Learning a language late in life?

EdwardTeach said:
A lot of our regularly used words come straight from French. With the old English words it may share a root with an Old German word but often they have changed so much in the last 2000 years as to be barely perceptible. Likewise unless you are really into linguistics any grammatical similarities between German and English are not on the face of it obvious at all.
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I disagree entirely, the majority of our common use familial words, words for food, natural things, frameworks of existence are from the Germanic route the Latinate vocabulary tends to come more into play with educated language indicating it's routes in the Elite medieval classes.

It always amazes me when you hear Saxon English being spoken exactly how much is discernible if you listen carefully and concentrate it's even more shocking when you hear the rare Frisian dialect in Northern Holland and realise you can make out recognisable words and structures.
 
I'm learning Swedish still and TBH its not that hard once you get over the grammar and the 3 extra letters, which still catches me out even after 3 years.

As long as people don't have too thick an accent i can completely understand the conversation now. I can read the newspaper and get about 80% of it.

But its the vowels that kill me. Especially coming from London where we drop our Hs and every vowel sounds like an E.

Im getting there but i turned 40 the other day... Jesus... And yeah it certainly seems harder to learn a new language.


Norweigan is incredibly similar to Swedish i sometimes get the 2 confused for a sentence or 2.
To me Danish is nothing like either and Finish sounds like someone swallowed a bag of Aaaaa and EEEEEEiis

I live in the north though and the accent up here is so different to the south. I sometimes struggle with southern accents. Koperberg drinking puffs.
 
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Efour said:
Norweigan is incredibly similar to Swedish i sometimes get the 2 confused for a sentence or 2.
To me Danish is nothing like either and Finish sounds like someone swallowed a bag of Aaaaa and EEEEEEiis

I live in the north though and the accent up here is so different to the south. I sometimes struggle with southern accents. Koperberg drinking puffs.
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Written Danish is very similar to Norwegian (which used Danish for hundreds of years anyway), but the spoken one is a world apart. We have a Dane in my workplace and I spoke a little Norwegian to them, and they responded in Danish. I caught a few bits but the accent warps everything.

I've often considered "switching" to Swedish as there seems to be a lot more people wanting to practise English <> Swedish on the couple of language exchange apps I've tried. Barely any Norwegians to practise with.
 
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Button Pushed said:
As someone who speaks three languages fluently, I love going to Holland and speaking English to my wife to ask her what she wants when ordering, then turning to the staff serving us and in fluent Dutch ordering. The looks we get is amazing, so many people just get thrown off completely :D


I learned Dutch by living there, I had no choice. It was hard but not impossible. Good luck dude :)
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Where abouts did you live in Holland? As in Amsterdam pretty much everyone speaks English and even my Dutch friends moan at how many times they have to converse in English when going to shops/restaurants etc.
 
Freefaller said:
I feel sorry for those brought up speaking it...
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As do I. Poor folks, having to live with that burden :(

Xein said:
Where abouts did you live in Holland? As in Amsterdam pretty much everyone speaks English and even my Dutch friends moan at how many times they have to converse in English when going to shops/restaurants etc.
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A town called Hoorn, 40km NE of Amsterdam. Very pretty place if ever you get the chance :)
 
French is a lovely language.

Use Duolingo to compliment however you choose to learn. My friend got fairly fluent in Spanish in the the space of 9 months through Duolingo alone.
 
As most people are stuck to their phones all day, every day then check out a couple of apps that have already been mentioned in this thread:

Duolingo: This has most of the Romance languages in (French, Spanish, Italian), the Germanic (German, Dutch, Scandis) and some Slavic (Polish, Russian etc). The mobile version is a bit cut down but if you do the exercises on the desktop website, you'll get all sorts of grammar explanations below each new exercise to help cement what you're learning. Some of the courses contain amusing sentences and that seems to help you remember things a little better too (In Norwegian: Du spiser min hunds mat - You are eating my dog's food).

