Do You Speak A Second Language?

In the context of the world's known languages, yes, English is comparatively simple and orderly. As the McWhorter book (among others) discusses, this is partly the result of a history involving repeated waves of adult language learners adopting the language for day-to-day use. Compare English to Icelandic in terms of history... it is not an accident that the Germanic language spoken by the isolated islanders kept its rich inflection and case systems and the one that faced repeated waves of invasion and rule by non-native speakers lost those things.

So yeah, compared to English, the French verb tenses are complicated. But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

It's probably worth stating explicitly if we are going to be talking about differing levels of complexity in language that all languages are still functionally equivalent. If we are talking about grammar, sound inventories, or lexicon size, we're talking about structural complexity. Higher structural complexity does not make a language or its speakers capable of expressing more complex thoughts or supporting more complex societies, and more importantly, the opposite is also untrue: structurally "simple" languages can express anything structurally "complex" languages can. This false equivalence is so prevalent among people without a linguistics background that generally linguists will just tell you that all languages are equally complex. Functionally, they are. Structurally, some are far more complex than others.

But neither of them have anything on the Navajo verb system. It's beyond the capability of most adults to achieve fluency in at all.

To clarify, most native English-speaking adults with no background in Navajo is who I mean by "most adults"; clearly native Navajo-speaking adults have no problem with it.

I was told as a child that Navajos themselves don't achieve full fluency until they're in their 40s - I have never actually checked this but my mother told me that, and it seems too delicious a fact to want to disprove

wiki makes navajo sound great and head-fking, not feeling like i'd be 100% on this after a couple of weeks of classes:

Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human or lightning) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):
humans/lightning → infants/big animals → med-size animals → small animals → insects → natural forces → inanimate objects/plants → abstractions
Generally, the most animate noun in a sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second.

OYE hispanohablantes -- hice un hilo en 77 para charlar en español
necesito practicar, y uds deben ayudarme en este asunto

私は日本語の一年生です。
Mi studas Esperanton, sed mi estas nur komencanto.
Ego sum ​​Latinis studebat.

this guy
<3 language virtuosos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CWPfZjRatk

huh that is actually impressive. He's talking in a regional dialect that even I can't speak, not without living there for a few years at least.

AND one of my professors posted this re: code switching, also interesting re: general language sniping and its implications
http://www.ebony.com/news-views/when-you-make-fun-of-rachel-jeantel-you-make-fun-of-us-333#axzz2XSN22JRP

This quiz is fun, to the extent that you enjoy guessing global dialects of English based on audio samples (I do!):

http://qz.com/259129/quiz-can-you-guess-the-accent/

I got some of the tougher ones from being lucky enough to work in a job where I interact with people from all over the world all the time and recognizing their accents.

RIYL word salad, funny translations
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/09/05/the-case-of-the-sinister-buttocks

That quiz was pretty good! I got stumped by one where I wasn't sure if the speaker was S. African with an RPish accent or Dutch with an RPish accent.

I like it when people post those mistranslated signs on Facebook (usually Chinese or Japanese) because I can then try and figure out the intermediate steps which led to the bizarre translation.

I got 10/12, and the two that I missed I wavered at the last second away from the correct answer choice :(

http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2014/09/dyslexia-chinese?fsrc=rss

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/10/is-chinese-the-best-language-for-learning-math/?mod=WSJBlog

https://www.mcgill.ca/medicine/node/160311

http://www.dialectsarchive.com/

Audio recordings of various dialects! Load up the map and pick a region! Hours of fun.

So I finally came around to Pimsleur and now Duolingo.

Duolingo was good enough to get me to the point where I could give research talks in French, a first step toward getting a job in France where I teach, write, go to meetings, etc in French. you're not going to build up conversational fluency with duolingo alone but you can get the basics / confidence to communicate in person, where you will inevitably sound like an idiot and fuck much up at first, but get the needed feedback to improve very quickly.

I always wonder if careful music listeners are better primed to get up to speed in non-native languages.
or singers

Wait when did you start using it?
With regard to music listeners I think there are some kind of similar listening skills that may be related but not sure what conclusion you can draw. For instance, know plenty of excellent musicians who either haven't been able to learn a language used in a style they work in or have a terrible accent or can't learn their spouse's language.

I started duolingo in spring 2014. gave my first research talk in french in autumn 2014, did an academic job interview in french in spring 2015 and won the competition. I went pretty hard. plus I speak spanish so my brain/ear was already adapted to latin syntax. and I had already lived in france for a year before, though I didn't speak any french at that time and didn't work on it all.

Expecting an app to make you fluent is too much to ask, but if it got you as far as you say it did, that is a pretty glowing recommendation.

And I assume it did indeed do exactly what you say. I've never known you to lie- the truth is your job!

I took French immersion all through grade school, and found the Duolingo French course a good refresher. But apart from using it for occasional practice, I feel like I've reached a limit on its utility. I need to move to Quebec or something if I'm going to get to the next level.

yeah I was just ready for it I guess? I spent between 1 and 2 hours a day on it. plus I moved to France at the end of spring 2014 and so had immersion available whenever I wanted. what I recommend the app for, and I do recommend it highly, is to get enough of the basics so that you can put pieces together yourself. like you won't learn all the verbs with it of course but you'll learn the most important ones and how to use them, even tenses and moods. but the key thing is using your new skills daily-ish irl.

Can't go into detail right now, but seems to me that it does as much as an app can possibly do at this point.

