How did you learn to be multi-lingual?

[Miss Bea]

Something has amazed me. It is the skill in some of you out there, speak the English language. I’m interested in how this came about. It is amazing to me. I’ve almost been embarrassed by speaking just one language, and would have loved to be exposed to another, so it came naturally to me. (I have to admit, Yurok is the language my heart tends toward, but, to be honest, we have no one who speaks it, naturally any more) My grandmother spoke Yurok and Tolowa, and only understood English. Two of the local tribes here. 
Your story, if you don’t mind...
 

[Dages]

Learning at school, basically.

I've heard that it can be related to listening to music as a kid, training the ears (my father was a pianist (as a hobby) so I guess it helped). 

[Bek]

My first language is Russian. Then comes Kyrgyz, which I picked up in my early teens when I was sent to live with my grandparents in the mountains for a few years. I learnt English as my third language in late teens/early 20s. My fourth language is Arabic, which I also learnt around the same time as English, but my Arabic is rusty at the moment. I have not used it much since those times. Then I dabbled in French for a few months in my mid 20s. I can understand it quite a bit, especially written texts, but never gained spoken fluency in it. I think I could learn to speak it in a few months if there was a need for it. 

 

There are also other languages that I did not learn, but can understand by virtue of knowing the languages that are related to them. If you know Russian, for example, you can understand Belorussian and to some extent, Ukrainian and some other Slavic languages. Though one may need to get exposed to the latter ones for a bit to start understanding them fully. 

 

Similarly, knowing Kyrgyz makes me understand many other Turkic languages to varying degrees. Some of these languages have up to 90% mutual intelligibility while others may take somewhere between a few weeks and a few months of exposure to start understanding them fully. 

 

A few months ago, I counted how many languages I can speak and/or understand. It was around 15. I was actually surprised myself. Then I thought that I could bring that figure to 20 something in a couple of years if I brushed up my skills in other related languages.

 

 Language learning is a skill. If you invest in one language, you can pick up another one more easily. The more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn a new one. 

 

 The benefits from knowing a language or more are immense in terms of brain power, health, cultural awareness, communication etc. 

 

 

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by Bek

[New World Explorer]

2 hours ago, Miss Bea said:

Something has amazed me. It is the skill in some of you out there, speak the English language. I’m interested in how this came about. It is amazing to me. I’ve almost been embarrassed by speaking just one language, and would have loved to be exposed to another, so it came naturally to me. (I have to admit, Yurok is the language my heart tends toward, but, to be honest, we have no one who speaks it, naturally any more) My grandmother spoke Yurok and Tolowa, and only understood English. Two of the local tribes here. 
Your story, if you don’t mind...
 

Naturally, by living in a country that speak another language 

And being a witness helps a lot, as we need to preach to others, prepare for the meetings, give talks - so the learning curve is way faster. 

[Dages]

Learning languages is a nice hobby for this world, useless for the next  

 

[Hotteok]

On 1/22/2020 at 4:43 AM, Dages said:

Learning languages is a nice hobby for this world, useless for the next  

 

I think then so many languages will appear.. 

How many 'English's will be there? We couldn't understand old English or middle-age English.

But I'll still learn new languages..

languages won't vanish overnight unless Jehovah makes us forget them.

 

Speaking only language won't make other languages disappear overnight, although eventually they'll be gone.

Still, I think there will still be some people studying 'old' languages like me.

 

I'll be quite interested in learning middle-age Japanese, Latin or Koine Greek for example. 

[Hotteok]

Speaking only one language is a default state of a human being.. Something natural. 

Jehovah didn't intend Adam and Eve to speak more than one language when He created them.

 

Being bilingual from a young age also is natural and easy in that infants or kids take all languages that surround them as their mother tongues. 

An English person speaking French can understand French as one of the dialects of English..

The switching between the languages to someone like him/her is swift and easy. 

 

What's really abnormal is one speaking a foreign language fluently. 

It's the result of pure labor and practice. 

Words, sounds, grammar.. all so much different from one's mother tongue that one has to exert himself and train really hard to be able to function to some degree in that language. 

 

Edited February 6, 2020 by Tryin'SoHardToBeSpiritual

[Hotteok]

To answer the question, however, I think the order of learning a language might be

 

Alphabet > Sound system of the language > Basic words > Basic grammar > More basic words > Books designed for kids (to practice reading and listening) 

> Intermediate grammar > Intermediate books > Our JW videos and publications (for more than 1 or 2 years) > Advanced books

 

And most people get stuck before they reach intermediate level, because learning a language is boring. 

When I was in my intermediate level, I picked one book and wrote down in a notebook every word I didn't know in that book and kept reading the notes until I knew them all by heart.... And I had to write down more than 20,000 words in note books before I felt 'comfortable' reading books in general written in English. 

