Learning German.

Chagen

I’ve been taking German for almost a whole school year now. And I have to say, it’s rather difficult. Well, in an odd way; I seem to grasp it quite quickly, but there’s parts that trip me up…and I looked through a German 3 textbook…oh dear.   It’s a fun language to learn, but it has some really complex grammar that can be hard to get. I could explain, but English is as filled with as many ridiculous inconsistencies and oddities (probably more than German), so I would be just a big hypocrite.   Looking at it, English has roughly the same amount of pronouns as German, but I can’t remember all the German ones to save my life. Yet I can remember the English ones fine.   That as a whole has been bugging me; there are oddities in German that really trip me up, yet the oddities (including ones way worse than any of German’s; English is a sloppy and rough language for being so widely spoken) in English  are no trouble to me at all. Which makes no sense.    Thank God I love German so much; I’ll be taking it all the way to my senior year. I should be fluent in it by then. I can always hang around German Racing Sim forums to practice.   On a completely unrelated note, I tried translating My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy songs into German in my head. I have no idea why.

nohaynicklibre

Easy to know why it's hard. You have been talking English since you were born ( I assume you are American) but you just have started taking German.

Nyarly

"Thank God I love German so much; I’ll be taking it all the way to my
senior year. I should be fluent in it by then. I can always hang around
German Racing Sim forums to practice.
 
On a completely unrelated
note, I tried translating My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy songs
into German in my head. I have no idea why."

Du machst mir Angst, Chagen.

...Es fühlt sich merkwürdig an, in einem englischsprachigem Forum Deutsch zu sprechen.

Chagen

I understood parts of that...

But why do I frighten you?

On a random note, Google Translate thinks that "Chagen" is a verb (probably because of the "-en"). It just put "Chag".

Gelzo

You're kind of a noob at life, aren't you?

Oh well, everyone starts somewhere.

The idea that you can become fluent just by taking four years of foreign language class is laughable. You need immersion- which normally means living in a foreign country for a significant period of time. And I don't mean to be discouraging, but the first year of a foreign language is by far the most easy, fun, and interesting. As with many things, you start to get diminishing returns well before you can get good.

Keep at it, there aren't enough Americans studying other languages. Just don't overestimate your ability. No one likes a Peggy Hill.

Icalasari

^ I like Peggy Hill. It's hilarious to see the subtitles and find out how hard she's failing!

Chagen

Gelzo: Okay, so I overestimated myself.

But if it takes a long amount of time living in a country to get its language perfectly...how am I supposed to achieve my goal of learning 15+ languages?

Gelzo

^^Well, presumably you wouldn't want to be liked for being a failure.

Of course, I suppose I can't speak for Chagen.

^Oh boy, that's going to be a long answer. Wait a minute or two for it.

But for now, the short answer is that you won't be able to.

Vorpy

^ Gelzo will not post the long answer.

Chagen

There was a man who learned 30 langauges.

And was studying many more. I aspire to be a Hyper-Polyglot.

Vorpy

I know Blackfeet/Pikuni, Crow and English. Also fluent in Guttural.

Noimporta

There was a man who learned 30 langauges.

There was a man who ate forty cakes, that's as many as four tens. And that's unique, and highly unlikely to be replicated.

Icalasari

^ And that's terrible

Gelzo

Fluency is difficult to achieve. Once we're past puberty, we lose a lot of potential for language acquisition. For over 15 languages, you're going to have to dedicate a fuckton of time, effort, and resources. Depending on your career interests, it's likely not worth it for practical reasons, but I guess it might be understandable if you love language enough and want the ego boost.

If you define "speaking a language" as being able to form and understand few novel sentences and key phrases in that language (roughly first-year proficiency), it's certainly more feasible. I'd say if you were motivated enough and had access to the right resources, it'd be achievable in your spare time within a year. But I and I assume others define being able to "speak a language" means being fluent, and even that definition is pretty nebulous.

There are some people who have made claims of being able to speak as high a number of languages as 15, but I believe this thing is prone to exaggeration, and when that is not the case, the individuals likely have more time, money, and/or brainpower than I would expect anyone I meet to.

On a more positive note, I think learning a language become easier once you've studied others already. Perhaps it will become easier to add to the number once it's already large.

I would advise doing a bit more research to make sure that this is a goal that you really want to meet, and to decide which way of going about it is best for you. I think the most effective way of learning a language is to study it for a significant period, and spend time in a foreign country or otherwise be in a position where you have to speak the language for a time, but I honestly can't say whether that's the best strategy for a project of this scale.

^^^^^STFU, I had to get dinner in between typing this.

^^^^There are some claims of people knowing over 50.

Chagen

Noim:So? Doesn't mean I can't try. I'm not letting the odds get in my way.

What is is with nerds and pessimism? What happened to dreams, to aspiring to rise above your potential, to kicking reason to the curb and going beyond the impossible?

Gelzo

Don't confuse a sober consideration of the evidence with pessimism.

I think it's a fine goal to learn a lot of languages, I just don't want to see you give up when you realize late in the game that the arbitrary number you picked isn't necessarily feasible.