HelloTalk/Tandem: Both language exchange apps. Set your native language and your learning language, and you'll get a list of results of the inverse of that. You can then send requests to people native in the language you're learning. Most offer things like corrections to show where you got a sentence wrong, audio messaging etc etc. Just an extra immersion on top of the repeating exercises in Duolingo.
 
To answer the OP.

I studied a lot of languages at school but also in general as I enjoy them. Coming from a somewhat mixed heritage I have from an early age been exposed to a lot of languages - this does make it easier.

However, despite studying Spanish at school, after spending extended periods of time there (in Spain) it really did improve my Spanish dramatically, and actually having the guts to try it.

Lessons are also great - but I find interactive lessons with someone to be more useful just because you can stop and ask questions.

Grammar is the key to a language - once you learn the basics, you can add the vocab around it. Even if you just learn the basic tenses of verbs (past, present, future) without worrying initially about the continuous and perfect and conditional tenses to name a few. Though in French certainly there are many many different versions of the past/present/future, which subtly but importantly change the meanings. That said you can get by in general to make yourself understood with basic tenses.

I also learned to speak a little Greek (being part Cypriot as well) and whilst I can understand and read it, I never took the time to learn the grammar, so my Greek is very pigeon Greek and just a string of nouns and adjectives together rather than well constructed sentences.

I also studied Arabic a little later in life (mid to late teens) as I spent a lot of time in the Middle East I also had an option to study it at school instead of General Studies. Completely different construct (no verb "to be" for example) and massively different alphabet and just really alien. However, with a bit of structure, and if you have a good understanding of grammar, it's easy enough to pick up. My Arabic is now poor owing to lack of practice (though I had a small conversation when in Dubai, which surprised me!), but I know enough to break the ice and muster a little bit of respect and broker than initial relationship which is important.

Immersion is key along with structured lessons. I've never tried those self study tapes so I cannot comment on how good they are.

For example I'm teaching myself object oriented programming at the moment, and I'm self learning, it's hard, because I can't ask the stupid questions to real people and have to scour the net to find the answers and even then I'm making assumptions. So at some point I will have to cough up and take lessons if I want to become more proficient at it. That's just how I learn, some people can do it more viscerally, I need something more structured to understand the basic constructs then I can add to that quite quickly.

It's hard, but you can do it, you will just need to put the effort in. Good luck!
 
I'm jealous that you're able to do that! When I was in my teens I used to work at Ikea whilst I was at college and one of my co-workers was insane. He was Swedish-Peruvian and could speak fluently in English, Swedish, Spanish, French, Italian and a bit of German. Was always amazed at seeing him switch between the langues as if second nature. I know the ship has sailed for me to do that but I'd love to be able to fluently talk in at least one other language.
 
arknor said:
german has the most ridiculous word order and the whole gramatik is based on the words gender so if you don't remember every single words gender you can never make the sentence properly
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Most of my German was more learned from repetitive use, kinda like English - You learn how it's usually said, then you learn the exceptions.
A lot of German is about putting executive terms at the end - "I will a steak eat", rather than "I will eat a steak". It's like pretending to be Yoda!!

But I speak German, from hearing German being spoken. I don't aim to have school-perfect German and most people do not speak their language with bang-on perfect grammatical precision in real life, anyway... not even the Swiss, apparently!!
 
i don't think the duolingo app on the play store is much good for french in my experience - it tells you when you're wrong but doesn't tell you why! really annoying because you can't spot patterns and see where you're making your mistakes

B@
 
B@Th*nG said:
i don't think the duolingo app on the play store is much good for french in my experience - it tells you when you're wrong but doesn't tell you why! really annoying because you can't spot patterns and see where you're making your mistakes

B@
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Yep, that's why I said it's cut down on mobile. If you do it on the web, you get all the grammar notes below the exercises so you can work out where you went wrong.
 
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