i have had the opportunity to learn several languages apart from the ones that i am fluent in -bhojpuri which is a dialect of my native region, sanskrit which i studied for 7 years, marathi which was around me for 19 years, french which i learnt for 6 months, and now spanish which i have learnt slash has been around me for the last 16 months. and i have realised i dont have the knack for it. at the most i can entertain fluent speakers with my random ramblings - now thats a unique distinction too!
whereas i have only now begun to observe how people pick up new languages, check these out - oh i am brazilian but i studied german for 13 years, lived in columbia and US - so i am fluent in portugese, german, spanish and english. or i am french born and brought up in the US and lived in Spain for a year - so i speak french, english and spanish fluently. and i am teaching my 4 yr old son all these three languages. i am spanish but went to canada to experience a new culture. lived there for a year and am now fluent in spanish, english and french.. oh i am french and learnt italian when i was on bed rest for 3 months becauseof a fractured leg. so i am fluent in french, english and italian.
maybe they just surround themselves with the foreign language and force themselves to adapt to it, thus making it happened at a super fast rate. i did try that too. most recently i lived with two peruvian girls during the summer, so that i practice my spanish and dont forget what i learnt in the past year. but i guess they found my broken spanish funny only for the first few sentences. then they switched back to english. or maybe they just got bored of the muchisimo tiempo i took.. maybe its just me...
maybe its the difference that confidence makes. i have to frame the full sentence, the perfect tense, the perfect translation from english (yeah i have realised i think in english).. if i were to just force myself to speak spanish only, i would pick up the language's thinking.. its characteristics.. for example you will never say mi nombre es.. which is how it is in english. you will say instead me llamo.. so a direct translation would be wrong. and because i need to be wrong to get to thinking right, i will never cross that barrier. but i want to.. any suggestions?
i believe its the structure... e.g. if your mother tongue is Marathi, you will pick up Hindi, English, Gujarati, Bengali quite fast. Similarly, if your mother tongue is Tamil, you will pick up Telugu, Kannada faster.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly for European languages, Spanish, French and Portuguese are quite similar. German, Dutch and Swedish are similar...
We Indians sometimes dont get the WoW you know 3-4 languages because all Indian languages are perceived as regional/domestic tongues. On the other hand when I see Europe, its like Indian states, every state has a different language, but in the political context the perception is each language belong to a country as opposed to a state... Hence the WOW factor... :)