Language Acquisition

[LostAngeles]

I realized as I was doing my Japanese homework that it wasn't too hard. This was interesting as when I try to speak, I constantly find myself tripped up, off on a tangent, or my brain moving faster than my mouth, causing me to appear to have completely shifted gears, but my writing doesn't generally suffer from that, even before editing. Then I realized that my four years of high school French still exists in the fact that I can read a fair amount of it and that I supposedly started reading at a very young age.

So just out of curiosity, how many people find spoken language easier and how many find written language easier?

 

[Michael Redman]

I got to be pretty good at reading and writing Spanish when I was in school, but I never got so that I could understand spoken Spanish that wasn't intentionally annunciated slowly and clearly for my benefit. This may be partly due to teaching method, but it is much easier to pick up meaning from written words that give clues to common latin origins. That wouldn't work for a language that used characters I was not already familiar with, of course.

 

[Benguin]

I'm hopeless at reading and writing almost all foreign languages. But then my learning has all been done in conversation with native speakers, only school french from books.

The only way my languages improve is actually practicing them, especially if I'm in an environment where I have to use and expand my ability 'cos no-one understands english.