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Kiriae
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28 Oct 2014, 4:37 pm

Polish is my 1st language. English is 2nd. German is 3rd.

My adventure with it started when I was 8 and I found out Cartoon Network in my grandma cable TV. The cartoons there were only in English but I didn't mind at all. One of the cartoons even become my special interest. Somehow I could understand everything - I could simply figure the meaning by looking at the action.

Later on there was a long break. My next contact with English was when I was 12 and we started to learn it at school. It was not so easy anymore. The lessons were boring and I couldn't understand much. I was also scared - teacher was making us to do "counts". A random student was saying "one", the next one "two", another "three" and so on. It might be an easy exercise but for some reason it was really confusing for me - I could not easily relate the numbers to the strangely sounding words and I had to keep my focus on. I was praying for not getting 20 or 30. I could repeat after the person before me something like "twenty-seven"->"twenty-eight" but it was taking me a while to realize there is a "thirty" after "twenty-nine".
But the good thing was I could get the grammar and I could recognize and remember written words.
I passed middle school English with a grade of C.

High school started.
On the 1st English lesson a young teacher told us to "Write a letter to your English crush." to see what we know. It was 1st time I was told to write an essay like that. I remember I melted down and said I won't write it because I don't have a English crush and the teacher told me noone does and it is just a practice so I should simply imagine I do. After a while I calmed down. I was pretty sure I can write a English letter because I knew enough words and grammar. But I couldn't figure out what a "letter to a crush" contains and I never have had any crush in my whole life. After all I put in some lame sentences and repeated "I love you" a few times. The teacher told me it was a nice try. For the next a few weeks I also "did well" in other English exercises. I started to like the teacher.

But soon the teacher disappeared without a warning - we acknowledged she was just a replacement and the real teacher came back to school. I couldn't get used to the change. New teacher started to teach us right away, giving us some more essays and exercises to do. I was doing my best but I was getting Ds and Es of them. Then I got an F of an essay and the teacher told me I fail totally and I am the worst of the class. That was painful...

I have decided - I will stop paying attention to the lessons and start to learn the practical use of English. I installed an English MMO game on my computer and started to play it everyday. I could understand the words so it was pretty easy for me to get into the world. I was doing quests and looking at in-game chat. Soon I started to communicate on the chat too and it was quite nice when I realized I am able to get people help me with the quests and trade items by using English. I also learned a lot of sentences people use in normal, everyday talk.

My grades in school suddenly jumped up from D-E to straight A within a month. The teacher was so surprised... At first she was thinking I am cheating but soon, after a few proves she realized I really got it just like this. That was a crazy fast development. I guess it is the power of special interest.

In middle school I also started to learn German. It continued through high school without any disturbances.
I never considered the language useful but it was easier to understand and remember than English, I guess the "those good at math should pick German" is true - I was always good with math and I have had straight A in German, unless we had to write essays which I was getting Cs and Bs from. But it was unpractical so I gave up learning German in 2nd grade of high school when we were allowed to drop some subjects. I was still helping a friend with her German homework though.

Currently I can communicate in English almost as fluently as I do in Polish. I lack some nuances and I still can't pronounce English words very well (I always type and read, rarely listen and speak) but it is something I have difficulties with even in my national language - I truly prefer to type and write over speaking and listening and I often can't understand sentences that contain hidden meaning.
I am also able to understand German people that I occasionally met in MMO game but I always use English when I speak with them and I prefer when they answer in English too. I never gained the ability to use German fluently.



OddDuckNash99
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28 Oct 2014, 7:08 pm

I taught myself advanced Spanish because I had a passion for it and my high school went too slowly in their curriculum. I believe that I was hyperlexic as a child, and I found out that I'm hyperlexic in Spanish, too. I just have a natural affinity for languages and vocabulary. I also know some French, and I know lots of Latin/Greek medical roots. I'm not very good at listening in Spanish. Like, I can't watch TV shows that are in Spanish. I attribute this to not having enough "real-world" practice and my ticker-tape synesthesia, which I have in both Spanish and English. If I can't "see" the word because I don't hear it clearly, I don't follow it. But I'm incredibly fluent in reading written Spanish. My skills are, like most areas, very unequal.


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Skilpadde
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28 Oct 2014, 10:29 pm

grbiker wrote:
It has been a much more organic exposure to a second language, rather than the typical academic approach.

What does that mean?

senecafox wrote:
It's easier to learn another language if you go to the country where they speak it for awhile, then you learn it in a way that doesn't feel like learning and you are forced to practice it and hear it every day.

One good thing here in Norway is that we don't have dubbing for anything but children's shows. I've picked up a lot that way. (The downside is that I avoid all movies in other languages than Scandinavian and English, because I just can't be bothered to read movies.)


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Kiprobalhato
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28 Oct 2014, 11:21 pm

^i think it means learning based in real world immersion like being in a foreign country or listning to conversations in foreign languages, or watching tv in foreign subtitles or dubs, as opposed to sitting in a class with a textbook listening to a professor. how one learns his/her first language.

