Question for Second Language Learners

Amphioen said:
Funnily, out of all the languages I know, I'm probably the worst at German. Dutch is my mother tongue, but I'm quite fluent in English. Even though, listening back to my videos, reveals an accent of whihc I didn't know it was that strong. I also have a minimal knowledge of French. I can understand a basic conversation and I can order ice cream in French, the latter is of course the most important. :p
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Yes, I agree: being able to order ice cream is the biggest key, haha. Especially because for some reason I've found that ice cream in France is unusually tasty xD
 
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Because this thread is asking for questions for a video, I've moved this to the script/video ideas/planning forum. ^^

I've had a lot of Spanish classes, and quite a few German classes. I tried to teach myself some Korean in my free time, although my pronunciation is pretty terrible. :p I've forgotten most of the languages I've learned bits and pieces of. =(

Some common difficulties would be false cognates. Lots of Germans become objects in English, and English speakers receive professions in German.

bekommen in German = to receive
become in English = to come to be

Then we have funsies with spelling. English spells it "Kaput," German spells it "Kaputt." x_x

Umlauts are hard for English speakers unless you know where your tongue is supposed to go. Once a person learns the tongue is supposed to stay in the same place as it is when you say the "eeeeeee" sound (as in "creek"), then the letters become much easier to pronounce. ^^ Also the ch in English is really different than the ch in German. :eek:
 
KatyAdelson said:
Because this thread is asking for questions for a video, I've moved this to the script/video ideas/planning forum. ^^

I've had a lot of Spanish classes, and quite a few German classes. I tried to teach myself some Korean in my free time, although my pronunciation is pretty terrible. :p I've forgotten most of the languages I've learned bits and pieces of. =(

Some common difficulties would be false cognates. Lots of Germans become objects in English, and English speakers receive professions in German.

bekommen in German = to receive
become in English = to come to be

Then we have funsies with spelling. English spells it "Kaput," German spells it "Kaputt." x_x

Umlauts are hard for English speakers unless you know where your tongue is supposed to go. Once a person learns the tongue is supposed to stay in the same place as it is when you say the "eeeeeee" sound (as in "creek"), then the letters become much easier to pronounce. ^^ Also the ch in English is really different than the ch in German. :eek:
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Awesome thank you very much Katy!! Lots of hardcore linguistics terms in there, I love it. XD
 
So I'm franco-chinese so I speak both french & chinese and I speak english because I've been in an international bilingual (french-english) school all my life and then I speak rudimentary german because I've been learning it for 7 years x)
I feel though that a lot of people struggle with the "r" sound in french as it's quite guttural and not many other languages have it. Apart from that, I think my biggest struggle with learning languages after passing that initial grammar rules bump, sentence structure, etc, then it's the vocabulary.
As for Chinese, apart from that fact that it has specific characters for words, I think it's the fact that a lot of natives use "Chengyu" which are 4 word/character expression to convey an idea, and they're all metaphorical so you can't really translate them literally you just have to know what they mean or otherwise guess what they mean.
But yeah I think expressions that are specific to each language are not the easiest to master when learning a language and that could make interesting videos for you to explain maybe an expression from a certain language and talk about where it comes from, etc :)
 
Astinax said:
So I'm franco-chinese so I speak both french & chinese and I speak english because I've been in an international bilingual (french-english) school all my life and then I speak rudimentary german because I've been learning it for 7 years x)
I feel though that a lot of people struggle with the "r" sound in french as it's quite guttural and not many other languages have it. Apart from that, I think my biggest struggle with learning languages after passing that initial grammar rules bump, sentence structure, etc, then it's the vocabulary.
As for Chinese, apart from that fact that it has specific characters for words, I think it's the fact that a lot of natives use "Chengyu" which are 4 word/character expression to convey an idea, and they're all metaphorical so you can't really translate them literally you just have to know what they mean or otherwise guess what they mean.
But yeah I think expressions that are specific to each language are not the easiest to master when learning a language and that could make interesting videos for you to explain maybe an expression from a certain language and talk about where it comes from, etc :)
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Ah d'accord! 谢谢, I appreciate the input! (See what I did there? :p)
 
I've been living in the US for 16 years and I haven't been able to get rid of my accent! At this point I'm not trying to hide it anymore because I know it will always be present. In fact, I have come to embrace it and I consider it an originality about me. I'm
just glad I can speak and understand a second language. Maybe I'd add a third one like Portuguese or Italian due to their lexical similarity.

Ps: My accent is Spanish btw.
 
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