Is language learning socially acceptable?

General discussion about learning languages
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sporedandroid
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Jun 19, 2022 12:41 am

zenmonkey wrote:Sure. But what isn’t really acceptable is bragging about hobbies or knowledge sets. You don’t need to tell everyone you’re fluent in abcdfg languages.

What can be problematic is ‘suspect’ languages.

When I was studying Arabic/Tibetan/Hebrew I have been asked why? And challenged in unacceptable ways about these language choices, usually around religious and/or political aspects.


I find people misinterpret me talking a lot about language learning as bragging. I find I sometimes just get carried away and talk about things people aren’t familiar with. I guess that makes me seem pretentious. It doesn’t help that COVID happened, so I sort of made language learning my whole personality for a while. Making it my whole personality helped me get the hang of how to learn a language, but I know it probably made me annoying as well. I’ve been trying to get the rest of my personality back.

I do get bothered being asked why I chose a language. I never really have reasons. There’s always a bit of a story behind why I’m interested in stuff, but it’s never quite a reason. I’m not sure people want to hear the story anyways. They just want me to justify things quickly for them. They probably don’t know what to talk about. Sometimes I just pretend I’m learning French, just so I can talk a bit about language learning in a normal way.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby garyb » Sun Jun 19, 2022 11:27 am

thevagrant88 wrote:If I ever mention that I’ve studied a bit of Japanese, people assume I watch anime and usually wonder why don’t I learn something useful like Spanish instead. I usual tell them that I don’t really watch anime…in Spanish. Somehow the fact that my Spanish is pretty decent somehow shakes off some of the “weeb” but yeah, what can you do.

I have found that knowing a few foreign languages can seem more "socially acceptable" than knowing just one, especially when that one is mostly spoken in a single country and so isn't seen as very useful.

Italians usually think I'm a bit crazy for learning their language, or even that I might have a weeb-like obsession with their particular country and culture (and admittedly there have been points in my learning journey where there was some truth to that...), but when they find out that I'm a bit of a language nerd in general and Italian just happens to be one of several languages I speak, it definitely softens the blow and just seems like an unusual hobby. All the more so when I know a couple of similar and more "useful" languages too, so might as well have just picked up some Italian too while I was at it.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby Kraut » Sun Jun 19, 2022 3:27 pm

Prof. Arguelles on the question (from the AMA at Reddit:

Greetings Professor,
How do those closest to you react/reacted to your language pursuits? You parents, grandparents, professors/mentors, spouse, children, friends, colleagues, etc.

Did you ever have to deal with anyone being less than enthusiastic, to put it mildly, about you learning so many languages (which I guess can seem very eccentric to some).




My father passed on the gene to me, my grandfather was proud of me being a scholar, my wife married me for who I am, my sons have never known me any other way. My friends think I'm weird. My professors in college encouraged me, but those in graduate school discouraged me (pushed toward specialization). My colleagues have had 0 comprehension for it. Certainly I have often encountered people who thought that language learning was a waste of time, but I've never had to "deal with them" as in suffer their disapproval for protracted periods of time.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Jun 20, 2022 3:37 am

zenmonkey wrote:One of my daughters does say “no magic in front of the muggles”. Which is just a reflection on one of my rules - use language inclusively. Try not to have an in-speak conversation when actively interacting with non speakers. That’s rude and that’s certainly not very socially acceptable.


And I have experienced this first-hand when my in-laws tried to force me not to speak French with my daughter around them. I basically said my daughter, my rules (on languages), not yours, like it or not. I was accused of disrespecting old school values. Now they have to put up with French with my three kids and Dutch with the same three (no I don't have six children). I guess I'm extremely disrespectful, at least from their perspective.

Sometimes I feel like the catering to monolinguals - especially monolingual English speakers goes to far. It's in the same vein as not wanting to offend someone, so we tip-toe around their issues. Still, what your daughter suggests is generally good advice, it's just not always applicable.