Elysium2101 wrote:
I also at some point learned how to write in a fictional writing system and noticed that I could easily remember the individual characters.

that's pretty cool. share?

i have two fictional writing systems i regularly practice and 'stim" with. for now i call them heillese and ayranic. i bring my pen everywhere and write with these wherever i can. i am constantly tweaking them (especially heillese) so they are not very consistent, they've gotten simpler as time goes on, yesterday i removed the symbol that represents [e] in the middle of the word, completely. i still retain the word final [e]. the word initial [e] is like a little twig sticking from the next letter. like "ellie" is written as "llie" with a prong coming from the first l.

heillese looks like arabic people say, my other one has characters borrowed from existing scripts like latin, greek, japanese and hebrew (but not cryllic EW). [ts] is represented by Hebrew ayin, for example. ע.

but i have also plenty of original characters in ayranic.

but yeah...nice to find another person with a created script!

my first language is spanish, but being born in the united states i leaned english at roughly at the same time. being immersed in english constantly has elevated it past my spanish skills i admit. but i go to to mexico to see family lots more often.

i took an italian 101 course last summer at the city college. i passed with a b minus.


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Skilpadde
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28 Oct 2014, 11:29 pm

Kiprobalhato wrote:
^i think it means learning based in real world immersion like being in a foreign country or listning to conversations in foreign languages, or watching tv in foreign subtitles or dubs, as opposed to sitting in a class with a textbook listening to a professor. how one learns his/her first language.

Thanks, Kip! :)


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Kiprobalhato
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28 Oct 2014, 11:35 pm

Skilpadde wrote:
Kiprobalhato wrote:
^i think it means learning based in real world immersion like being in a foreign country or listning to conversations in foreign languages, or watching tv in foreign subtitles or dubs, as opposed to sitting in a class with a textbook listening to a professor. how one learns his/her first language.

Thanks, Kip! :)

no problem. :) language is one of my interests.


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nyxjord
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29 Oct 2014, 11:52 am

I have found that learning languages is very difficult for me. Even for my first language (English), I was in remedial classes when I first entered school. I had word comprehension and verbal delay. Thanks to those classes, I am caught up, but it is impossible for me to learn another language. I have tried multiple languages.. it's all too much, I become overwhelmed because of all the new words/ phrases/ word- sentence structures and tenses. I become overwhelmed because I feel that I have to know everything at once (which there is too much to learn like that) so it does not work out for me. I think that I am probably in the minority with my issue with language.


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grbiker
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29 Oct 2014, 12:12 pm

Skilpadde wrote:
grbiker wrote:
It has been a much more organic exposure to a second language, rather than the typical academic approach.

What does that mean?

senecafox wrote:
It's easier to learn another language if you go to the country where they speak it for awhile, then you learn it in a way that doesn't feel like learning and you are forced to practice it and hear it every day.


senecafox pretty much explained it in that quote. essentially being immersed rather than sitting in a classroom.



Skilpadde
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30 Oct 2014, 12:25 am

Thanks, grbiker! Yes, I'm sure it helps the motivation, but it must also make it a lot more demanding to you live in a country where the second language is spoken.

When I was in England and USA on vacation, I found that I became exhausted by talking pretty easily, while it's not the same in Norwegian at all.


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Beautiful, sweet, gentle, playful, loyal
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Kiriae
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30 Oct 2014, 8:21 am

Skilpadde wrote:
When I was in England and USA on vacation, I found that I became exhausted by talking pretty easily, while it's not the same in Norwegian at all.

When I was in Germany on vacation I was not that exhausted but for first a few days I have had an unusual headache I have never felt before - a specific point (I could exactly feel where it is) in the left side of my head was aching. I connected it with hearing only German and English nearly all day long.
I guess my brain was making new language synapses. :lol: After the pain went away I realized I understand German text and speak better than I did before coming there.



DarkAscent
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30 Oct 2014, 11:10 am

I'm learning British Sign Language as a second language because I attend a residential school for deaf students where most speak the language as a second language outside of the lessons and when school finishes, and a few speak it as a first language. I find BSL much easier to learn than in the French lessons I had at school. I guess this is because I'm constantly practising and learning with other BSL speakers and improving; whereas, when I was learning French, no one liked to practice it outside of the lessons.

My advice is that the best way to learn a language is to be around people who speak that language and practice with them every day. That way, you can converse with them, and hone and improve your skills of the language that you want to learn every day as I am with BSL. When I was in French lessons, I couldn't understand most of what was happening and it was a miracle that I passed my French GCSE.



IamRob
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30 Oct 2014, 1:42 pm

Im bilingual,english and french.my moms side is english and my dads french,i first learned english but was put direcly into french immersion when scooling started.around here we dont really have the choice to not learn french and i actually had to ask permition from the gouvernment to go to english highschool.over the years i did loose some french by being in an english area but the past ten years ive been in a french area and it got much better,to the point where i dont show an english accent and can suprise the few english people by talking to them in english,i did the same in the past but in french.i sometimes dont let on that i speak their language,i guess its a way to know what people really think or feel cause if they think you dont understand thell say this stuff to their friends in front of you.ive had a little experience with this can you tell,lol.
Anyway i got an app to learn some german,it doesnt seem too hard there are similarities to english and maybe some punctuation(not sure the term im looking for)principles similar to french.i can understand some spanish because of the french similarities as well.

Immersion is a good way to learn any language,context helps to remember(for me anyways)