Learning a language, now vs then

[boptist]

In the nineties I learned French and German at school (and Latin as an after school enrichment for disadvantaged kids - I didn’t realise at the time ).

I loved learning languages, even though I dropped them at A level to focus on my sciences.

I’ve recently picked them up again with Duolingo and podcasts and can’t believe how it’s even more fun and so much easier. You could race ahead of the school work and have a much richer experience.

I’m wondering what your experience is of learning languages. What about your children? Do they take advantage of the new tech? Any language teachers reading?

I learnt in the 80's and 90's and found it interesting too. No till late 90's but I watched TV in different languages, went to the library stocking magazines and newspapers from other countries, enjoyed graded reader books, exchange programmes etc It was on the continent, though.

My DF around 1966 learned English via "Calling all Beginners' a long distance course by the BBC. DF was born in 1934 and had virtually no formal education.
When I was young there was English, French and the classics at school and you could take foreign language classes, if there was money - but books to read or speaking practice were hard to come by (unless you went on to university).
My DC have a wide choice of languages at school and with youtube, netflix, classmates, duolingo, babbel, memrise, skype courses - there is really no excuse not to learn foreign languages.
And it is so much more fun - I have restarted some time ago on a large scale and enjoy myself tremendously.

I was terrible at languages at school, and still am. However I have been learning bits through Duolingo and I’ve found it quite helpful.

I find reading and writing much easier than speaking and listening but I’ve been told it’s usually the other way around. I find it much easier to learn the individual words first rather than encounter a wall of sound. If Madame had had subtitles I might have found it a bit easier.

I also love being able to google a word to check the correct pronunciation.

French is one of the languages I’m relearning. Are there any (slow) podcasts or programmes you can recommend?

I did a bit of a search and see that someone recommended Coffee Break French, so I’m going to try that out later.

(It’s a podcast).

Thanks, I’ll have a look at that.

Can anyone recommend a podcast or app where I could start learning Spanish?
I've always wanted to but it's just never happened

I find reading and writing much easier than speaking and listening but I’ve been told it’s usually the other way around.

I don't think that can be true. Passive skills are always easier than active skills and written language is easier to deal with than spoken language because you have much more time to think and process. Reading is therefore the easiest skill and I'd be surprised if that wasn't near universally true. I can read a bit in languages I've never even studied due to their similarity to languages I do speak.

@MozzchopsThirty Coffee Break do Spanish as well, and it’s really good - I managed 6 weeks in Peru after doing the course!

Mozzchood, look for Coffee break Spanish podcasts.

I learned French at school and it was OK. I was pretty good at it, but not terribly keen. It was just another school subject. Forgot it all almost immediately once I finished the GCSE.

When I learned my second language I was hugely motivated by a fascination with the country and culture. I used a textbook and an online course from the University of Iceland, watched a load of films, read a lot of pop literature armed with a dictionary. I made a lot of progress in reading, writing and listening but I had to move to the country to really start speaking properly.

Thank you will check out coffee break

Oh and my children are bilingual naturally through having parents with different native languages. That's the easiest way to do it! It will be interesting to see how they get on with a third language at school but they aren't old enough yet.

I'm 44 and learning Slovak and it's just horrendous. It's not a language that many people want to learn so the resources like Duolingo simply aren't't out there and the ones that are assume that all learners are students learning it at uni so a lot of the language isn't very relevant to my life as a mother of a toddler who works! The grammar of the Slavic languages is just impossible and you have to learn up to 7 versions of some words that change according to gender and then also the question being asked and you have to recognize the question being asked even if no question was actually asked!?!? It's so hard but I've just signed up for a course starting this coming Tuesday - twice a week at 1915 after doing a full day in work and then coming home to have daughter time and going out when she goes to bed. All I can say is thank heavens the school is over a McDonalds so that I can have a decent coffee from the McCafe (or a greasy energy boost when I'm really desperate)!!!!

All this effort better stop me from getting dementia!!!

I loathed French at school and had the most awful teacher. I'm not that sure about language teaching at school today, but it seems more geared towards passing exams rather than being able to communicate in another language.

As an adult I have been learning French again and love it. I do go to a group, but there are so many resources available now which are a huge help. Also, as I'm mainly learning for pleasure I don't have to get too hung up on the grammar to quite the same extent.

Another podcast I like is News in Slow French, they do other languages too.

