Learning Languages

[Mary Terry]

I studied American Sign Language/Deaf Culture in college. I also spent as much time as I could immersed in a signing community, mostly Deaf. I also had Deaf friends. Between the exposure and classes I was somewhat fluent though I had much more trouble understanding than speaking. I think that because I have not signed for so long, I have lost much of my skills but also think they would come back if I signed everyday.

Congratulations on learning to sign. You must have good eyesight! I have a close relative who was born profoundly deaf due to her exposure in utero to Rubella before a vaccine was developed. (And this is why everyone should get childhood vaccinations!) I have learned from her that there is a big dispute and divide among American educators of the deaf about sign language versus lip reading and speaking. She started attending a special language school for deaf children at age 2 which prohibited the children from using sign and required them to learn to lip read and speak.

Today, she is about 53 years old and her ability to speak and lip read is phenomenal. She started learning sign language in her 20s and has many deaf friends who are limited solely to sign language so she often serves as a translator for them when dealing with the hearing community. She works for the local Sheriff's department and has helped them communicate with the deaf. She also has been married for decades to a hearing man and has two hearing children in their 20s who learned at a very young age that mommy's ears are broken and they helped their mother understand when people mumbled, or averted their faces when speaking, or had big bushy mustaches/beards that covered their mouths.

Her old school asks her to visit every year on parents' day so parents who just discovered that their children are deaf and are heartbroken can meet her and see that deaf people can have wonderful, fulfilling lives. She is also a role model to the young students as someone who has succeeded and is happy in life despite her deafness.

No one in our family ever learned to sign because she communicated so well by lip reading and speaking that it was never necessary to learn sign to talk to her. We chuckle at some of her expressions. My favorite is "turn on the lights, I can't hear you" because she "hears" by lip reading.

 

[Alexej]

My mother tongue is Norwegian, but my first language is English.
I have picked up Dutch from living there for 10 years.

 

[Johann]

I'm too socially anxious for voice chat, though mesaging would work I guess.

Yes, I did. Since I was in high school. I remember we wee shown a video in the music lesson that showed a forest in souther Germany, and it seemed llike an idyllic, peaceful place for me. Somehow it really affected me an I wanted to know eveything about Germany, it's history, language, culture. It became a 'special interest.' I never felt that I belonged anywhere, and I longed to go away somewhere, where things might be better for me. Of course, it isn't better - it's just the same thing in a different setting, but at the time it was kind of a way of escaping for me.

That is interesting. Social anxiety and language learning at first glance seem to be incompatible but I think your anxiety would decrease if you built a good relationship with someone through messages prior to speaking with them through voice messaging.

Everyone needs to feel there is a place they can belong and it can be hard to find that place in life. Often it is hardest for people who are very different in various ways. The more you fall on the extremes or tail ends of a normal distribution, they harder it is to find people who relate to you. Psychologically, attraction is linked to similarity and proximity and often people spend their most intimate moments with people who are just like them.

 

[Progster]

That is interesting. Social anxiety and language learning at first glance seem to be incompatible but I think your anxiety would decrease if you built a good relationship with someone through messages prior to speaking with them through voice messaging.

Yes, that would work. Speaking a language to practise it helps a lot, but it is possible to learn grammar and vocabulary without speaking, to be able to read texts or forums, for example.

 

[hiraeth]

My mother tongue is Norwegian, but my first language is English.
I have picked up Dutch from living there for 10 years.

I am curious how do you define "mother tongue"?

I find the concept of "native language" (or "mother tongue", or even also "first language") to all start to become too complicated for the newer generations where increasingly large number of people actually do grow up speaking and naturally acquiring multiple languages simultaneously - from one or both parents, from having lived in several places in childhood, or also from the internet and mass media.

I guess the most useful distinction I have found for myself, as a (lifelong) language learner, when I ask another person "what is your native language" the only thing I'm really interested in is whether they acquired it "without effort" - which means almost always starting early in childhood, as it thus has these implications:
- they can speak and be perceived as "without a foreign accent", and thus also be held to much higher linguistic / communicative / social / cultural standards by others
- they most likely can tell me quite reliably when a grammar or word choice definitely sounds unnatural and should be avoided
- they most likely cannot tell me why it is unnatural, ie. grammar rules

The source of acquisition - if one or both parents were also "native speakers", if they had actually lived in a place full of "native speakers" or they just learned from way too much TV/movies/internet life, or lived in one for a very short time, if that was the first language they were exposed to or started to speak in as an infant, if that language is still their strongest one today, .... are pretty much all irrelevant

 

[Alexej]

I am curious how do you define "mother tongue"?

For me its quite easy, my mother (and father) spoke Norwegian but I grew up in the UK. So my mother tongue is norwegian but the language I know best and can express myself most exactly in is english. This is partly a function of the richness of the english language, but also of my mastery of it.

We spoke norwegian at home but outside the home it was english.

 

[Ierwitas]

I always have problems with foreign languages, especially in writing. My writing skills are bad and I usually order some difficult works. I have a job so money is not a problem for me. Tomorrow I will get my literature review paper from a writing service. I'm sure I will get high mark!

 

[GrownupGirl]

Like most English-speaking Canadians I speak, well, English. Not Canadian or American or whatever nonsense people call it. And like most English-speaking Canadians about the only French I know is what I remember being taught in school and from reading the bilingual labels on cereal boxes.

 

[vergil96]

Which languages do you enjoy learning or want to learn? I'm fishing for ideas, haha. I learnt English and German at school to a good degree, but I studied also French and still learn Japanese for myself. I plan to begin learning Russian too, but it is likely going to be fast, because my native language is Slavic and has a lot of similarities with Russian. It would be plausible to learn a language that is spoken in a country that you have interest in, so I thought of Scandinavian languages as well or perhaps Mandarin could be very interesting.

 

[tree]

I've used Duolingo for Latin, German and Spanish.

Had Spanish in high school and college.
Latin I have studied at home.
The only German I knew was from the phrase book
my father had when he was in the military.

I completed all of Duolingo's lessons for Latin.
The material seemed silly at times since it concentrated
on how to speak Latin in current times...Stuff like
whether you lived in Philadelphia and entire lessons
that were meant to be memorable through their
absurdity. (Throwing fish, for example.)

For casual use, the Duolingo's spanish seemed ok.

The course I use at home for Latin is Artes Latinae.

 

[Forest Cat]

It would be plausible to learn a language that is spoken in a country that you have interest in, so I thought of Scandinavian languages as well

If you learn Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, you can learn three languages but sort of get away with the work of learning just two.
I speak all three and they are similar, so if you learn one of them, the other two automatically makes a lot of sense.

 

[Progster]

I'm hooked on Clozemaster at the moment. I find it useful for revising languages I already know and even learning now ones. It has a very wide range of languages. You don't have to start at the beginning like you do on Duolingo - you can go straight to the harder sentences of you are a more advanced learner and just want to practice. I'm doing Greek, German, French, Italian and Romanian, which I know and just want to practise, and new ones: Latin, Norwegian, Albanian, Swedish.

 

[GrownupGirl]

You know you have ASD when you think you're perfectly capable of understanding the language of space aliens or animals but you can barely understand what your own species is saying.