[Deleted User]

…

Gelzo

You might also want to note that the impossible is by definition not possible.

Chagen

Okay, now that I get a retry, let's take this from the top once more...

German isn't as bad as I thought. It's certainly not easy, but not ridiculous.

Pronounciation is difficult, though. Even if it is phonetic, those sounds can be hard to make, especially the umlauts.

Ä is easy, a long "a" sound in English. I actually like it a lot.

Ü is harder for me to tell the difference from it and "U", but I can. Pronouncing it, however....don't count on me to get it right without having to overexxagerate it.

Ö...oh god, I hate this one. I cannot pronounce it, because I literally cannot tell the difference in sound between it and "O". Ugh. I hate this one, and the difference can be profound ("Schon=Already" and "Schön=Beautiful", to name one example).

Gelzo

Past infancy, phonology is the most difficult part of a language to learn. It's nearly impossible to pronounce sounds fluently if they are not in your native language.

Chagen

I...wouldn't say that. While it may be much more difficult, I can pull off a respectable german accent..sort of. 

Gelzo

Looks like there are phonemes in German that do not exist in English. I don't know what symbols they correspond you, but I sincerely doubt you can pronounce those accurately.

I've studied Japanese for nearly two years and Spanish for four. It's a lot easier to pronounce the Japanese "r" with the English "r" even though the consonant sound in the "dd" in "pudding" is has a greater similarity, and in Spanish, easier to put stress on the "r"s that need to be "rolled" rather than actually rolling them. I'm assuming you do something similar for German.

It's sort of like how the French often have to approximate "th" sounds in English with "z". Sort of like zis.

Longfellow

ö, as far as I know, is like the German "eh" except with the lips rounded. The tongue should be further forward for an ö than for an o. (The top of your tongue should be a few teeth ahead)

You also have to be careful about even the vowels you think you know. "Eh" seems easy enough but in English we tend to turn it into a diphthong, like "eh-ii" (say the word "say" and you'll see what I mean). In German (and French, Spanish, etc.) the "eh" sound needs to be one pure vowel. When you say "oh" the lips need to be more rounded than in English--also you must resist saying "oh-uu" as in English. Compare the English "bow" to the German "Bohle".

There are also the different consonant sounds, such as the ch in "ich", the ch in "ach", and the r in "Rose".

I recommend you learn IPA and German phonetics; maybe your teacher can help you specifically here. It's best to start pronouncing the language well when you're first learning than to have to peel back bad habits!

Chagen

Longfellow....that's odd. I've never pronounced "eh" as "eh-ii". And I have no trouble pronouncing the german "oh" either.

Longfellow

Then you have better pronunciation than most people.

Stormtroper

Compare the English "bow" to the German "Bohle".

Better yet, compare "Touhou" with "Toehoe".

Vorpy

Toho Purojektu

Ponicalica

Actually, I think «Project» is something else in Japanese.  Also, all you Tōhō fans should join the Tōhōkai.

Stormtroper

«Project» is, but «Touhou Project» is Touhou Purojekuto.

mathias

Learning a language, generally takes a lot of time and effort. But it's certainly possible to become relatively fluent in a second language without going to it's country of origin for immersion. Doing so would of course facilitate the learning process and if you went there for, say a year, and made a concentrated effort you could become fluent for the purpose of daily conversations and also be able to understand most movies etc. So if you want to lean 15 languages I'd suggest that the best method would be to spend one year in each country, making for a total of 15 years. It's probably not particularly practical though. 

Anyways, back to the original point. While you guys can all judge whether or not my English skills are close to fluency, it is certainly a second language I have learned to the point of usability. Going for native fluency is pretty fucking hard though, I can usually tell that all my sentence construction is a little more, for a lack of better words, clumsy than a native speaker's. Anyways, I've learned English only through schoolwork and, probably more importantly, by reading English books and watching English movies etc. Of course you need a foundation, which the schoolwork gives you, to get anything out of this, but once you have that foundation the best way, in my experience, to learn another language is to watch a lot of movies and read a lot of books in that language. You never stop learning though.

German can be a bit of a bitch, it certainly has a lot of rules. The funny thing is, my biggest problem with German was never the rules as such, I would always do well on grammar tests etc, because I'm good at systems. However when just speaking German I wouldn't be able to remember it all, but would still be to conscious about it, rather then just say "screw it" and talk, correctness be damned. Which you kind of have to do, to move on. Of course the fact that my active german vocabulary sucks doesn't help either. Despite the fact that so many German and Danish words are related. All I can say is, keep at it. While I understand a lot of German, if I concentrate (about 60-80% of most movies) I really regret not doing some more to learn it properly when I had the chance, back in public school and the gymnasium. My current meager german skills are simply due to pure laziness back then, so don't make that mistake.

So yeah, while English perpetuates everything, and as such it's easier for us foreigners to learn it, English people don't really have that luxury when it comes to learning other languages. So seek out lots of German stuff on your own, it's what will help you learn the most.

Chagen

English is your second language? I legitmately could not tell, your English is perfect.

You've actually inspired me: if you can get this good at English, there's nothing preventing me from getting that good in German.