It's postulated that my multilingual abilities helped, among other things.
One of the meetups had a bunch of googlers in it regularly. One of them was a loud gregarious Italian from the north. He was telling me a story about cleaning fish and chopping their heads off with a machete and how he cut the end of his finger off and had it reattached. He seemed nice but a little inept and lacking caution.
Covid was starting. In the newspapers it was reported that Zurich had its first case of Covid. They were cautious to not say who it was - no clues at all in the paper. But a friend at Google forwarded me an internal email that said no one at Google had it yet other than someone in the Zurich office who had just been in northern Italy.
I stopped going to the meetups. I really should start again but not sure what's going to happen next.
So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?
As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).
But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..
The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.
It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.
It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.
English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.
Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.
But, as someone who has now devoted a large portion of my life to becoming proficient at a second language, I do think there are benefits, even if they've never been proven. The most important of these, in my opinion, is just the social aspects of learning another language. You have to get out there and talk to people, and that's inherently healthy.
I do want to say that you hear loads of pessimism about whether or not it's possible a language after childhood, etc., but I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's possible to do even if you suck at languages (as I do). The primary factor is motivation, and the second biggest factor is time. Find a language that you like, because you like the culture you'll be interacting with when you speak it. If you don't, you'll never find the impetus to keep going when it gets hard and boring.
[1] protip: drink coffee if you like it, and don't worry about it. Likewise, learn a language if you like it, not because some dumb article said it would make your neurons fluffier.
Mix into that a weekly lesson with italki from your home and you can learn any language at any age.
I'm also old enough to remember when getting listening materials required going to the library for cassette tapes. Today, you can talk with a wide selection of native speakers, listen to essentially infinite audio and video content, and immerse yourself in a culture halfway around the world for the price of an internet connection.
When I go to somewhere that speaks Spanish the whole place “jumps into 3D” for me. I can understand what people at the table next to me are complaining or laughing about, I can make small talk with people, I don’t have to follow the “avocado toast” trail that the non-native speakers sort of get jammed into because they struggle off of it. It is a much more human experience when you understand the language.
At home, I can watch Spanish movies as well, and listen to music artists I probably might never have heard about like C. Tangana and Rosalia otherwise. It has doubled my cultural landscape for me.
After reading the article, I wonder if this isn’t a key secondary benefit to learning the language itself. It gives you a larger variety of things to enjoy in your life.
The trick is to immerse yourself. I spent 2 years in Latin America, then one in west Africa. If I wanted to talk to people, I simply had to learn.
Previously thought my engineer brain couldn’t do it.
> I can't tell if the time constraints (family, work, life) or mental constraints are the bigger problem.
Almost certainly time, and/or motivation. I've certainly met a few people who had mental blocks to learning, but for the most part, anyone who has the time to actually study can learn a language. The people I've met who failed weren't dumb...they just didn't work at it.
As the sibling notes, if you can immerse yourself, that's the best thing. I've personally known multiple people over age 30 who went from 0 to B1 in Japanese in a year of immersion. Add another year, and you can get to B2. Of course, that's obviously hard if you have a family, etc., but you can still succeed without it -- it just takes longer.
If you don't actually need it it's hard to be disciplined enough to put the work in when there so many other calls on your time.
For me immersion is the only thing that really works. I can plug away at the grammar and vocab ad aeternam without making a den in the task but having to use the language to order a beer or food or talk to people who don't speak your language to get things done works much faster.
bryanrasmussen•1h ago
verdverm•36m ago
I suspect an amount of the same in human language, where learning french if you know spanish is less lift than learning a tonal language like mandarin
similar results from (eg.) learning music can be found, the underlying pattern seems to be learning things that are very very new to you, and challenge the brain, benefits the brain
jraby3•33m ago