I couldn't get into it. My vocab is better than my grammar and it seemed like i had to get through hundreds of entry level vocab tests before i got to any grammar, and once i did i was expected to just intuit the rules, there was very little actual explanation. Probably I was expecting the moon on a stick and trying to learn a language without actually conversing in it is just really hard, and spending 10-15 minutes a day on an app, any app, isn't going to cut it.

Love Duolingo and will forever vouch for it. I started with Soranî Kurdish about six months ago. Haven't been fully devoted to it every day, which obv would be best, but I'm already capable of having short, simple conversations with soranî speaking people. In a language previously completely unknown to me, both vocabulary and grammar, which isn't like any language I knew before I started.

I briefly tried extending the French offering by starting the Italian course in French, but I'm not really motivated enough to learn a third language. Not when I can hardly get through a conversation in French.

The "language ego" problem discussed upthread is one I can relate to. In my case, having taken French in school, I constantly feel like I ought to be better than I am, which is demotivating. If I were learning from scratch, then I could regard everything I learned as an accomplishment, as opposed to a belated catching-up.

Where is "language ego" mentioned? Oh, I see. La Lechera. That is a great post.

I like that it is persnickety about the grammar. Just exactly what one needs to build up basic confidence: it corrects you simply and quickly and shows you the proper way to say something and then you move right on.

It happens to a lot of very capable people!

Bottom line: Some people are better equipped to learn languages with these programs; others aren't. The social/emotional component to language learning shouldn't be underestimated.

I specialize in teaching people who have barriers (of many types) to overcome before they can begin to use a new language to communicate, so I've seen a wide variety of types of learners except for the ones who do it easily themselves bc they don't need me. As a language learner myself, I've definitely got issues. It's ok!

I admire immigrants for many reasons, but one is that for most, language ego is an unaffordable luxury: a Somali who moves to Paris or Chicago, say, can't worry about accent / errors when their lives depend on communicating in the new place. I tried to put myself in their shoes when learning French (well, I'm an immigrant now too, but b/c of my privileges I can avoid French more than I do, I want to be a regular person here).

Didn't you take a placement test ahead of time, ledge? Or did you do poorly on that because you don't like grammar?

Euler's last post otm.

Re: language learning and music appreciation, see also math and music. Lots of claims are made about the connection, but there are many hard-to-ignore skeptics.

Arrival's a good film in connection to this subject.

Didn't you take a placement test ahead of time, ledge? Or did you do poorly on that because you don't like grammar?

i love grammar :) but my brain has retained very little from my none too hot at the time schoolboy french and that let me down in the test, yep. fwiw a common complaint of english people my age is that we weren't taught proper english grammar and thus didn't have a solid base to build any other language on.

Do you ever listen to the station France Culture, Euler? I'm finding it a good resource, just for hearing French speakers talk about stuff I find interesting. Lots of cool philosophy programs in the archives.

xp to self - i mean i know duolingo tries to avoid explicitly teaching difficult grammar rules, but if you go into a french class as a kid and start getting told about perfect tenses and subjunctives and you have no idea what those even are in english, you're not going to get very far.

I occasionally follow franceculture on fb & then lose interest, and have repeated this a few times. but I don't generally like listening to podcasts or watching shows or films. it would be good for my oral comprehension though, which is easily the weakest part of my French repertoire now.

re. tenses and moods, yes, it helps that I know spanish already where things are even more complex than in french: we don't use the preterite ("passé simple") except in literary french so you only have to keep track of two ways of forming thoughts about the past, as opposed to three in spanish.

but you can speak simply, in the present tense all the time, at first, and be understood, and then gain the confidence to add tenses and moods later.

my best teacher in grad school was chinese, had rough english, strong accent + weak command of grammar : and yet he got his points across well. he's my role model in language things : allez en avant, et la compétence vous viendra.

It happens to a lot of very capable people!

Bottom line: Some people are better equipped to learn languages with these programs; others aren't. The social/emotional component to language learning shouldn't be underestimated

This is so otm and deserves to be acknowledged as such imho. Especially the latter part. I didn't start to learn Kurdish for the mere fun of it, I am emotionally attached: it's the second language of my lover and the first of her parents. As far as drive and will power go, wanting to learn it because of love is pretty much the top spot, so motivating.
It seemed very daunting when I started out. And still does occasionally, because by learning the simpler things, the harder things seem as hard as the simple things did before. There's always this nagging feeling: "how can I possible advance in this entirely unknown language?' But then the old cliche of practice makes perfect (or rather: half-decent) is true every time, it really is. And I converse with people in a language before completely alien to me.

I found Duolingo's method not perfect (AI will hopefully catch on and learn what I do and don't want endlessly repeated), but it is great way to dip your toe into something formerly completely unknown to me, like Kurdish is.

(Nb. I grew up learning five languages, and am fluent (Dutch, Frisian, Bildts, English) and very ok (French and Catalan) in six now. I had nothing to 'do' with that, most of it was given to me growing up. I still don't know if this multilingual background gave me a head start trying on something as different as Kurdish? But Duolingo helped me enormously, regardless, to get a bite on the basics and take it from there)

what materials are there for learning kurdish? is the textbook in english?

I've been using Babbel to learn Swedish, and it costs me $66 a year - should I switch to Duolingo?

Ha, I just added Swedish yesterday and I would say, yes, definitely, really enjoying it, although maybe I am only saying that because it gave me such a grade grade on the placement test. So, yes, sign up, take the placement report back and if you like maybe we can practice here on this thread or some other. Why are you learning it?

ORDENE SU ROSCA DE REYES CON ANTICIPACIÓN

Y Felisa me muero!

^punchline of an Latin American/Argentine joke, play on "¡Feliz Año Nuevo!"

Och gott nytt år, allesammans!