Icimoi
What on earth? Of course they do!
RufusTheReindeer
ici
Who said that?????
I'm rubbish at other languages, but I'm pretty good at English!!
I said it. There is no magical difference between one's native language and furrin languages. The difference is exposure. The native English speakers I've met with what I would call a genuine blank spot for languages were people who would have difficulty getting full marks on a language competency test for the purposes of UK immigration. The rest had somehow developed the idea as a child that not being able to become fluent in a language over the course of school meant they were crap. Well, no. To achieve fluency in a second language, a figure of 1000 hours (goes up or down depending on how different the langauge is to your first language) is generally quoted. And that's 1000 hours of being engaged in learning, not in staring into space. ikindalikelanguages.com/blog/how-much-time-is-it-realistic-to-learn-a-language-in/
I would be less adamant about this, but about four years ago, I decided I was going to try and become fluent in languages other than English, despite the fact that I have a disability that means I have never truly achieved all round fluency in English. For example, my aural comprehension is shit. If you say "have you got the carrots yet", I can hear "have you seen the Monty Python Parrot sketch?" I've had hearing tests, and my sound detection is perfect. It's just how my brain identifies sounds. It also affects my speech and makes phones calls to call centres a nightmare. As a child, my mother took it for granted any living language was pointless for me, and had me doing Latin instead.
I can now read novels in a second, and I am working on a third and fourth language. I'll admit that there are significant grade differences in my GCSE/A-level/degree marks between the exams that are reading/writing and those that are speaking/listening comprehension, but there were back when I took GCSE English. My spoken presentation for that was two grades lower than all my written coursework, then.
I am always going to have to put in more work than other people, just like I had to put in more work to become comprehensible in English outside a family setting. I didn't pick up how to speak naturally, and wouldn't have done in any language, wherever I was born. That "blank spot" is there, and it is an issue that is always there. But it gets my goat when people without a single issue bemoan their lack of talent and tell me I'm a "natural linguist" today because they assume that someone good at languages doesn't need to work and that I'm not working because they didn't see me doing it.
As a language student, I now know lots of others. We all work at it. And all the ones who have particular issues had it in their native language. Your native language isn't magic. You had more exposure to it. The dyslexic people were dyslexic in English, the people who needed speech therapy as a child have to think carefully about sound reproduction and bad habits, etc.