To want to be fluent in a second language?

[Jelliots]

Has anyone successfully learnt a second language as an adult from scratch without actually moving to that country? Can it be done?

im Duolingo level at the moment but as soon as I try to watch anything in my chosen language im totally lost! I’ve nearly finished the Duolingo course so clearly it’s not going to cut it! What else could I do? Can’t afford private lessons

As a pp said, it's very variable.

I'd liken it to playing the piano. Some people will never be concert pianists, no matter how long they try and how long they do it for. But they could still be very good players.

Of course most concert pianists also start very young. Though not all.

Imo duolingo is very good for learning pronunciation/vocab/confidence.

But you have to practice conversation and listening if that is what you want to achieve.

@landsharksanonymous that's a very similar level of Russian to me! I read that Chris Hadfield, the astronaut, learned it well, as an adult, enough to be in charge of the international space centre. Mind blowing.

Of course most concert pianists also start very young.

A cheesey story I read in the Reader's Digest many years ago:

After a piano concert, one of the audience rushed up to the pianist, gushing with praise.

"That was so good! You're amazing! I'd give my life to be able to play like that!"

The pianist looked at her. "I did," he said.

Good for you OP! There are some good recommendations here and some I will even take note of.

I am currently learning Thai as I hope to move there one day in the near future! I have an online tutor who I found on this website: https://preply.com
I know you wanted a free option but the costs are very reasonable.

There is a lot of language shorts on Youtube that are handy. Also a good idea is to watch some of your favourite films, shows etc in Italian as that can help with the pronunciation etc. I also use an app called Quizlet which is handy too. I am about two months in and I certainly know things I didn't know and a lot is being retained but it really does take a lot of effort!

Don’t be disheartened by being lost when confronted with the spoken language. I used to live in France, I’ve worked in French and published in French. But when I haven’t been for a while it takes a couple of days for my ear to tune into the cadence of the language and start picking up what has been said.

Once you have a basic grasp of the language, TV helps. The news is good as newsreaders tend not to use slang and enunciate clearly. Then move on to Netflix with the spoken word in Italian and subtitles in English. When you get comfortable with that switch the subtitles to Italian.

Thank you - that's very interesting, and I'm in awe of your polyglotism!

I do think it really helps to have some kind of understanding of grammar. I don't necessarily mean the sort of fronted adverbial stuff that turns children off writing in English. Maybe more basic stuff around tenses, direct and indirect objects etc etc. I learned French in a very traditional way which meant a lot of correctness and little fluency. More unusually I studied Latin and Ancient Greek. Both these last two have turned out to be absolutely brilliant now that I am learning German at regular classes. It's necessary to get this sense of how a second language works differently from your native tongue and be able to understand the basic rules/structure. I think it's very much like having to reprogramme your brain - do things with your left hand when right handed would be an analogy.

I do think it really helps to have some kind of understanding of grammar.

Yes. I was at a crap primary school in the 1980s & the first I heard of grammar apart from nouns, verbs, adjectives & adverbs was in language classes at secondary school. I’d had no idea before then that things like gerunds & subjunctives existed, let alone that I was using them.

Yep. It would be so much easier for secondary MFL teachers like me, and for the kids we teach, if English speakers actually understood the grammar of their own language a bit better! We were probably the only people who welcomed the SATs SPAG stuff, as kids at least know a bit of the basics. Some of what they teach is useless though. Fronted adverbials .

I did Latin A Level, so I appreciate how much Latin can help train you in grammatical structure. But I've always thought it was a bit daft to think that learning a dead language was the most sensible way to get good at English (or French, German etc) grammar.

I also often wonder how good primary school teachers can be at teaching SPAG, when none of them will have learned much of it themselves until they trained to teach! I bet lots of them hate it

I did Latin A-level too, and yes!

We’ve been covering the subjunctive in my Italian class recently. It’s tricky, but it would have been a lot harder if I didn’t already have an idea of what it was.

That’s a very English-speaking country kind of a question. Of course you can do it, in non-English speaking countries people learn languages and do become quite proficient all the time. But it will take years and a lot of investment (real classes and a lot of time spent studying). A few years back I’ve learnt my fifth language and it took several years to learn it sufficiently to be able to work in it. I’ve never lived in the country though, visited twice, so obviously I’m “fluent” in a very functional kind of way. I wouldn’t be able to crack lots of jokes or be super natural in a way I speak it. For that you’d definitely need to immerse yourself in that language (or at least live with someone who’d only speak that language with you).

I have a friend from another European country who is completely fluent in English. I’m trying to learn the language of her country. Thd key difference she thinks is that English is everywhere particularly culturally - music, films, tv so she heard it all the time. By contrast I have to actively seek out The language of her country as in the UK you would very rarely come across it

I have a friend who was born and brought up here, but his father is Danish. As a young man he spent a year studying in Denmark as he really wanted to learn his father's native language.

It was a complete failure as everyone spoke to him in English the whole time as they all wanted to improve their, already impeccable and impressive, English.

I'm always trying to explain this to my students. We still do exchanges and when our kids meet their exchange partners (especially the German ones!), they are baffled and a bit embarrassed to find out how vastly better their partners' English is than their own German, French or Spanish. I point out that British kids will very rarely see or hear a single word of the foreign language outside of their lessons and homework. Their partners will probably be exposed to English every single day, maybe even quite a lot per day.

Verb tenses (and the subjunctive) are always the things that cause the most trouble. We tend not to actually explain the subjunctive until A Level, we just teach them a bunch of phrases with subjunctives in them, so that they can access the top band of the GCSE markscheme. With the passive, even A Level students often struggle. Not because it's hard to form, but because they have no idea when they're using it in English, so they don't realise they need to use it in the foreign language!

Yes, and gaming plays a big role too. I teach English in Austria. Most of the gamers are completely fluent in English because they are playing games in English and talking to other players from around the world in English.
We then have to polish up their English a bit so they use appropriate language in appropriate scenarios but they can do that easily.
The non-gamers also watch a lot of Netflix and so on in English.
The teaching in the schools is very different too. A very high level is expected and it's also compulsory in primary school. Most of the children I teach are very motivated because they know that they will need English in the future, whether for a job or for travel. A lot of the jobs are tourism based here so it's very important.
Children in the UK don't have that motivation, there isn't the need to learn a language because you can get by in most places with English. Then there's the issue of which language to choose. For most other countries English is chosen as the first foreign language in schools because it's the most obvious choice given how many people can speak it worldwide.
Also, starting in primary schools in the UK was a good idea but when it was introduced the issue was which language and often there was no coordination between feeder schools heading into particular secondary schools which meant you had children coming in who had done different languages at primary and often that meant everyone having to start from scratch in the particular language or languages the secondary school offered.

I went off topic there, sorry, but I do find language learning fascinating and the principles apply to children and adults, immersion and working at it over a sustained period of time.

This is a chance to post my favourite language video.

If English was spoken like German

this is amazing!! And so difficult to follow! It must make Germans cleverer surely