Ворон

[azurelunatic]

In a comment buried deep somewhere in Suggestions, someone said that they weren't likely to learn to read Russian even with continuous exposure.

I find that attitude puzzling. For, it is with continued exposure that I've started being able to read-by-sight (though I doubt I'd recognize the first word spoken) things like Вопрос, спам, статус, and Кэрри. My learning takes phases. Sometimes it's active, and I seek out alphabet videos (still in Kindergarten, really). Sometimes it's passive, and I just run yet another suggestion in my queue (or request in my category) through the translator, taking the time to look at the words that don't translate and see if I can translate any of them from letters or context or both. (Often as not they're loan-words picked up from English technical and LiveJournal-technical language, with some peculiarly Russian-grammatical morphing, and thus I give back although the rest of it doesn't compute on its own.)

Raven had a great deal to do with the way my mind is wired. I pick up the shiny things, see, and words have always counted. (Ворон, my brain says helpfully. "Вор means 'thief'." Thief-bird. And now I realize that characterizing Piotr's contemporaries descending for the funeral as a bunch of flapping black ravens is perhaps a horrible, horrible pun.)

Perhaps I will never reach even an elementary level of comprehension, much less attain fluency, but I'm hardly going to attempt to stop my brain from investigating and picking up words and rehearsing them at night so I can see it in big glowing letters behind closed eyelids, shape of the word, letters of the word, pronunciation of the word, meaning of the word, and some bastard etymology to boot, all in one concerted little struggle.

Comments

[aella_irene]

So...Вопрос means Piotr? *is bad at Russian. Better at Greek*

[azurelunatic]

(Sorry, reading the wrong word)

"Question". I see it in Support a *lot*.

[trixieleitz]

I love learning new languages, even though it gets harder as I get older. Possibly that's just because I have so much other stuff going on in my life now, rather than any age-related reduction in capacity to learn.

Perhaps I will never reach even an elementary level of comprehension, much less attain fluency, but I'm hardly going to attempt to stop my brain from investigating and picking up words...

Yup, that's me all right :) Apparently there are people who are not like that.

[andy.livejournal.com]

Фан фан фан!

[pauamma]

I'm amused beyond reason that your name on your profile is in Greek. :-)

[branquignole.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I want to learn Russian some day! It's the only language with weird letters that makes me want to learn it. I think it's fascinating. And it does sound beautiful! :)

[iroshi.livejournal.com]

I sometimes get the vague desire to learn Arabic just because it looks beautiful written down. :)

[leora.livejournal.com]

I was trained in foreign languages (Hebrew and Spanish) for years. Hebrew starting at age 6 and continuing until age 14. Spanish starting at age 12 and continuing until age 18. I did not learn either language. I was doing reasonably well in Spanish, until the classroom went to full immersion. As soon as the teaching was being done in Spanish, I started having difficulty learning the language and started to fall further and further behind my peers. I could learn Spanish alright if I was being taught it and taught it in English, but being exposed to Spanish didn't do me any good, and it meant that the teaching value decreased, since I could not understand as much of what I was being taught. And then I started to hate Spanish class and dread it every day, which made me learn even less.

I know that exposure helps many people learn a language, but it seems to me that some people don't get much out of it.

[azurelunatic]

I differentiate between exposure and immersion. I do not suspect that I would do very well in full immersion. Exposure, I define as hearing, seeing, it, with context and sometimes explanation every time, over and over. "Вопрос" in the titles of Support requests. Yes. No. Spam. SUP.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense. I might pick up a very small amount from exposure, as I learned the word "schmutzeka" (no clue how to spell that) in childhood from my grandmother's repeated admonitions to keep those schmutzeka feet out of the kitchen. But without actual teaching, I learn very little from exposure.

It's one of the things that I have noticed is different about me from most of my friends, I learned well in a school environment (I went to very good schools, which was very fortunate for me, but still the standard school environment works for me), and I do not learn nearly as well outside of it. However, I can teach myself things now that I have a good foundation of education, but that works best within realms I am already good at, such as learning more psychology on my own, when I already have the background to understand it.

I find it easy to imagine having regular exposure to a foreign language and learning very little of it. You are likely to pick up a word here or there, but it's not very useful to just have a word here or there.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

I am terrible at non-Latin alphabets, but usually incredibly good at languages. I even have a hard time with Greek, for crying out loud, which is just nonsense. I think some people may not be able to pick it up because, like me, they mapped a symbol to a sound, and they can map the variations, but memorising the spatial components of the symbols is terribly hard.

[azurelunatic]

The best thing that I have found for me for creating that mapping is YouTube kindergartener-level videos, where they have the symbol, the sound, and (sometimes, for foreigners learning instead of kindergarteners) the Latin-alphabet equivalent, all at once. Better by far than the things where you have to say it yourself.

The D is easy for me. Zhe is also easy because of LJ.

[jpallan.livejournal.com]

I'd rather pick up Attic Greek. More useful. At least in my line of work.

[azurelunatic]

I wonder if there are equivalent videos out there for that.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I find this interesting. I am terrible with languages. But I found that aspect of learning Hebrew (although it is important to note that I was about six years old when I started my Hebrew education) to be the easiest aspect. When I was practicing regularly, I could certainly pronounce anything in Hebrew if it was given to me with the vowels written in (as it always was). But I could not understand Hebrew. Similarly, I found that learning the grade one Braille alphabet was fairly trivial; I got it in my first day of studying. What then made me give up hope was the vast quantity of memorization needed to actually read grade two. When it turned into hundreds of things to remember. But I could map sounds that are familiar to me to a new symbol fairly readily.

I just haven't been inclined to try much with languages, because what value is being able to say something out loud if you still have no clue what it means?

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I see a lot of Russian on LJ, but never in a context where I'd become aware of the meaning of a word of it unless I looked it up. So it's exposure, but not meaningful exposure.

I note also that I have had several years of Japanese (8, by how-many-years-of-my-life-I-have-been-taking-Japanese-during, but not by understanding level, because (A) they were different intensities of course, and (B) it gets rusty VERY EASILY), and I have watched plenty of subtitled anime, but the amount of vocab and/or grammar I have picked up while watching subtitled anime is trivial compared to what I have picked up by actually attempting to speak or write Japanese. This is, I can only assume, because I'm a kinesthetic learner.