Random Rants XVIII: It's cold as hell!

Status
Not open for further replies.
It's not too late to not make it a murder-suicide dude, looking at your sig!
 
Well, I'm screwed. Got a 30 on my calculus test, which counted also as the one I missed. If I go and get 100s on the next 2 tests, I might still be able to pull out a B at least. Stupid math.
 
The key, and sometimes the only way to do it, is to live in a place where it is widely spoken... You can already speak Spanish and English, right? No doubt you can learn another one. You're probably thinking of French...? If that's actually the case, then you shouldn't complain and instead get to work! :D It's extremely easy - being Romance, it's so thoroughly connected to the other 2 languages that you speak, that you really should have absolutely no problem in becoming fluent. I know, learning a foreign language can get frustrating at times. It can get really frustrating, to the point of giving up. But if what I assumed is actually the case, then you've set out to learn one of the easiest languages in the whole world, for you! So just keep trying.

Hey, if my friend from Japan is 100% fluent in Romanian after 5 years of living there, and if most of the people I know here in Germany are fluent in German (including approximately 1.6564564576 million Turks :)p), which have a very hard time with an entirely unrelated language), then you can do it too, with a language that has a lexical similarity of over 80% to your native one!!

(and just so you know, the last number is actually not pulled out of my behind :p)

Just don't give up, it's admittedly painful, but the only way there is.
The thing is, even though I may be able to speak, read, and write it ... it'll never be like Spanish or English where it comes totally natural to me. I mean, it's not like I'm translating in my head when I see/hear/read French, but I make a connection (sort of like latching on to see the cognates) to Spanish. My mother can speak English very well, but it's not like when she speaks Spanish. I'm sure you're not as comfortable when speaking in German or Italian as you are in Romanian.
 
I'm still waiting for the electronics guys to finish the preventative maintenance on my machine so I can do the post-maintenance tests. They're usually done by 4, and right now it's looking like they won't be finished until at least 6:30, which is when I'd normally be leaving work on a 'late' day. So I'm looking at getting out of here around 8pm at the earliest tonight.
 
The thing is, even though I may be able to speak, read, and write it ... it'll never be like Spanish or English where it comes totally natural to me. I mean, it's not like I'm translating in my head when I see/hear/read French, but I make a connection (sort of like latching on to see the cognates) to Spanish. My mother can speak English very well, but it's not like when she speaks Spanish. I'm sure you're not as comfortable when speaking in German or Italian as you are in Romanian.

Well, it will happen over time, there's truly no doubt about that; again, especially if you take the time to live in a place where French is spoken by a majority of the population. I mean, if you can already think, understand and speak this language without translating it in your head, then you're obviously quite advanced with it. The rest comes just through practice... and I don't mean doing grammar exercises. I mean experience with the language, giving it the time to become ingrained in your mind. The problem with actually becoming fluent in a foreign language is not just learning the new words and how sentences and phrases should be built and tied together - the problem is that each language has its own different sets of categories; any language used by man is, so to say, a multitude of concepts, which, in different tongues, overlap each other, but are not perfectly equal - therefore being only partially the same concepts as the ones you were used to. The ability to mold your thinking after the shape of those categories is what will make you fully fluent in a language. What makes you slow and "foreign-sounding" while speaking a foreign language is exactly the existence of a discrepancy between the sets of categories you use in your first language (or in any other one that you speak fully fluently, for that matter), and the target language, the one you are trying to learn.

Also, yeah, I'm really much, much more uncomfortable when speaking German or Italian in comparison to Romanian or English... I mean for starters, I've never learned one bit of Italian grammar, therefore I'm quite certain that any full sentence I attempt to say will contain at least one mistake, and as for German... Heh, I'm still struggling to express myself in conversations most of the time, and when it comes to understanding... the person I'm hearing must be slow, speak clearly and most importantly not use any dialect words in order for me to be able to fully understand what they are saying (meaning: to get the feeling that I understood every word), and those conditions pretty much rule out the entire population of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. :p I'm still way, way further down with my knowledge of German than you are with your French, despite the fact that I'm living in Germany and have been working like a madman to learn it. But the situations cannot be compared. I mean this language shares with the other languages that I know so much less of the vocabulary... and don't even get me started on the sentence structure! Let's just say that the horrible mishmash of verbs at the end of any slightly complex phrase makes me need to rethink any long phrase in order to understand it... And this is in spoken conversations almost always impossible, due to total lack of time.

But I'm drifting away from the subject. The point is, these things come. Trust me, you have it easy, and time will prove it. Just give yourself some time to live in a French-speaking place and you'll be a fully-fledged fluent speaker in no time. :D
 
I only have 13 subcribed threads with new posts :(
 
I have something like 10 right now, so quit complaining. :p
 
Wear sunglasses?
 
Morning commute = staring into the sun
Evening commute = staring into the sun

Thats almost exactly what my commute to college is like. Going to? Sun's off to the side, so the shadows rapidly alternate with light. Turn the street? Im staring right into the setting sun.

Coming home? Yay for car headlights. I should get a powerful light for my bike, make the drivers eat some of their own medicine (And further make drivers hate cyclists. Cus you know what, we hate you too)
 
Can somebody motivate me into reading about the great Weimar German Revalorization Crisis of 1924? Because it's boring me to tears.
 
Rant: I'm awake right now, at 1 in the morning. Damn you, homework, DAMN YOU. :mad:
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom