Yea my reading is now good enough where I understand almost all the subtitles, but I really need to ween myself off them at some point because they’re a crutch to making me actually really focus on listening at real speed, which is fucking hard and I don’t like it.
Eh, that’s a relatively modern development.
Technically English is a pluricentric language with two prestige dialects - English (RP) and american (SAE). Due to the lack of a language academy both are defined de facto via the Oxford and Merriam Webster dictionary respectively, and corresponding broadcasting usage.
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I’m wondering if I’ll ever get to the point where I can watch French or Spanish movies without subtitles. I have about 3 years of fairly intensive learning with both. With French, I studied at a language school for about 500 hours plus another 500 or so hours of at home study, living in both Quebec and France, etc. With Spanish I’ve had a Mexican girlfriend for 2.5 years and we talk 95% in Spanish. Even still, I feel like I can only understand about 70% of movies if I don’t have subs (unless it’s something pretty simple).
I wonder if I’m just awful at understanding languages or if this is a fairly normal progression. OTOH, I feel like I’m great at quickly acquiring vocab, learning grammar, etc. I’d imagine that lots of poker players are like this as we have a skill set tending more towards logic.
This makes me feel better lol, I’d assume someone with your fluency would be able to watch Spanish movies more easily
What about Spanish? Spain has had the biggest army for awhile, but an awful accent. I can’t imagine that a lisp sound for c and z is standard and they seem to skip over letters more often compared to accents from Bogotá, Lima, Mexico City, etc. I’d consider those Latin American accents to be more “standard” Spanish, but it could just be my bias.
It’s a constant struggle man. 1-on-1 I am ok, but even sometimes with my girlfriend, I’ll just tune her out a bit and let my brain summarize what she’s saying. Then once I get in large groups or watch movies that are fast moving, my comprehension level drops quite a bit.
I suppose technically you’d say that I’ve been “fluent” for awhile, but just seems weird that my listening is so lacking. I suppose my skillset is just way more weighted to reading/writing than listening.
In my French school, we’d do these exercises where we had to listen to a 3-5 minute audio and then answer questions and I always felt like I was the worst one at it. But then at the end of the year, I ended up having ~4th best grades out of 16, but mostly on the strength of my reading/writing.
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I guess the counterpoint is how Castilian Spanish became the dominant language of Spain over Catalan and other dialects. Maybe the rules are different in the post-colonial era.
Is it because the pronunciations are just hard to understand and run together? Is there much Spanish slang or phrasing that you still don’t know?
I’m watching Luis Miguel series on Netflix and his dad literally just mashes every single word together, and even if I slow it down and listen over and over there is just no possible way for me to make out wtf he’s saying until I see the subtitles. So I imagine you’d need tons of exposure to Spanish for your brain to just kind of know what these word mashes are.
when i was a teenager cable kid became popular and one of the channels was a south american telenovela one. like half the people in my age group spoke spanish fluently just from those shows
Spanish slang varies a ton from country to country, but Mexican slang I’d say I’m extremely well versed.
I guess just in general if a handful of people are speaking rapidly to each other, then it’s often a bit too fast for me to pick up everything and stuff can run together.
Probably the other factor is that I’m super motivated until I start to reach fluency, then I get lazy and stop expanding vocab and stop learning rarer tenses. So I stay at a low advanced level instead of struggling on towards a native-speaker level. Then I search for a new language and start picking off all the low-hanging fruit there, rinse and repeat.
I think it’s just hard. And I don’t think 3 years is enough.
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I’ve been in Tbilisi since April and will be here a full year, which usually means I’ll be giving the language a solid effort, but I pulled the plug on learning Georgian.
There are just too many negatives:
- It’s only spoken by about 3-4 million people in Georgia, and nowhere else.
- It’s not related to any other language. I liked being able to leverage my French ability into learning Spanish and Portuguese a lot quicker, but with Georgian, there are no such benefits.
- It’s extremely difficult
- Young people in Georgian usually have very good English
So even if I grinded Georgian hard for a year, I doubt I’d get to a point where I wouldn’t just switch right to English in most of my interactions anyway.
About a week ago I switched to Polish, and it’s been fun so far. My last name is Polish and I have a lot of Polish heritage, so I figured why not. So far I’m just doing Duolingo, and am still enjoying it. At some point, I’ll try out a couple classes on italki and maybe some easier listening material.
Polish is also quite difficult, but I’m planning to visit Poland for 1-3 months next year and then a year through the Baltics. The whole region plus Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia mostly speak Slavic languages, so Polish will give me a leg up on understanding a bit of those as well. Especially Czech or Slovak which are part of the same sub-family as Polish and very related.
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Yeah sounds like the only way you were never going to get to a point where Georgian was actually useful was if you dated some Georgian girl who somehow didn’t speak English. But the year of trying still had to be very interesting.
Do you find with Polish you pick up the accent easier (assuming you ever heard it growing up)? My dad used to do a comical Italian (which probably would be deemed offensive in the wrong context) accent around me as a kid. Italian accent is like second nature to me.
i don’t speak georgian, but the number one reason to study it would be to learn to sing at least one of their beautiful songs
I had the same challenge with Tagalog. (Filipino)
Because everyone’s speak such good english, it is hard to reach a point where it adds any utility. Communication with nearly everyone is better in english.
There was a couple of thresholds where it became more useful.
Theres a quick threshold where you can give directions to taxi drivers.
After that it was years for the next useful thresholds.
- reading local news. Which generally wasn’t available to the same depth in english.
- following a group conversation, where everyone speaks tagalog to each other and english to me.
I do need to get back to it. Buts it’s even tougher to do out of the country.
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Slavic languages aren’t much easier.
I quit Czech for the same reasons you quit Georgian.
Are you planning on living in the Czech Republic long-term? Can you get by well without speaking Czech?
In Prague, you can. Most of the time I try to speak Czech it’s interrupted by that person speaking English back to me.
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Yah, using Tinder and dating was a big part of how I learned Spanish and French, but that’s no longer an option.
I only spent a couple months with Georgian. I decided to give up before investing the full year and move on to Polish.
I’ve never heard Polish before. My Grandpa used to say like 3 phrases to us, but that’s all for my exposure to the language.
The writing is also really artistic, like something out of Lord of the Rings.
Having a latin alphabet makes it A LOT easier. In a week of studying Polish, I would already know how to say, I speak English, do you speak English? And basic sentences like the boy likes cookies. After 2 months in Georgian, I still hadn’t fully mastered the alphabet and my vocab was just the basics: hello, goobye, how are you? how much? etc
According to this, Polish would take about 1100 hours compared to 600 for the easier languages. I would say Georgian would most likely be closer to the Hard group (2200 hours)
The thing that sucks so far about the Slavic languages is the declension system. You have to learn different versions of nouns depending on the role it takes in a sentence.
In any case, plenty of English speakers learn Japanese, Chinese, etc. and the Slavic languages are still much easier than that.
The main thing I have going for me is that I actually enjoy learning languages, so it’s more like a hobby than actual study. If it ever feels like a grind, then I’ll probably stop, unless I’m planning to stay long-term in that country.
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