I still can't speak the language!

[Thejoyfulstar]

Three and a half years ago, my husband and I moved abroad for work, taking our 2 children whp were aged 1 and 3 at the time. We are both from the UK and didn't speak the local language at all. We work for the same company where everyone speaks English but were both very excited to learn the language.

As we both work full time and have no family support at all, we started having online lessons when the kids were in bed. We were normally so exhausted from working all day and dealing with the kids, we both struggled to concentrate or complete our homework to any meaningful standard. We tried Saturday mornings but it was too intense with the kids running around. Then our teacher did something which we both felt was inappropriate and we didn't want to use him anymore.

In the meantime we would do bits of study on our own from textbooks and apps, and try to chat to locals in coffee shops or the park etc. We were making ok progress considering, but a year into our journey, covid hit.

We were working online while managing our kids at home which, which was incredibly stressful so online lessons took a backseat. We weren't allowed to go out so couldn't chat to locals.

When life reopened, we tried to resume chatting to locals but it was much more difficult with masks. The business of working and having the kids took over and the lessons took a back burner again. We resumed online lessons with a different teacher who is great, but the tiredness issue in the evenings after work is the same.

Then I got pregnant and had another baby so lessons have taken a backseat again. Every expat I know who can speak the language has either married a local or moved here when single and childless and had the time and energy to devote to learning the language.

Work is an English speaking environment, my husband doesn't speak the language, and the locals we do get to speak to still wear masks everywhere which adds another level of difficulty. We are always too tired or busy just dealing with life to make a serious attempt at learning the language.

When I am relaxed and speaking to a patient and understanding local who speaks slowly, I can chat away and get my point across. However I am completely out of my depth in most situations where I'm required to use the language for anything other than pleasant small talk. Accessing local services without a translator is almost impossible.

We love this country, have a really brilliant life here and both really want to learn the language. Aside from watching TV and listening to the radio in the language etc we don't know what else we can currently do. Our family commitments and lack of extra energy, as well as total lack immersion, is holding us back. I'm now feeling totally overwhelmed and am starting to realise its never going to happen because I'm always too busy or tired.

My baby is 6 weeks old and sometimes I can barely string a sentence together in English, let alone the local language. A workman came to fix something yesterday and commented how poor my language is for how long I've been here. He is completely right but it was depressing!

Any ideas? I don't want to say the language but it's one of the romantic European ones.

It's really difficult to learn a language if you don't learn from birth/early childhood.

When I did gcse French I thought "when I do a level, I'll be fluent". When I did a level, I thought "when I do a degree in French, I'll be fluent". When I did a degree in French I thought "when I've done my year abroad, I'll be fluent". Nope! Never got fluent and I've forgotten a lot of it as haven't spoken it properly in years. It does come back when I visit France, but it's not fluent.

I think others have given you good advice here. You will learn a good bit I'm sure. I know pensioners who were decent French speakers and are now fluent after living in Belgium for about 5 years. They're super sociable as well and already spoke several languages which I do think makes it quicker, but it is definitely doable.

@IndoorsyImogen I think that is part of my feeling of overwhelm: knowing that I will never be fluent. However I do think that its not necessary to be fluent to be able to communicate well, so that's a good reminder.

It's also a confidence thing. I also can chat away to the right person; someone friendly who likes small talk etc. But then someone will say something straightforward to me and I won't get it. Can absolutely relate to your chatty man on a bench vs simple instruction from waiter situation!

Anything stressful, (which I know leaving a table isn't, but maybe very low level stressful), sends me into a miniature panic and all my French just abandons me.

How good are you at learning languages? Some people pick things up easier, some really struggle and never do.

I once lived abroad for three years, went with ex dh for his work.

I didn’t learn a single word, I just couldn’t.

Then again, I was made to drop French from GCSEs as I was going to fail miserably and let the school statistics down - four years of lessons at secondary school all I could say is “my name is” and “my age is” in French. That was with also having a tutor outside school, I couldn’t take it in and retain it. It was the same as an adult.

I’m just shit at languages.

