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Originally Posted by ficbot
Verencat, interesting what you said about knowing others who took the same classes as you and did not come out fluent  .. |
My husband took the same class as me to start learning Hawaiian. It was a very laid back class, granted, but we alternated sessions (so one could stay home with the kids) and so we basically each got about 2x/month in this class. We had a book to study with as well. I came out being able to have junvenile conversations with people (mostly about placement of objects and characteristics of objects and other simple concepts
) and he was able to say and respond to "How are you" and "What is your name" with equally horrid pronunciation. He then took the beginning class again the next year (about 3x/month) and came out... with pretty much the same information. Flash forward 4 years of living with increasingly fluent wife and children... and he is still at the same level. But, he said, interestingly enough, that going to those classes helped bring back his knowledge of Navajo (which he grew up speaking, in a minimal sort of way, to communicate with non-English speaking family members). He is one that is very smart with things like technology and the language of computers, and has a lot of trouble with learning new languages, or even communicating in English at times.
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Originally Posted by HarryT
It certainly appears that no language is inherently more "difficult" to learn for children - eg studies have shown that all 6 year olds have pretty much the same level of "fluency" in their own language, no matter what it is.
However, it is unquestionably true, I think, that certain languages are very difficult to learn for adult learners if they differ radically from your own language in the way they "work". Most Europeans find "tonal" languages such as, say, Mandarin, difficult to learn, because their own languages are not tone-based. On the other hand, English speakers generally find Italian pretty easy to learn, because it is highly regular grammatically, entirely phonetic in its pronunciation, and has very few "traps" to fool the learner.
Gaelic, as I said, has the reputation of being very difficult to learn for an English speaker.
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Being quite proficient in English
, at first I found learning Hawaiian to be very disconcerting. Unlike most other languages I had learned, Hawaiian's structure was totally different. Many sentences didn't even have anything like a "verb." They don't have a classification that fits the English idea of "noun." I had to stop my analytical mind from trying to pigeonhole the types of Hawaiian words into English concepts.
The phonics are very easy, however, so the reading/writing wasn't difficult for the most part, it was the sentence structure that was tricky. Newer speakers (I.E. the Kindergarten students in the Immersion school) tend to use English structure and put Hawaiian words in it. Those who grew up speaking
Pidgin often have a bit of a head start, since the structure is much more similar to Hawaiian structure. From my very brief peek into the Japanese language, it seemed like Hawaiian had more in common with Japanese than English. Not sure if that totally holds true or not.
I would love to "relearn" the languages I had learned before (and seem to have mostly forgotten), and learn new languages, but I find it difficult. I'm not sure if it's because my first "second" language exposure was really as a high school student (German), or if I'm a bilingual (only) kind of chick. I do tend to pick up accents and languages fairly quickly, so I'm not sure what my hangup with trying to add a third language would be, unless it's that lack of opportunity to be immersed. I truly stand in awe of people who can work in three of more languages on a daily basis, with little or no hesitation.