I don’t have a source but I’ve read that young children can learn up to 4 languages at once, without mixing them up, before they show any sign of strain.
Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language?
psycho_driver@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The older you are when you begin trying to learn a foreign language the harder it is. Like almost everything, actually.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Switzerland has 4 official languages
Scrollone@feddit.it 1 day ago
Yeah, but trust me. People in Zurich only learn German and a bit of French, they don’t care about Italian or Ladin.
Witchfire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
While there is a point where yes it’s gonna be hard no matter what, I’m learning a new language in my 30s and finding it relatively easy. As an adult you already have a large vocabulary and know what more complex words mean, you just need to learn their translation.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Same. I started learning French from English, and my experiences from software development have made learning a new language easier. I also took Spanish almost 20 years ago, and while I don’t speak it, I have a better understanding of how languages are structured so learning congregations is easier since I understand the concept better. Perhaps the specific words I’m learning don’t stick in memory as easy as a child, but learning a new language is like 30% vocab and 70% sentence structure and congregation. The hard part is the “logic”, if you will.
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
May I ask which language you’re learning? I’m curious about Japanese and Arabic (Egyptian Dialect). But both seem really tough to learn.
Witchfire@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’m fluent in English and Spanish, et je suis en train d’apprendre le français
Though I will note that of course, learning a language that’s in the same “family” of languages as your mother tongue will always be easier, regardless of age. The jump to Japanese or Arabic from English is far greater.
ModernRisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Dutch is my native language so not sure how close that is to Japanese, ha. But I understand what you mean.
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Speaking Japanese honestly isn’t too hard. Reading/writing Japanese is more difficult but is easier as you realize the complex Kanji are just combinations of simpler kanji and how those relate to meaning. Most of the sounds are also in English.
ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.
Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).
While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.
(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)
Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.