languages, travel and the UN

[amw]

News from Colombia: abortion has been decriminalized! Also, there is a strong wind warning. I like to try read the newspapers of the place where i go before i go there, if i can. Now i can stumble my way through the Spanish, a big chunk of journalism has opened up that was out of my reach before

Comments

[amw]

I have to say the various online translators (Google, Bing etc) do a reasonable job translating news articles from other countries. It does help if you know the language a little bit, so you can understand if the translator chose a sort-of-but-not-quite-correct word, but for the most part you can get the gist. The trouble is it's not really much fun to click on a foreign newspaper where you don't really know the editorial slant and look at articles you don't really know if they're just an AP/AFP/Reuters repackaging of what you already read elsewhere

[newwaytowrite]

I loved this post.

[belleweather]

So many thoughts on this... thinking about how I'm always trained to use the most formal register possible, and then pick up the slang and colloquialisms and bring them back and horrify my instructors. In normal spoken Romanian, people so rarely use the full verb for to be unless they're making a point about the like, literal being-state of something (the potato EXISTS, dammit!) Otherwise, they just use 'e', but they'd never do such a thing in writing. I spent months going "What is this e business? What do these people even mean?" because no one would mention to the fancy-pants American how people actually speak.

Also, simultaneous verbal translation is hard as fuck, and the people who do it for the UN or high level folks are goddamn rockstars.

[sweetmeow]

I've wondered if people either have an affinity for learning languages or don't. You've written about learning both Chinese and Spanish in your travels - and German, too. And, you just do it, maybe not perfectly, but you're able to get by. I can't imagine

[olamina]

People say kids brains are sponges for language but I'm not so sure. Native tongues and total immersion are one thing but I think anything that is only heard a few hours max requires study at any age. I think I learned way more practical German taking a 6 week intensive course while living in Berlin than I would have in a year of book study alone in an American classroom.

[sweetmeow]

I think that is true that one has to immerse themselves in a language to learn it well. Just classroom study and doing a little homework isn't going to

However, I still think kids pick up languages easier. Their brains aren't "set in their ways" and are more open to that kind of learning. The time to become bi-lingual is when you're a toddler! That's the only way I can describe why kids do it easier.

[amw]

I do think kids learn a bit easier than adults in certain respects, but they're also learning a bunch of other things at the same time, so they don't have the opportunity to have the same kind of diligence or drive that adults do when focusing on one particular language. For example, as adult you can choose to dedicate hours a day to training in just the one language you want to learn, whereas kids have a ton of other classes and homework to worry about. I also think it helps to not have all the hormonal and emotional distractions that happen when you are a kid - you can just focus on the thing you want to learn

[livejournal]

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