I don't think that can be true. Passive skills are always easier than active skills and written language is easier to deal with than spoken language because you have much more time to think and process. Reading is therefore the easiest skill and I'd be surprised if that wasn't near universally true. I can read a bit in languages I've never even studied due to their similarity to languages I do speak.

I was told that by someone who teaches adult ESOL, but I suppose ESOL students may be a different kettle of fish as their literacy standards may vary.

Passive skills are definitively easier to acquire (at least that's what my didactics studies and my experience tell me) - for active skills you need practice - lots of it - and you need somebody reliable to correct you and a thick skin as you will be making a fool of yourself along the way.

Mozzchops- NotesInSpanish podcast by Ben Curtis is brilliant.
I tried CoffeebreakSpanish once I'd run out of NIS ones, but there's no comparison. With Ben it's like a proper lesson.
My degree is French and Spanish but I'm terribly rusty and was also concerned that, as language evolves so quickly, I was speaking Spanish with a "what ho jolly spiffing" Enid Blyton style language!

Re: language skills- listening and reading are receptive, writing and speaking are productive. There's no one size fits all, though reading per se is generally the "easiest" thing to do until you get to having to analyse meaning, inference etc.

In my experience (and year on year my students' results confirm it, though obviously still with the odd quirk) writing and listening results are always lower than reading and speaking. Which maybe indicates there's an easy receptive skill and an easy productive one!

My language learning at school, looking back, was atrocious. Grammar rules written on the board, useless multiple choice exercises (statistically a monkey holding a pen will circle a few correct answers!) no speaking aside from booking hotel rooms (when was I likely to be doing that at 11 years old??)

I just posted on another thread that I love languages and have been studying them on and off my whole life, but it is much more difficult when you are older.
For me, I agree that reading and writing are easier skills because you don’t have to move at someone else’s pace, which you do with listening and speaking (that’s of course once you get beyond the toddler stage, as they just learn a language by hearing it all the time and repeating it).
The resources nowadays are endless though - tons of stuff on YouTube, foreign language TV stations etc. I’ve used Duolingo but think it has its drawbacks - it has some errors and I’m not sure how you learn sentence construction.
If you can’t get to classes - and they are fun but I’m never sure how useful it is spending time with a lot of people who can’t speak the language any better than you - you can have individual tuition on Skype.
Obviously the best way to learn is to spend time in the relevant country (and don’t hang around with a lot of English people!).

Duolingo for most of the languages I want to brush up on or acquire new only comes with a 'learner speaks English' option. So I only use this app for "getting words quickly" and use several other methods for grammar, background knowledge etc.

Duolingo is what it is- a vocab tool. As long as you don't expect more from it, it's great. I refreshed my Spanish using it.

FutureLearn do free mini courses at various times and various levels. I've just started beginners Norwegian.

I enjoyed learning languages at school (Spanish, French and German although only French to GCSE level) but I forget them very quickly.

My mum tried to raise me bilingual with Finnish as well as English and I went to Saturday school as a child for Finnish lessons but I didn't really learn. Went to immigrant school as an adult in Finland and learnt formal Finnish (written Finnish is different from spoken Finnish so learning the written style wasn't too helpful for learning to talk with the locals!) so have mostly learnt through immersion but still not fluent after 12 years here. It's a hard language, the grammar still escapes me (15 bloody cases!!)

I'm now learning Swedish on duolingo, it is definitely more fun than the other methods but not sure how much I can actually learn from it.

Duolingo is what it is- a vocab tool.

That’s not been my experience.

I have always loved learning languages but grew up in outback Australia with little opportunity. Thankfully my tiny school was happy to help me and arranged for me to learn French through distance education (mainly using cassette tapes and mailing my work to the city). They also arranged for me to learn Japanese through some sort of online classroom set up. It sounds odd, but perhaps because that is how I initially learnt, I have continued to enjoy learning that way. I buy language CDs and listen to the on repeat in the car for months. I can't necessarily read and write well, but I was proud to be able to check into hotels and order food, go to post offices etc in France, Germany and Poland on our honeymoon.

I learned French, German and Spanish to varying extents when I was younger. I use Duolingo to polish the dust and rust off what I learned 20 odd years ago. It's great for practice, and I can develop on from what I know, but it doesn't explain how the grammar works.

My 6yo dabbles with French on it, and he does seem to be learning something beyond random guess work. I have to bail him out a fair bit, but he puts in more than random chance would credit him with. I'm happy to encourage it as if it feels familiar before learning more formally at school, it will be good for his confidence.