> If required, I can read French books.
Not reading books will limit your vocabulary. If you read when required, you don't read.
It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
21–30 of 339 posts
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#22I think the subtle thing missed here is the effort required to speak a second language well is not worth the effort. Just scraping by is good enough especially if you still have access to your first language. Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
If you live somewhere long-term not speaking the local language well will pose more subtle barriers even though you could still buy bread in the bakery. It really makes you feel like you don't belong (in a way you don't) and are not "home".
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#23World's biggest cat
Even you can't believe it's size
See her video
https://howto105.blogspot.com/2019/04/worlds-biggest-cat.htm...
See the video a dog shopping and lots of other acts like humans http://bit.ly/2DCpo9I
Fish walking with legs like humans See the video on link below http://bit.ly/2XRGyYD
This couple is different Girls are both twins and boys are also twin brothers see how they look in video http://bit.ly/2VwoZQd
A cute dog is dancing in video Just watch this video and try to control your laugh http://bit.ly/2ZK1XVs
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#24Why It’s So Hard to Learn French in Middle Ages
would also be an interesting article
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#25> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have.
Bouloche has been corrected.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#26> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
> It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche That says a lot about the quality of peer review at the NYT.
That someone missed potentially a typo in a foreign language?
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#27I learned Vietnamese in my mid 40s. I think it’s just a matter of persistence and patience. As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#28The biggest difficulty, apart from the aging difficulties (which I think are smaller than people think) is that you don't have time to immerse yourself in the learning experience.
There is no reason if someone not making an effort won't learn a language when they depend on it. Sure, they won't get all the grammar details, and will have an accent, but they will learn to be conversational on it.
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#29I despised French a bit (my own native tongue), as I grew up with a little fondness for English, and spent most of my time speaking English (probably Engrish at times). Then I got.. say bored of casual (tech/web) English, and started to feel happy again with French, even accounting for all its odd rules and twists and everything. I felt it was a lovely bag of varied multitudes and shades that were very good for painting pictures with higher levels of colors and not being strictly informative or factual. I guess it's a question of desire and maturity .. at times you want easy and predictable, and maybe later you want to play a little more with words. And this might not be a French-only case, I'm just giving my 2 centimes ;)
Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
#30Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help…
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
Adults are generally getting paid to do things they can already do and when we get home, we tend to piss away our time with things we know we'll like and aren't too unfamiliar. We can spend a week learning something, but in terms of our gross knowledge, it's comparatively nothing at all.
I'm not quite middle aged yet, but I'm working on learning my third language and started just a few months ago. I'm setting aside a solid hour a day + small 2-5 minute intervals throughout the day, and I'm learning faster than my second language due to the effort I'm putting in. I won't deny that it does get harder to learn completely new concepts as we age, but one benefit we have over kids is we know how to learn effectively and we have exposure with wide arrays of topics. Try to find ways to apply your other accumulated knowledge and discipline to new topics and you can learn faster.
And I mean, shit, you ever see kids try to learn Spanish or French in middle school or high school? Most can barely put together a basic greeting at the end of 1 or 2 years. A 30 or 40 something who reads a phrase book during lunch break and watches some 5 minute grammar practice videos at night 4 days a week will learn faster than 9/10 teenagers.