@shepabear

Agree with what others have said - you really do have to practice practice practice and put a lot of commitment into it. We live in a Spanish speaking country, have lived here for 18 months. We are both having lessons and revising, but it is so so hard for it to cement itself. I can get by in restaurants, shops, can have very basic conversations with others about our dog and my son, but I find it really hard to listen to what someone is saying and pick out what is being said, especially if I don't know the context. Because we live in an affluent area with lots of English speakers, I often find that as soon as I speak Spanish and they pick up that I'm not a natural Spanish speaker they start talking to me in English. Which is very helpful but also really frustrating as I really want to try speaking more Spanish! My son goes to a British school but lots of his classmates are either local or their families come from other Latin American countries so they speak a lot of Spanish - he is picking it up far quicker than we are because he hears it in the playground and his best friends speak it - and his Spanish accent is incredible! Whereas as soon as we are in a coffee shop they automatically ask us 'milk and sugar?' instead of leche / azucar. So not being immersed in it is probably the biggest obstacle to really learning it. Keep at it though - we've resigned ourselves to never being fluent but are continuing our lessons and doing our best so that at least we can say we are trying!

I experienced this too in a small Spanish village. Be lighthearted but joke, hey, flights here cost me 2 hundred euro, let me practice my Spanish! Or hey, when you visit Ireland we will encourage you to practice your English! Or if you get nowhere whith good humout (try the martyred approach) No me entendió usted????? muy bien, sí me entendió, !¡qué alivio! entonces, le molesta mucho si seguimos ésta conversación en Español?

I got frustrated though, i was not a perambulating English class!, i had good enough spanish and i could communicate in spanish, but often the switch to english was just made without being necessary.

I can only imagine how hard it must be to go to sweden or denmark and learn their language!!

I am just across the water from you,in Croatia. I have now been here 15 years.
My situation is different as I married a local and live in a small village on one of the islands. Considering how touristy it is there are surprisingly few English speakers here, including my husbands family and his best friends wife. So at the beginning I was completely thrown in in the deep end, with a language I had absolutely zero knowledge of. Oh and one very important part of my education, my husband works away, 3 months away, 3 months home. So it was a true case of sink or swim!

It sounds as if you have the basics already, so you just need to build on that. For this you need to be submerged in the language, which is difficult if you are 100% English speaking household. Once I had been here a couple of years my husband switched back to speaking Croatian all the time. To today our conversations are bilingual, I speak English he speaks Croatian. If you can find a local friend to have this sort of set up it would be immensely helpful.

The suggestion of kids tv shows, is perfect. This will also help your children to become more fluent. Peppa Pig is a good one as they are short sentences. My children who are pre teens watch Italian peppa pig to help with their Italian.

Also seeing as you have 3 small children have you considered hiring a local teen to help you out with the kids. You may not need help, but with 3 small children I am sure they would find something to do. You could maybe say three afternoons a week, and ask them to only speak Italian to you and the children, and to feel free to correct you. I learnt a lot from my husband’s teenage niece.

To anybody else starting in this journey of learning a completely unknown language my advice is three easy steps.

1. Learn the numbers, surprising how much you can understand once you know the numbers.
2. Ten words a day, learn them parrot fashion. By the end of the month you have 300. If you can’t do ten even five would help, my husband and his brother have learnt many languages (not fluently) and they both claim with 100 words you can understand and make yourself understood.
3. Submerge yourself, listen to local radio in the car, always have the news on at least once a day even in the background. Kids cartoons and work up to teen dramas.

Good luck, and you are doing really well. It takes time, yes and effort, but 3 1/2 years is not that long. Also you will have good and bad days. It is only in the last few years I have lost my bad days, those days when you can not even comprehend the most basic of conversations. Forget about it and move on, tomorrow will be better.

OP in some companies/organisations that work in English in non-English speaking countries, they have provisions for employees who want to study the local language. It can be time off to study, subsidised classes etc. it may be worth talking to HR about it to see. Especially if it meant you could do a lesson during the day.