 

Edited February 6, 2020 by Tryin'SoHardToBeSpiritual

[Sheep]

16 hours ago, Tryin'SoHardToBeSpiritual said:

What's really abnormal is one speaking a foreign language fluently. 

It's the result of pure labor and practice. 

Words, sounds, grammar.. all so much different from one's mother tongue that one has to exert himself and train really hard to be able to function to some degree in that language. 

You're right about that. The only other language besides English that I speak fluently is French. But I had a hard time doing it; lots of pure labour and practice, as you said. I moved to a French-speaking territory to help out where the need was (at one point) greater. But my timing was off. The need was tapering off at the time, so I only stayed in it for nine years and then came back to English. I can still function in French though, after some 23+ years away from it. But I'll always have an English accent. Very few who learn another language later in life can come through the learning process with no tattle-tale accent. I admire those who do.

 

One thing I can say about languages: Jehovah sure did a bang-up job messing up the languages at Babel!

[Hope]

18 hours ago, Tryin'SoHardToBeSpiritual said:

Speaking only one language is a default state of a human being.. Something natural. 

Jehovah didn't intend Adam and Eve to speak more than one language when He created them.

 

Being bilingual from a young age also is natural and easy in that infants or kids take all languages that surround them as their mother tongues. 

An English person speaking French can understand French as one of the dialects of English..

The switching between the languages to someone like him/her is swift and easy. 

 

What's really abnormal is one speaking a foreign language fluently. 

It's the result of pure labor and practice. 

Words, sounds, grammar.. all so much different from one's mother tongue that one has to exert himself and train really hard to be able to function to some degree in that language. 

 

I do think that even if our languages hadn't been deliberately scrambled, in time there would have developed various dialects or ways of speaking peculiar to various lands and people as we spread out. 

 

For instance, when explorers came to the New World, they didn't have words for native animals like raccoons, opossums and other flora and fauna unfamiliar to Europeans.  So, they adopted the words the Native peoples used. Languages in general use all sorts of "loaner" words from other languages to describe things there are not words for.  I don't see that situation being much different in the Paradise.  There are needs for certain descriptive words in some places that are not needed in others. There are 50 words for "snow" in the Eskimo languages.  People who live in tropical areas don't need that many words.

 

I believe that while we'll likely be mutually intelligible around the world, it won't be unusual to travel somewhere and hear words used that we don't hear where we live.   

[Qapla]

Hmmmm .... let's see, how did I become multi-lingual?

 

Well, I was born in Philadelphia and later moved to Florida ... so, when I first learned to talk it was Northern/Yankee English - then, after a few years living in Florida I became fluent Southern English.

 

I didn't really put any effort to learn these two "languages" - they just came natural by living among those who spoke it.

Edited February 7, 2020 by Qapla

[Dages]

7 hours ago, Sheep said:

But I'll always have an English accent

It's ok. Accents are very nice. 

[well]

As a kid, my parent insisted to talk in mandarin, though I replied in hokkien, a chinese dialect, a language we speak socially to fellow Chinese in my home town... Then, I learnt Indonesian and English at school... Plus other english and mandarin courses outside school few times a week... Have a chance to learn Japanese during highschool and college, but not serious on it... 

 

After that I lived in a city while majority of chinese speaks teow chew and hakka, still chinese dialects that I learnt... 

 

Conclusion... upbringing, surrounding and talent contribute somebody to be a multilingual person

[Sylv]

I grew up in the Netherlands, so learned Dutch. I picked up German by osmosis - the German TV station started with a children's program about an hour before the Dutch TV station aired anything  . We also lived close to the German border, my sister married a German and we visited back and forth often. Between the ages of 13 and 16 I learned* English in school.

 

Then I moved to Canada and really learned English! It still took some years before I considered myself fluent, but total immersion left no other choice. At this time I also took German in high school for an easy credit  

 

* my first day in high school in Canada, somebody asked if I had a "ruler". The only definition I knew was in the context of a president or queen, so I just said "sorry, I don't know" - that is what my English classes in the Netherlands prepared me for  . For anyone wondering, the Dutch word is "liniaal'. 

 

 

[Qapla]

20 hours ago, Sheep said:

But I'll always have an English accent. Very few who learn another language later in life can come through the learning process with no tattle-tale accent. I admire those who do.

 

This is very true. I often can detect accents in people even though their English is very fluent.

 

That said, I did know someone once that had an interesting way of speaking (he was not a JW). He was born in Cuba and his family fled from there in the 1960's and came to Florida. He was a very young boy at the time and his family spoke the Spanish of Cuba. His father could speak some English - but was very difficult to understand. His mother only spoke Spanish.

 

As he grew up he attended the public schools on the north side of Jacksonville ... an area considered to be very "redneck" with decided southern accents. At home, they only spoke Spanish.

 

I met him when he was an adult (they had a auto mechanic shop across the drive from our shop). The thing is, when he spoke English, he sounded just like an other Jacksonville Redneck - however, when he spoke Spanish, he sounded like he had just moved here from Cuba. There was absolutely no evidence of one of his accents in the other language.

