As somebody now living in Spain and getting to grips with another language, I have to fully agree with the points above.
Re: #1 - I recently went to Germany and had the same experience: I rated everything I heard as "not English" and couldn't make the jump required to register that the Spanish didn't work either. Since I'm used to people not understanding me unless I speak Spanish, I couldn't get over mentally that it was another world and I had no way to play in it.
Re: #3 - the same happened me within about 1 month of arriving. I watched a quiz show that offered up 9 letters in random order. You had to create the longest word possible to win. I could come up with 5 or 6 words off the top of my head that looked legit for Spanish without having a clue if they existed or not. More often than not, they did.
Among other things, adults hate to be seen to be wrong or make mistakes, and feel shame and/or embarassment at doing so in front of other people. Children do not. Also, people regularly forget that the idea of communication (with other people) is to get your point or idea or message across. While it is nice to do so fluidly and elegantly, dropping the latter requirements does make for an easier time when communicating with others.
Interestingly enough (and I think I can come up with a business for doing this...), alcohol directly removes both of these restrictions. With the lowering of inhibitions, you are less likely to be concerned about making a fool of yourself (boy can I attest to THAT one!) and you spend most of your time desperately trying to convince the other person of the profound and intelligent depths of your topic-du-jour. Most people I have met have noticed a remarkable increase in their language abilities round about 1.00 a.m. Sunday morning in convivial company where the social lubricant is flowing.
I read somewhere (think it was in an NLP book) that when you take responsibility for the delivery of the message during communication, you experience more success. In other words, if the other person "took it the wrong way", it wasn't their fault. You need to rephrase to get them to react the "correct" or desired way. Applying this to foreign language learning, instead of me desperately trying to be grammatically correct and getting infuriated because the other person doesn't understand, I'd immediately learn, mimic and copy those sounds/phrases/actions that produced the desired result whether they made sense in my language or not. I think this is what most people do not do, and thus find learning a new language difficult. I also think they spend too much time studying the new lanuage, and not enough time learning and using it. There's a difference between studying and learning.
Finally, although I never realised it at the time, I was brought up like all other Irish people with Irish shoved down my throat every day in school. These days, I cannot understand it, I cannot follow a conversation and I would hard pushed to make an entire sentence. My Spanish is much better, even my secondary-school French is better and I can't use that at all. However, I still remember the basic things we learned as children, and more importantly, as pointed out by MidnightBrewer above, the idea of divorcing myself from my language comes very easily to me. I don't associate a word with the object, they are two distinct and separate parts. If someone has another name for the same object (in another language), it doesn't faze me, it's just what they call it. I think that is the advantage that children of two or more languages have that others don't - we see the labels while others have to take the time to remove them and reconfigure themselves to use more. Maybe like using hard-wired magic numbers in code instead of constants.
I'd be interested to see if there is a connection between the use of slang and language ability. I certainly use different words professionally versus casually, at home versus the office and with
We plan on moving our operation over to a
ricer part of towns dumps to see what we can find.
You'll end up with small underpowered computer cases with glowing neon lights underneath and flame decals on the sides. But with a kick-ass sound system.
"Flip out and start killing everyone" - it's just a robot. Not a Real Ultimate Robot.
On a more relevant note, maybe we could reduce war to "Your robots killed all my robots. You win."
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, yesterday Slashdot announces that Atlantis has been found again. What else were they going to do? Pretend it wasn't? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/125722 9/
As somebody now living in Spain and getting to grips with another language, I have to fully agree with the points above.
...), alcohol directly removes both of these restrictions. With the lowering of inhibitions, you are less likely to be concerned about making a fool of yourself (boy can I attest to THAT one!) and you spend most of your time desperately trying to convince the other person of the profound and intelligent depths of your topic-du-jour. Most people I have met have noticed a remarkable increase in their language abilities round about 1.00 a.m. Sunday morning in convivial company where the social lubricant is flowing.
Re: #1 - I recently went to Germany and had the same experience: I rated everything I heard as "not English" and couldn't make the jump required to register that the Spanish didn't work either. Since I'm used to people not understanding me unless I speak Spanish, I couldn't get over mentally that it was another world and I had no way to play in it.
Re: #3 - the same happened me within about 1 month of arriving. I watched a quiz show that offered up 9 letters in random order. You had to create the longest word possible to win. I could come up with 5 or 6 words off the top of my head that looked legit for Spanish without having a clue if they existed or not. More often than not, they did.
Among other things, adults hate to be seen to be wrong or make mistakes, and feel shame and/or embarassment at doing so in front of other people. Children do not. Also, people regularly forget that the idea of communication (with other people) is to get your point or idea or message across. While it is nice to do so fluidly and elegantly, dropping the latter requirements does make for an easier time when communicating with others.
Interestingly enough (and I think I can come up with a business for doing this
I read somewhere (think it was in an NLP book) that when you take responsibility for the delivery of the message during communication, you experience more success. In other words, if the other person "took it the wrong way", it wasn't their fault. You need to rephrase to get them to react the "correct" or desired way. Applying this to foreign language learning, instead of me desperately trying to be grammatically correct and getting infuriated because the other person doesn't understand, I'd immediately learn, mimic and copy those sounds/phrases/actions that produced the desired result whether they made sense in my language or not. I think this is what most people do not do, and thus find learning a new language difficult. I also think they spend too much time studying the new lanuage, and not enough time learning and using it. There's a difference between studying and learning.
Finally, although I never realised it at the time, I was brought up like all other Irish people with Irish shoved down my throat every day in school. These days, I cannot understand it, I cannot follow a conversation and I would hard pushed to make an entire sentence. My Spanish is much better, even my secondary-school French is better and I can't use that at all. However, I still remember the basic things we learned as children, and more importantly, as pointed out by MidnightBrewer above, the idea of divorcing myself from my language comes very easily to me. I don't associate a word with the object, they are two distinct and separate parts. If someone has another name for the same object (in another language), it doesn't faze me, it's just what they call it. I think that is the advantage that children of two or more languages have that others don't - we see the labels while others have to take the time to remove them and reconfigure themselves to use more. Maybe like using hard-wired magic numbers in code instead of constants.
I'd be interested to see if there is a connection between the use of slang and language ability. I certainly use different words professionally versus casually, at home versus the office and with
I get it for the pictures. Oops!
"Flip out and start killing everyone" - it's just a robot. Not a Real Ultimate Robot. On a more relevant note, maybe we could reduce war to "Your robots killed all my robots. You win."