Can a monolingual adult become bilingual?

[msrisotto]

Hello all,

I couldn't find a more appropriate forum and there seem to be some very experienced people here who's input i'd appreciate!

I am desperate to be bilingual or at least fluent in Spanish. I lived in Spain between the ages of 2 and 7 so how i managed to avoid having a good grasp of it is beyond me - english speaking school, parents, surrounded by english speaking expats. Go figure.
We went back to spain 1-2x a year for years after moving back to the UK too.
Anyway, basically i feel i need to right a wrong and i feel distanced from an important part of my life oddly.
Anyway, my partner was bilingual english/spanish as he lived in south america for a few years though currently living in england so is more fluent at the moment and we're building up my conversation skills together, i'm going to spanish classes once a week. I want to do an immersion course in spain which i could afford for about a month. How good do you think i could get? Do you think i'd have to live in a spanish speaking country to really get it? I imagine i'll move to Spain at some distant point in the future but i want to learn sooner rather than later. I'm 24, is it too late?

Thanks in advance for any input!

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It sounds bizarre, but I slip up less often with cultural references/slang in this country than I did as a teen in my native country: we didn't have a television in those days And my parents were pretty narrow in their cultural sphere.

Mumsnet, of course, is hugely educational.

Pitchounette, I met a guy on a plane once who was trilingual - I think in Malay, Chinese and English. However, he was rather sad that no he could not express himself as he eloquently as he would wish in any single language.

Mind you, I'm monolingual and sometimes feel the same .

You sound like me! I also lived in spain from about 2-6 with english speaking parents, in an english speaking school and didn´t really (knowingly) pick up spanish. However my parents insist we did speak spanish occasionally and of course we had lots of bilingual friends and watched spanish cartoons. So for those few years we were surrounded by it and I am sure you were too. I did gcse spanish at school but a rubbish teacher meant by the end of the second year we were just about at "in my free time i like to..." so not much progress there.

When I was 24 I decided to make the leap and move to spain in a kind of "now or never" to learn the language. For the first 3 months I took one on one tutorials once a week. I knew my spanish was so patchy that a one size fits all course wouldn´t work i.e. I could read in spanish with a decent accent even if though i couldn´t understand what I was saying. I just knew how to pronounce it. And it came so fast to me, it was obvious that the early exposure had hard wired a lot of it in there and my tutor said it seemed like he just had to reactivate it, not teach it from scratch. I still studied my verbs and did my homework so effort was required but it did come pretty easy. Speaking was the stumbling block, I was living with an old friend from when i had lived here as a kid (We had always stayed in touch) and she was fully trilingual (we are in catalunya) so I had her and her mates all chatting away in spanish all day too. Even so I found it hard to get over my embarrassment and so it wasn´t until I met a lovely spanish lad at about the 3 month mark that my speaking really took off. He spoke no english and we conducted all our conversations with a lot of "como se dice..." and miming. But I found it easier to just talk to him one on one and he was dead patient and didn´t make me feel stupid when I said something wrong (whereas my friend, bless her, is a bit ´point and laugh´).

And that was that, I moved in with lovely spanish lad and my spanish went from strength to strength. 7 years later we are married and I would say I am very fluent. not bilingual, like a previous poster I have to have movies that bit louder in spanish, I can but don´t enjoy reading in spanish like I do in english, I also much more easily zone spanish out if I am tired or don´t want to listen whereas even if I am half asleep on a bus my ears will pick up an english conversation quite against my will! I do however think and often dream, talk to myself and occasionally ds, in spanish.

I would say after about 4 months I could hold a decent conversation, by about 6 months I was fluent but would have still been making regular errors, especially with the subjunctive, by a year these were significantly less. Good luck with your studies, you should definitely go for it but be aware you might have some knowledge in there so a course where you can move at your own pace would be best. And don´t worry about where you learn it, I have a regional accent (like a spanish person learning english in birmingham or something) but I don´t mind, people find it very quaint and it doesn´t detract from the fact that you are speaking another language.