 

I asked about it once - he told me that it was how he learned each language. That since he was so young when they moved here - both were "first languages" to him. He said he thought in whichever language he was speaking at the time ... as far as he could tell.

 

He is one of the very few that I have ever come across that had two "native language" accents and did not sound as though he were "foreign" to either of them.

[Sheep]

On 2/7/2020 at 3:16 AM, Dages said:

It's ok. Accents are very nice. 

Hhmm. I'm glad you think so. I was visiting the US a few years ago, and I got accused of having a Canadian accent! Yes, I was speaking English. But our accent from north of the border gives us away.

 

Funny thing about accents here in Montreal. The vast majority of people in my area are French-speaking. Many of them also speak English, with varying degrees of proficiency. Recently I tried going in service with a brother from a nearby French congregation, to see if I could still remember how to do it. So I took one of the doors, and the householder answered the door speaking French. But on hearing my English accent, he immediately switched over to English (although with a French accent). Very curious. I was wanting to practice my French again, and he messed it up by insisting on speaking English!

 

Edited February 8, 2020 by Sheep

[hatcheckgirl]

My mum is Greek, and my dad Italian. I was born in Australia, but spoke no English til I went to school. I was fluent in both Greek and Italian simultaneously, knowing to speak Italian to Dad, and Greek to mum, and their respective relations. At school they thought I was dum because of my English deficiency, and was put in the lowest grade. But it wasn’t long before English was my third mother tongue, and I was soon in the top classes. Being able to speak languages gives you an advantage at school, and most of us with ethnic parents did better than the Australians in school because of that (and we had pushy parents 🤣).

 

My parents sent me to Greek and Italian school (as was the norm for us in those days). I didn’t last too long in Greek school because the teacher had a violent way of teaching, and I nearly peed my pants, but I did enough Italian school to complete Year 5 primary equivalent. This made it very easy for me to integrate into year 5 in Italy when we moved over there for a year, and then back to Australia again. My friend told me that my English had changed in that one year I was away. But I soon got my English accent back, since I was only 11.

 

In high school, I learnt French. Not fluently, but because I know Italian, it wasn’t a stretch. I dabble in Japanese now. But age is not helping, and things aren’t coming easy for me any more, so I have to really try a lot harder to make things stick now. I can’t rely on my natural abilities and similar linguistic background with this one.

 

Interestingly, my English accent is not like the rest of the ethnic children I grew up with. They retain a fusion of Australian and a twinge of Greek or Italian. I have something of an English accent because my first English exposure was at school where it was still very British and teachers enunciated with the clearer news announcer’s accent from the ABC news. It is interesting how our upbringing changes both the fluency and accent of our mother tongue. 

 

 

[Qapla]

I was at a KH today teaching a Hands-On-Training class. In conversation with those in my group one of the sisters named the languages she speaks - she named about 8 languages in addition to English. When asked about knowing all those she explained, "I'm from South Africa - it is normal there to speak like this."

[Bek]

5 hours ago, hatcheckgirl said:

Interestingly, my English accent is not like the rest of the ethnic children I grew up with. They retain a fusion of Australian and a twinge of Greek or Italian. I have something of an English accent because my first English exposure was at school where it was still very British and teachers enunciated with the clearer news announcer’s accent from the ABC news. It is interesting how our upbringing changes both the fluency and accent of our mother tongue. 

Yes, I heard a recording of your Bible reading. Your voice and accent are very sweet. At first, I also thought you were British.

 

[Sheep]

21 hours ago, hatcheckgirl said:

I have something of an English accent because my first English exposure was at school where it was still very British and teachers enunciated with the clearer news announcer’s accent from the ABC news. It is interesting how our upbringing changes both the fluency and accent of our mother tongue.

I grew up with English in Canada, but I am certainly no expert. I can understand English from Britain, Australia, South Africa, etc, but I can't figure out what the difference is with the accents! To me, they all sound alike, and that they just don't sound like Canadian or US English.

 

Yeah, I speak English. But I don't speak British.

[Ishaya]

to learn a new language you need to have alot of time for it

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[Ishaya]

i have tried a number of times to learn a new language at least one other language outside nigeria apart from english,i speak hausa too and i speak the nigerian pigin but i dont really feel thats enough to qualify me as multilingual.

i was making very good progress in learning the french when in secondary school ( i was top of my class) but after graduation i didn't have anyone to practice with (which is very vital for learning a new language).so i guess im back to my basic three languages-english,hausa and nigerian pigin.Lol

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[Donna]

On 2/7/2020 at 5:16 PM, Qapla said:

when he spoke Spanish, he sounded like he had just moved here from Cuba. There was absolutely no evidence of one of his accents in the other language.

Even though we can tell the differences.

There's a very little difference, almost imperceptible, but natives who live in Cuba can tell.