Things you wish people would stop saying when you tell them the languages that you're learning

[emk]

There's one thing I don't like hearing, though - that I managed my languages because I'm talented while they didn't or won't theirs because they're not talented.

Human beings have an immense capacity for inertia and for making excuses. They say, "Adults can't learn languages", they claim they can't get in shape because of genetics, and they say, "I'm just no good at X." I do get rather annoyed at listening to this.

There are two excuses I do find perfectly acceptable, though:

1. It's too much work.
2. I don't want to.

I'd much rather hear either of those than "Adults can't learn languages."

[Ari]

I would be very curious to get some more insight into the matter. Such as various talents and level intelligence and their impact on learning. Because it simply is true that we are not the same and we do not start from the same point.

Dunno about intelligence, but I find pronunciation to be much more reliant on talent than other factors of language learning. I have good (not perfect) pronunciation of all languages I've ever studied, effortlessly. Others work a lot on their pronunciation and never seems to get rid of their accents. In vocabulary, grammar and so on, however, I think this is much less the case. It's 99% perspiration in these areas.

[lingua]

Most people are positive about my language learning but there have been a couple of times where I've been asked "but, why?" from Italians. They seem surprised. However, I'm not particularly bothered by it.

[Cavesa]

Another great one: "How long have you been in France? Oh, you've learnt/improved so fast!"
Nope, I haven't. I was getting these earlier and had to face the shock of supposedly having learnt French in a few weeks. Now people simply assume I have learnt in two months. Nope. I haven't improved much, apart from a few words (for example porte a galandage and some medical phrases), but the overall skills are the same. Perhaps there will be some noticeable improvement by the end of my stay, but it takes time to progress.

What is so weird about having learnt French before coming to France to study medicine? Shouldn't that be the expected standard? Thanks for dismissing the years of efforts

[Marais]

Another great one: "How long have you been in France? Oh, you've learnt/improved so fast!"
Nope, I haven't. I was getting these earlier and had to face the shock of supposedly having learnt French in a few weeks. Now people simply assume I have learnt in two months. Nope. I haven't improved much, apart from a few words (for example porte a galandage and some medical phrases), but the overall skills are the same. Perhaps there will be some noticeable improvement by the end of my stay, but it takes time to progress.

What is so weird about having learnt French before coming to France to study medicine? Shouldn't that be the expected standard? Thanks for dismissing the years of efforts

How long have you been studying French for?

[Cavesa]

How long have you been studying French for?

Another question I really dislike. What am I supposed to answer? I started at the age of 9 but I haven't been studying and progressing for 17 years. I was forced to restart several times, I had several long breaks, I was "learning" with significantly worse groups and therefore demotivated to study. So, what am I supposed to answer? the 17 years? Or the approximately 11 years left after leaving out the complete breaks? Or just the 7 years during which I was actually progresing? Or 10 years of classes? (The last too don't overlap that much). And I am not even sure these counts are correct, my path was quite a chaos.

It sucks to answer that. Either people hear the "17 years" and immediately find themselves another excuse and disregard my efforts and struggle, like I've already seen it even on this forum ("Oh, of course you speak French as you have had classes for 10 years, how dare you talk badly about teachers!"). Or they count just the time in class, leaving out the fact most classes were useless as either the teachers sucked or the group was a few levels bellow me. Somehow, the most important part, my self study at the beginning and at the end, gets the least attention.

Language learning is not just a function of time. After all, most forum members have been taking breaks from their languages, do you count the breaks in? And two years of 3 hours per week are something totally different than two years of 3 hours per day.
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I totally agree with emk, I'd love to here the truth "I don't want to" sometimes, as there is nothign to feel ashamed of.
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Like iguanamnon, I usually don't bring up languages on my own. But there are the situations that leave me no choice. I'd love my family, friends, boyfriends, boyfriend's families to stop bringing this up with strangers. "She speaks 4 languages!" or "She speaks 6 languages!" which is not true, I am not at that level in all my languages and don't claim to have the level

And "Say something in French/Spanish!". What am I supposed to say?

[Iversen]

Right, the "you're a language genius" is the one that really irks me.

