People who went to an American public school and speak English as their first language.
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@Fragglemuppet My struggle is always vocab.
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@Fragglemuppet
For me, casual speech -- chatting, ordering food, getting directions, arriving to hotel -- is different from formal speech e.g. in business or academic contexts. Casual is easier than formal.Most of my writing has been more formal -- fedi is actually a nice chance to chat in writing in the 2nd language.
Reading is the easiest cause I can go at my speed, use dictionaries, etc.. Chatting is the next easiest. Formal speech and formal writing are hardest.
(Spanish for 2nd lang)
@colo_lee And I think you've just put your finger on the problem. I was only taught 1 way of saying things in school. I mean I had a general idea there was a difference, but that was all I knew.
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@Fragglemuppet Well, not really what you asked, but I am Dutch from the Netherlands, and Dutch is my native language, I did English, German and French as foreign languages. English turned out ok, German I can understand fine, speak somewhat... Write not much. And French, 3 weeks after I had given it up, it seemed I had forgotten everything... Almost anything..
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@Fragglemuppet I said writing. I think writing is hardest for me because the expectations seemed higher. If I just kinda munged a verb conjugation while speaking, everyone still understood me just fine and we rolled through it. But writing is much harder because you actually have to know what you’re saying and how to spell everything, which isn’t particularly closely related to what you’re saying aloud.
@dougwade
This matches my experience: the thing about casual speech is that the goal is communication or hanging out together. And you can make all kinda mistakes and still succeed. Sense of humor on all sides helps. Writing is harder and more demanding... -
@Fragglemuppet My struggle is always vocab.
@bryanredeagle Ah, I loved vocab, but my hangup was grammar beyond basic verb conjugation.
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@colo_lee And I think you've just put your finger on the problem. I was only taught 1 way of saying things in school. I mean I had a general idea there was a difference, but that was all I knew.
@Fragglemuppet Same here.
My Spanish education was quite formal. Verb conjugations, gender agreement, and all that.
It was when I started actually talking to people that I realized I could really mess up and still make sense. So, I stopped worrying so much about grammatical errors and started just saying stuff. And guess what! It works! People laugh at the jokes and understand what I mean! Who knew?
(I still try to follow the rules when I can but I don't worry about mistakes.) -
@Fragglemuppet Impulsive speech is definitely hardest, especially in a traditional book & lecture setting with exercises, because you're composing sentence structures on the fly - in writing (especially now with computers) you can just go back and fix your broken word order when you realized you were supposed to put the time period before the events of the sentence or that you just got a gender agreement wrong. Writing was only really hard in Chinese for me, because English is the most unpredictable language for spelling - e.g. French has silent letters but they occur in reliable patterns (e.g. oiseaux.)
@cwicseolfor @Fragglemuppet
I can read a little Chinese (and keep working on it).
Listening and understanding or speaking are beyond me.
And writing Chinese seems close to impossible! -
@Fragglemuppet I took German and while I could get away with verbally avoiding some jams, the gendered articles were always tricky for me and writing left me less wiggle room.
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@Fragglemuppet I studied French in high school and, after not using it for many many years I was called upon to communicate in French. When speaking I just used the present tense of the verb and added either hier or demain. Worked perfectly well.
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@Fragglemuppet I think speaking was harder for me because the language happened to be the same alphabet with a handful of extra letters, but more specifically than that is the fact that every language I've attempted to learn didn't always have a 1:1 word order to English. For example, the order of adjective and noun pairs being inverse in Romance languages, or how it changes with German sentences with more than one subject. It's easier for me to remember when writing than speaking for whatever reason.
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@Fragglemuppet Well, not really what you asked, but I am Dutch from the Netherlands, and Dutch is my native language, I did English, German and French as foreign languages. English turned out ok, German I can understand fine, speak somewhat... Write not much. And French, 3 weeks after I had given it up, it seemed I had forgotten everything... Almost anything..
@crazydutchy I did think of people in other countries, and that is also interesting, but I thought they probably have different methods of learning than most of us here are probably familiar with, most likely better ones.
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@Fragglemuppet I have trouble embracing being inexact in my meaning and incorrect in my grammar, but afaik learning a language requires embracing that and trying your best even when your best isn't very good
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@crazydutchy I did think of people in other countries, and that is also interesting, but I thought they probably have different methods of learning than most of us here are probably familiar with, most likely better ones.
@Fragglemuppet Hmm, I have no idea how you learn things, of course, when I went to school, we didn't have internet yet, so I had braille books for the longest time, and only later a laptop with books on floppy discs.
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@Fragglemuppet This might depend on the language in question. I find Latin-based languages to be super easy to read and even can figure out the meanings of many words when reading them. But then when you get to something like Chinese or Japanese, it gets trickier because the characters are many and varied... There's a whole system of rules to how they work, but it's still complex enough that it would be incredibly difficult to just pick up...
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@Fragglemuppet Actually the hardest part for me was listening comprehension, because that happens at a specific speed. I can speak and write at the speed of my brain producing the right words, but I have to listen at the speed of the speaker.
(Of course, I now know that I have Auditory Processing Disorder thanks to autism, and that makes much of my life make more sense, including this issue.
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Listening. Especially to French, where they abhor consonants.
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@bryanredeagle Ah, I loved vocab, but my hangup was grammar beyond basic verb conjugation.
@Fragglemuppet I'm usually pretty good at grammar. So we just smack our heads together, and we got a fully communicating person.
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@Fragglemuppet Listening/comprehension should be an option.
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@Fragglemuppet In middle school, we had one semester of Spanish class (my local university had the same requirement; taking more was optional), and in both cases...writing was the hardest for me. Though that was mostly an issue of "How do I form a coherent sentence?"
We never got that far with speaking, beyond some stock phrases.
I'm pretty sure my high school had Spanish and French as options, but those were courses for the college prep kids. Us tech prep kids could've benefitted from learning a second language, but alas.
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@Fragglemuppet I very much struggled with learning another language as a teenager in school, but I was also struggling with a lot of things right then.
As an adult however I've been learning Italian ahead of a trip with family to Florence, and I've picked up about a hundred words just since the beginning of the year!