Another thing on mat leave could be to do a language exchange with a mum/dad from school (you said lots of Italian kids). There will likely be some who have at least an aspect of their English they'd like to improve - or just relish the chance to speak it so they don't lose what they've got.

There are also loads and loads of online language teachers and classes. On many platforms you can do trial lessons, so you find someone you like.

I'm learning a Northern European language also without it spoken at home (DH is not from here). At C1 level now and it's been an insanely hard slog. Not because the language is hard, but because of constantly being exhausted from life before study starts! It's not remotely the same as, say, being abroad when you're child free. Not in any way at all.

I'd say, given the time/effort required to learn a language when you don't have a partner who speaks it and you have kids plus normal adult responsibilities that you need to think long term. Do you plan on DC going to high school there. Do you plan on retiring in Italy? Are you willing to (for example) spend at least some time every weekend studying - meaning less time with DH and DC, less time for fun and relaxing - in order to speak it to the level you need and/or the level you want? You have to be very honest with yourself about your goal and look at what you're willing to sacrifice to meet it. Because it does involve some sacrifice as it requires time dedicated to it.

There are loads of Brits where I live who speak only English. I've never come across any Brits in my higher level language classes either. The reality is that sometimes the time and energy investment isn't worth it for many people. I mean if your kids are in an international school and you're in an international/English work environment then do you really need it? Could it be easier to find a local (qualified certified) translator and contract them when you need to deal with bureaucracy?

So before doing anything be clear with yourself what you want, why and what you're willing to sacrifice to achieve it. Then go for it, even if it's enjoying the freedom of no language learning!

Over the last three decades I've lived in quite a few different countries. It's meant I've had to communicate in Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, French and German.

Contrary to what some others have suggested, what's worked LEAST well for me was watching television or films. One puts in a lot of time for very small gains: the number of new words is too great, and the speed is too fast to retain many new words. I worked for a while with someone who did her PhD dissertation on this very subject, and the conclusion she came to was that virtually any other learning method was more effective.
What has worked best for me, when I was at the level you are at (i.e. you can sort of get by, but there are still big gaps), was two things:

1. read full length books straight through without stopping to look words up in the dictionary. However the books should: not contain too many complex or descriptive words, be something you would want to read in English and (this is the most crucial bit) you should already have read it earlier in English. Once you've read one book, continue with another by the same author as each author tends to repeat vocabulary. Reading a whole book is much easier than reading short stories, children's books or newspaper articles.
2. Watch really short things on YouTube. If it's only 5 minutes or so you will be able to watch it repeatedly until the entire content starts to make sense. You can also slow it down to three quarters speed and listen to that, and quite a lot of things have subtitles as well.

@RandomMess

Commit to speaking the local language only within your home especially as the DC will be at English speaking school/nursery.

That is not a good advice. Parents need to speak to kids in the parents' first language.

I think the main issue is your work is in English.

I've lived and worked in both France and Germany. In France, I had to speak French every day and my language very quickly developed to almost fluency.

In Germany, the official language of the company was English (although there was some German spoken) and I hardly learned anything, despite chatting in shops and doing all the day to day small talk.

The only way you will get better is using the language more. I would advocate that over formal lessons. But how you go about doing that when you work in English, I am not sure!

I find that as I get older I actively need to learn new vocabulary or it doesn't really sink in. I read in English and Italian and when I read in Italian I choose a few words that are new to me and put them in an app (Quizlet). When I am waiting around, on the bus etc I review them and test myself!

This is the sort of thing I mean. My (Italian) dh says these are not common/useful words but he's missing the point! They are words that he knows and I want my Italian vocabulary to be as wide as my English vocabulary. It probably never will be but it's something to aim for. You could start with easier words but the important thing is to review vocabulary regularly and before you know it you'll find the words you've learnt popping up everywhere.

I had a rotten time learning Italian when living in Italy, and I was fully immersed! Flat shared with an Italian, read Italian newspapers, went to the cinema regularly- I was an English language assistant in a secondary school, but everyone there was Italian.