I even heard that one at the polyglot conference in Thessaloniki, where people should know better...

(...)But sometimes, we go too much into the extreme of disregarding talent completely, in my opinion. And that is not correct.

In the concrete case I had said that it should be possible to drop a systematic error in pronunciation overnight, and I gave my erroneous conceptions about Finnish ä as an example. If ALL your Finnish ä's are wrong, then it is easy to change them all to something better in one go. Unsystematic errors have to be corrected one by one, and that's much harder.

As for the concept of talent I do think that the ability to spot a regularity differ from one person to the next. Being flexible enough to drop one habit and take up another at the turn of a hat is another. The ability to retain a word you just heard is a third one (which I don't possess to any noticeable degree), and so forth. So there is almost certainly not just one simple talent for language, but a lot of different abilities, which may be trainable to different degrees.

In my view we become irritated by references to (possible inborn) abilities because of two things: 1) that kind of 'explanation' denigrates years of hard work by assuming that you didn't really have to do any serious work for your results - you got them for free, 2) the other person can use it as a cheap excuse for being a lazy bum. But we are different, and the personality, habits and circumstances of some people may favor language learning more than those of other people.

[Marais]

How long have you been studying French for?

Another question I really dislike. What am I supposed to answer? I started at the age of 9 but I haven't been studying and progressing for 17 years. I was forced to restart several times, I had several long breaks, I was "learning" with significantly worse groups and therefore demotivated to study. So, what am I supposed to answer? the 17 years? Or the approximately 11 years left after leaving out the complete breaks? Or just the 7 years during which I was actually progresing? Or 10 years of classes? (The last too don't overlap that much). And I am not even sure these counts are correct, my path was quite a chaos.

It sucks to answer that. Either people hear the "17 years" and immediately find themselves another excuse and disregard my efforts and struggle, like I've already seen it even on this forum ("Oh, of course you speak French as you have had classes for 10 years, how dare you talk badly about teachers!"). Or they count just the time in class, leaving out the fact most classes were useless as either the teachers sucked or the group was a few levels bellow me. Somehow, the most important part, my self study at the beginning and at the end, gets the least attention.

Language learning is not just a function of time. After all, most forum members have been taking breaks from their languages, do you count the breaks in? And two years of 3 hours per week are something totally different than two years of 3 hours per day.
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I totally agree with emk, I'd love to here the truth "I don't want to" sometimes, as there is nothign to feel ashamed of.
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Like iguanamnon, I usually don't bring up languages on my own. But there are the situations that leave me no choice. I'd love my family, friends, boyfriends, boyfriend's families to stop bringing this up with strangers. "She speaks 4 languages!" or "She speaks 6 languages!" which is not true, I am not at that level in all my languages and don't claim to have the level

And "Say something in French/Spanish!". What am I supposed to say?

Well it probably is annoying if you analyse the question that much

Just '17 years on and off' would have done.

[tiia]

"Oh Finnish is hard, isn't it?" and later sometimes "You must be talented/a genius." - No, it is not hard. It is just different. And I'm not a language genius. But the genius-thing is not yet really annoying.
"It is related with Swedish, isn't it?" - But nowadays they know that Finnish and Swedish do not belong to the same group. So now it's more: "Isn't it related with Hungarian?" - Well yeah, but those two are as close as German and Russian. No, I cannot guess the meaning of Hungarian words. - The concept of a related language is often seen only as Germanic, Slavic or Romance languages.

How long have you been studying French for?

Oh this one... When I get the question about Spanish: I studied it for three years, forgot everything and started again two years ago. So how long did I study it? Two years? Three years? Five years? Or including the break: eleven years?

And for Finnish the typical: "How much can you understand?" or "Can you speak it?" Especially when they know I was there as an exchange student.
Is it so hard to believe I studied the language before I arrived there? Is it so hard to believe I actually speak the language fluently?

And "Say something in French/Spanish!". What am I supposed to say?

"I don't know what I'm supposed to say, because you won't be able to understand it anyway. This is stupid." Or just a simple self introduction.

[leosmith]

So, are you fluent?