Hi Maveta,

It's great hearing your story, thanks for sharing. I would love to move to Spain to learn like you did (how do you finance it though?!) but it won't be for a long time yet I imagine.

I didn´t half go on, did i?! It didn´t really cost much though I can´t really remember if i came over with much. I don´t think so. I moved in with my friend so no flat deposit or anything, just monthly rent which was less than at home. I got a job in a pub within about 2 weeks and kind of went from there. It was really really easy! the hard part is making the leap in the first place. No time like the present!

You're 100% right about the initial leap - it's terrifying!

I must say I've found this to be totally fascinating thread and it's got me thinking about what I think bilingualism means to me. I came across this the other day and it made me think that what I was trying to say was that, FOR ME, true bilingualism is wrapped up in biculturalism.
Einar Haugen said that 'true bilinguals' are also 'bicultural' ...

"Any learning of a language for "tool" purposes is to be excluded from the concept of bilingualism: only if the language becomes a medium for the user's own personality in relation to other members of a language community can he be said to enter into a truly bilingual relationship which is then bicultural as well." (Einar Haugen, 'On Bilingual Competence', 1969)

I do understand others may disagree completely but it gets me closer to what I was trying to explain I thought bilingualism meant to me and how it was more than having 2 languages or thinking/dreaming in 2 languages. I read a book about multilingual families, can't remember by whom and it disagreed and said bilingualism and biculturalism were seperate things.

What do you all think?

oops, think I was macaco further back in this thread!..I've changed name recently.

It is possible but it's very hard and you need to be quite disiplined with yourself and need practice with and encouragement from a person who has that as their first language ideally.

Look on the bight side, your not trying to learn Mandarin (like myself!).

Interesting thread and interesting that most people are defining bilingualism solely in terms of spoken ability in the language, with very little mention made of the written language. Now, IMHO, if you want to be considered bilingual in the L2(and in many cases to work in the country in question, outside the ELT teacher sort of job), you'd need to become extremely proficient in the written language, which is possibly harder.

Am wondering if some of us are not forgetting about the written side of bilingualism because we've actually found that easier. My own linguistic development went something like this:

1. learn basic English by means of Ladybird books, teacher and dictionary

1. read Sir Walter Scott

1. write essays

1. conduct a conversation

Not at all an unusual trajectory if you have started learning the language in another country. I was at least 8 before I even set eyes on a foreigner (=English person). About 11 before I first tried to have a conversation. 14 before I got the chance to have regular conversations. By which time I had already read a fair few of the English classics and had penfriends all over the world.

Hmm, ISWYM cory, yes, but reading and writing are very different - by which I mean reading is a receptive skill whereas writing, like speaking, is a productive one and therefore much more difficult to perfect.I don't know if it's more or less difficult than speaking fluently, but I just thought it was interesting that nobody mentioned it at all in a discussion of bilingualism. Immersion in a language won't necessarily enable you to write fluently in the L2.

Interesting thead.

I am as close as you can get to bilingual English/German, very fluent in German although I only started learning German when I was 19.

As an aupair in Germany, I lived with a German family and then I met and married a German. After about 8 months I was dreaming and thinking in German. After the first year, DH and I started speaking German together. After 2 years I started an apprenticeship, with vocational school and worked in sales. I was often mistaken for a native speaker.

My written language skills are not as good, but I can express myself equally well in both languages.

I agree that the definition of bilingualism cannot be equally fluent as there are very few people who are truly equally fluent in both languages.

My DC speak German very well and since moving to French speaking Switzerland their English has improved as we have English speaking friends here.

I don't know if you can learn to speak a language fluently within a month. If you already have some language skills that you can build up on perhaps.

Will have a look for the research about when the best age is for learning a second language is, I have it somewhere.

Just noticed that I contradicted myself there.

I am able to express myself equally well in both languages but my written language skills are of course better in English. Normally.

I do find thought, that there are some English words that I struggle to remember as I have not lived in UK as an adult. Anything to do with taxes, insurance, bank accounts, buying a house...