I can see the other perspective and do agree that it can be exclusionary and rude to carry on conversations in a foreign language when in company with others and there remains a common language in which all could be included. For me, I didn't want to break the one-language (okay two for me), one-parent rule regardless of the environment and I figured in-laws would see the sense in that and therefore the value in being persistent, but apparently not. I guess this is a potential case of fearing (or being sceptical of the motives behind) the unknown and for that I can only use my understanding of their potential 'angle'. Thus, I get it, but I'll stick to my guns.

garyb wrote:Italians usually think I'm a bit crazy for learning their language, or even that I might have a weeb-like obsession with their particular country and culture


In Australia, particularly in Melbourne (and maybe Sydney) and even some parts of country Victoria (perhaps NSW too), you'd be seen as as quite fine. Learning Italian here has been and continues to be perfectly acceptable, given how much Italian immigrants have shaped our multi-cultural landscape, if you will. And to extend on that, many Australians without Italian heritage have gone on to be quite interested in the country and this is seen as perfectly fine by Italian-Australians.

French is looked upon admirably I have found, but most people are unsure of how to go about learning it or teaching it to their kids. It's not as common in the schooling system as it was in my day, but it's still a highly regarded language in general, although some see it as useless given France is so far away (New Caledonia is barely even heard of by most Australians and is too small to factor in - a small island group near the huge land mass that is Australia).

In my discussions with others at times either they hear me speaking French or Dutch to our kids or my family comes up in conversation and somehow languages end up featuring. I do feel I have slightly bragged at times, particularly to other nurses, but it's in truth something that comes up perhaps over a lunch break, during a quiet shift or what have you and I really enjoy relating this to others as I'm proud of my kids abilities. I have to watch myself though at times because I can rant on a little. I dare say I've bored a person or two to tears. Perhaps I need to visit the forum more often :lol:

Those situations aside however, like most here I don't tend to mention this sort of thing if it's not relevant to the situation. Like iguanamon with sailing (or languages), I don't talk about kayaking to everyone, conspiracy theories (okay okay, I used to! ;) ), nor languages.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Jun 20, 2022 6:22 am

STT44 wrote:This bot has posted the same question on Reddit as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... cceptable/

Looking through its posting history is quite an eye-opener:
https://www.reddit.com/user/HalloMonsieur/posts/


Odd. What's in it for the bot (or whoever is behind the bot)?
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Jun 20, 2022 6:50 am

STT44 wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:
STT44 wrote:This bot has posted the same question on Reddit as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... cceptable/

Looking through its posting history is quite an eye-opener:
https://www.reddit.com/user/HalloMonsieur/posts/


Odd. What's in it for the bot (or whoever is behind the bot)?


Have a look at this thread
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 40#p208717


Interesting, but I'm still not totally sure of why the bots are doing this. If only for gathering marketing information as suggested by one poster in the thread you mentioned, it appears like too much trouble for too little gain - a lot of work for marketing information. Then again, information is power, right... so let's all share away!

I must say, that thread made my conspiracy mind appear in like-minded company, even if only for a split second. As opposed to zenmonkey's reflections of concern regarding post Covid paranoia... nothing wrong with a bit of paranoia, right, even if it seems a bit much at times? Nothing a little olanzapine couldn't fix, right? Gotta get our minds thinking right.

On the other hand, if it's not paranoia and there is indeed a pattern, what's more concerning is the general public's complacency or downright ignorance, especially post-covid. If there is cause for concern in the world, and it's not paranoia, too bad we've been taught to ignore outlandish notions, right? Ever wonder why people generally feel more comfortable rubbishing seemingly crazy theories returning to their FB posts or Netflix shows? Oh wait, those theories were officially debunked. Sigh, what a relief, it's now official it's all just paranoia peoples, nothing to see here!
Last edited by PeterMollenburg on Mon Jun 20, 2022 8:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby BeaP » Mon Jun 20, 2022 7:05 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting, but I'm still not totally sure of why the bots are doing this.

