Aspie and Foreign Language Learning?

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Yes, like I said...I quit. So, I don't have to worry with it now, but as former English major (poor choice on my part) you were required to take 4 consecutive (all in same language) foreign language courses.

I think I have an "amateur's" ear for language and music. I can memorise and pronounce words but the grammar is hard. Likewise I can write basic chord structures for acoustic songs but don't know squat about musical theory.
I taught myself a couple hundred Japanese words years ago and only stopped when I travelled away for a job. I met some Japanese people and they said my pronunciation was very good (but Japanese people can culturally tell white lies to be polite ).
Then I met a German girl and began teaching myself German until she went back home and I lost interest out of sadness. I memorised nearly 900 words and some very basic grammar and my ex gf said I was pretty good but she could hear the Australian accent.

too bad you can't get a job at the united nations as a kind of roving translator.

Thanks for the thought . I did have a job once with a business information company where I had to stand in for whichever translator of whatever language who happened to go on holiday at any given time. Then we got taken over and shut down by our main competitor and that was the end of that. I certainly didn't find it easy sitting still in an office all day, though, and just spent the whole day staring at my computer screen working away like mad rather than communicating with my colleagues at all. Looking back I'm amazed nobody minded that or gave me a hard time for not socialising at all, but they were all very friendly and accepting, which was good. I used to go home every evening after a day of staring at my computer screen and spend five or six hours on my own reading more foreign language texts and then spend every weekend reading more foreign language texts, with no social life at all. It didn't feel strange at the time but thinking about it now it was. .

i get the impression that there are hard savants [e.g., "rain man"] and milder savants who have an overwhelming talent in one or more areas [such as rapid/facile language acquisition] but still have sufficient neurons to function passably well in the social realm. just a thought.

It's more of a problem generating the small talk or conversation regardless of language. I can read, I can listen, I can write. I can't speak, particularly made up stuff. Most language learning seems to resolve around talking about yourself, I can't even do that in English

Jason.

I had a difficult time learning German and have retained little of it.
I do have to admit that I have little interest in learning languages

My son on the other hand had no problem learning Spanish & French and parts of other languages
He of course loves studying languages.

We are both Asperger's

so I guess the answer is It can be but need not be.

I'm a native English speaker and found European languages very easy to learn.

I love learning languages! It's one of my passions. I took four years of Spanish and three years of French in high school. I would've taken more if I didn't have to take phys ed and arts classes to graduate.

However, I don't learn languages to communicate. I learn them just because they fascinate me. I love learning complex grammar. I love finding out an entirely new grammar structure that I never would have even thought of, that takes me a week of study before I get the grasp of it. I think it's amazing how babies in other countries can pick these things up without too much effort, yet for an adult it's a challenge. I also love learning new sounds that don't exist in English. I'm really good at hearing the subtle differences between different sounds (like a Spanish "D" verses an English "D"), and I'm really good at making the sounds, too... which I always read was near-impossible beyond about 18 years old. I used to think that was crazy, but now that I know I'm Aspie, it could very well be an example of hearing sensitivity. I'm also fascinated by English grammar, by word histories (etymologies), and the way language branch out into families like a genealogical tree...

Now, note that I said I don't learn them to communicate. I have a few reasons for that. First is that it's simply not as interesting to me. Second is that it's a lot more challenging. I have a lot of trouble understanding, say, spoken Spanish... especially if it's spoken by a stranger. I can understand everything my boyfriend says in Spanish (I can even tell that he has a funny little accent, probably because he grew up in a bilingual household.) But when I was pressured to talk to Spanish-speaking customers at work, it was really, really hard. I had no idea what they were saying, and I struggled to respond even though I knew what to say and how to say it. Even people who barely knew Spanish were able to speak more coherently than I could. I'd been studying the language since I was 13, yet I still couldn't communicate. Why?! It was so frustrating!

Now, I've never had a problem like that with English, but I've read that a lot of autistics feel that way about their native language. One day I was thinking about that, and it clicked- My speaking/listening skills in Spanish are like many autistics' speaking/listening skills in their native language. I was floored, but it all made sense. No wonder I can be so knowledgeable, be able to write and read almost fluently, yet speaking to someone is so hard!

The hardest thing about that, though, is explaining to people (especially to an employer) that yes, I do know Spanish, but that no, I can't speak it. Give me a memo in Spanish and I will understand it as easily as one written in English. But don't you dare put me on the phone with a Spanish-speaking customer... I will be utterly lost. People can't understand why I can't do it, or what my problem is. Honestly, I don't know either, but please believe that it IS a real problem. My last boss thought I was faking it because I sometimes had days where I spoke really well, but other days I could barely get a sentence out. She thought I just didn't want to talk to customers (well, it's true I didn't want to talk to them, but that's not the reason I couldn't talk!) I wish I could just get through with it already, but considering I've been studying it for over ten years, I'm pretty sure that if I ever had the ability to speak/understand well, it would have surfaced by now.

Im pretty good at learning foreign languages when I learn the languages I speak just like a native particularly when I speak in Mandarin Chinese Hindi or Japanese. The foreign languages I am most adept at so far however are Chinese *Mandarin* Spanish Hindi and French. I am starting to pick up more on Japanese Korean Vietnamese Thai and Tagalog. I work in a very internationally diverse communitiy and I learn peaces of each language simultaniously. Simply by asking how do you say this and how do you say that in that language and I memorize what they tell me and speak it back etc. I have amazed a lot of people with this method and they ask me how long it took me to learn say mandarin I told them a few months and they tell me back wow you speak better than my son you have no accent I thought you have been taking courses in languages for years. I took a mandarin class for fun and easy credits and managed to get a B with what I already knew *would have been an A if it werent for the reading part* in my opinion chinese is easy its the reading and writing part thats difficult.

^^^
for most people the intonations would be the toughest part. even native chinese must work to learn this part of their language.

When it comes to Mandarin one must know the 4 tones I got the tones down perfectly. Its a fun language its almost like music to me. One word using a different tone can have a totally different meaning. If you said ma ma ma ma with each word with each different tone it would mean did mom scold the horse?

thai also uses intonations as well. somebody told me they use 13[!] of 'em!

I ran across some Japanese while engaging in my SI and thought it would be fascinating to learn. I had counting to 20 and some basic expressions down within the first few minutes. I've even successfully taught some co workers to count to ten. Ichi, ni, san..

Blindspot149....I LOVE your signature.

I've wanted to learn Italian for a long time. I have no Italian ancestors whatsoever, but I just love the language and culture. And the music.

I'm going into my senior year of high school this fall, and am one of the students chosen to take Sign Language. It's an ITV class, which means the school uses a program similar to Skype to connect the teacher to the classroom. About 30 students signed up for the class, and there are 6 spots available. They use a lottery system to determine who gets in

The guidance counselor at school knows how much I wanted to take the class, combined with the fact that I need a foreign language because I made the mistake of putting it off until senior year. He recommended me for it - I'm very grateful for this