In the end, I went to evening classes. It got better. Never fluent, but better. The other thing I did was read Agatha Christie in Italian. I randomly found a load of her books in Italian and found them readable (with a dictionary).

But you have a six week old baby - give yourself a year off. You might come out the other end speaking it better than you do now.

I sympathise OP, a friend of mine who was a teacher at an international school in Milan found it hard and after several years still hadn’t really picked up much. What changed was having children and choosing to put them in local preschool and primary. She had places at the school she worked in, but at that point she’d decided she was here long term so if she and her family were to integrate she’d use local schools, at least up to the end of primary. At that point she found she needed to use Italian, for school parents, for teachers, for other admin, and she found it came on in leaps and bounds. It was the “needing” to use it that changed everything, when she was working at the school she had no specific need to learn Italian well, but once she moved outside that circle the requirement was there and she found the impetus she needed to learn it. Her DH is Italian but at the time travelled a lot for work so was only limited support.

She now speaks Italian confidently and works in an Italian speaking role for a local company, so it can be done.

To add, I used to give her private lessons, at first she never seemed to manage to retain info, but after she started dealing more with Italians it seemed to fall in place more easily. I think subconsciously you do need the necessity.

It's hard work. I've lived in 3 countries where I've had to start from scratch with the language. I got so sick of people asking me what my hobbies were: I don't have money or energy for hobbies because it's all going on bloody language classes. I have now so much sympathy for the SEN kids at school who weren't allowed to do fun stuff when I was a kid. Learning how to learn your first extra language is nearly as hard as the language itself. If you move to France or Spain now, you'll probably pick up French or Spanish in 6 months!

The main thing I found is that language learning isn't a smooth curve. You make a sudden leap then plateau for ages. The only way I've found to get over the plateau and make another leap is to change the environment. Get a job, a hobby, a new class. Online classes are cheap and practical, but there's no sense of shame if you don't do the homework or make progress. Group classes are expensive, not personalised and frustrating if there's someone dumb but it shakes things up a bit and gives you some peer pressure. Unfortunately, all this also requires energy.

Would an Italian au pair be an option? You could make a deal where you speak alternate languages and you get baby sitting! It would probably benefit your kids to get a bit more adult exposure too. You don't want them learning only playground Italian!

[quote Thejoyfulstar]@AlexaShutUp yes I totally agree. That last bit of energy that I need to put into the language is literally my last bit of energy at the end of the day. I'm at total saturation point once my kids are in bed. I got an A in GCSE French 20 odd years ago and know that I had multiple lessons a week and painstakingly learned off the verb conjugations and vocabulary by heart. I know what it takes to even get to that standard (I'm probably similar level in the new language but with gaps) and I just don't have it. You're totally right in that there are no shortcuts and it's an issue of accepting my current situation. It's just frustrating.[/quote]
The way you’re describing is learning a language — you need to develop a new language.
Children are great at developing a new language, it’s something to do with the language centres in their brains. They learn from other kids, songs, tv, school so it’s more natural.
As adults we tend to think we need to learn the vocabulary for shopping, now the vocabulary for the doctor, the garage, the bank and so on. Learn the verb conjugations, It’s an artificial way of developing language.
Immersion is the only way. Talking to native speakers, listening g to the radio, watching tv. Look at YouTube for topics that interest you in the language. It’s the only way, time consuming ( been there and had to do it) but it works.

Gosh, thank you so much for all of your replies!!you have all given me so many ideas and tips as well as a different way of looking at how to learn a language. Some practical tips that I'm definitely going to incorporate into my life for sure! I really appreciate everyone's input even if I didn't reply directly. There were just so many great replies to respond to.
Thank you!

@Thejoyfulstar
Don’t beat yourself up over this.

To my amazement my DD did a degree in French and Italian. I couldn’t pass O level French. Languages are not easy for everyone. DD is musical and she always was a great mimic. She has a great ear for sounds. I absolutely do not. We are not all talented at the same things. So try and enjoy your family and if you want to improve your language skills, you will. Good luck.