As I understand it, they're gathering content for pages that make ad revenue based on the number of clicks/visitors. Questions asked by bots are usually typical 'google searches' like 'B2 in a year' or 'C1 at home'. Our answers become the content.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby seirahsam » Mon Jun 20, 2022 7:29 am

Why not? Every Individual have their own right to learn any languages!
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jun 20, 2022 12:51 pm

BeaP wrote:
PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting, but I'm still not totally sure of why the bots are doing this.

As I understand it, they're gathering content for pages that make ad revenue based on the number of clicks/visitors. Questions asked by bots are usually typical 'google searches' like 'B2 in a year' or 'C1 at home'. Our answers become the content.


Exactly this.
Because Google users ask questions, Google wants to provide short answers to questions.
Advertising spam sites are therefore just trying to answer as many questions as possible.

Ask question, harvest answers, put them online.

Good for everyone?
No. They're taking partial answers out of context. They're not accounting for topic drift (when the discussion slowly moves away from the original question.
The answers are often useless, and often worse than useless.

They're driving legitimately useful websites with carefully curated content down the rankings, and making the internet a dumber place.

It's like fake news all over again -- fake news was not originally some kind of clandestine misinformation psyop, but just a bunch of guys in southeast Europe who trained their computers to generate whatever copy people tended to click on... just turned out that the most popular stories involved demonising a certain high-profile member female of a blue-coloured party in a major world nation. Yes, ground was broken for that conspiracy theory rabbit hole by a computer algorithm, and then people kept digging it deeper.
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Re: Is language learning socially acceptable?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jun 20, 2022 1:05 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting, but I'm still not totally sure of why the bots are doing this. If only for gathering marketing information as suggested by one poster in the thread you mentioned, it appears like too much trouble for too little gain - a lot of work for marketing information. Then again, information is power, right... so let's all share away!

Aside from the FAQ-website-data-harvest, the simplest reason for on-topic-ish posting is to make an account look legitimate before "flipping" it into a spam account. This was the reason for the copy-and-paste bots we had a few years ago. When they necroposted in an old, long thread with a copy of a post from somewhere in the middle, lots of people wouldn't notice and would respond in good faith, being nice to the newbie (despite the necropost).

The point here is that people are more likely to see an account with a decent post count as legitimate, and anti-spam algorithms will too. If your first post is "Buy da Ray-Banz here, much low prices!" it'll get dropped instantly.

But if you've got a dozen or so posts in your account and you post "Hey guys, FluentBabelStone have a special offer on," you're likely to see the post left in place, and people might actually click on it.

I must say, that thread made my conspiracy mind appear in like-minded company, even if only for a split second. As opposed to zenmonkey's reflections of concern regarding post Covid paranoia... nothing wrong with a bit of paranoia, right, even if it seems a bit much at times? Nothing a little olanzapine couldn't fix, right? Gotta get our minds thinking right.

On the other hand, if it's not paranoia and there is indeed a pattern, what's more concerning is the general public's complacency or downright ignorance, especially post-covid. If there is cause for concern in the world, and it's not paranoia, too bad we've been taught to ignore outlandish notions, right? Ever wonder why people generally feel more comfortable rubbishing seemingly crazy theories returning to their FB posts or Netflix shows? Oh wait, those theories were officially debunked. Sigh, what a relief, it's now official it's all just paranoia peoples, nothing to see here!

There's a difference between a conspiracy theory and an assumption of bad faith, though.
Conspiracies require coordination and shared direction, and the weakness of any conspiracy theory is the number of people that unfeasible number of people that would need to maintain the lie.

Spam businesses can learn from each other, but don't need central coordination -- you get emergent organisational practices, just as you do in any other type of business. Their practices can be documented and discussed publicly without "blowing the lid" on the whole thing, because it's not illegal, so disclosure doesn't mean everyone going to jail. As long as enough people aren't aware of it, you can still get enough out of it.

In other words, for illegal conspiracies to be thwarted, only a small number of people need to know about it.
For dodgy-yet-legal business practices to become unviable, you need almost everyone to know about it.
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