Have you learned a language that you don't like?

[Josquin]

For me, that language would be Latin. Curiously, I enjoyed learning Latin at school enormously (but then, I also liked Maths...), but I never had a true affection for it. Maybe, it was just too logical and sober and I've never really liked the sound of it. Also, Roman literature is mostly very dry and, yeah, sober. There's just nothing about this language to really catch your imagination. The case and verbal systems are quite complex, so I enjoyed the challenge of translating Latin sentences, but it was all for the head and not for the heart.

Now that I'm studying Ancient Greek, on the other hand, there's a classical language I truly love. I like the complex grammar, the sound, and the literature related to it. It just has a totally different "feel" than Latin. Unfortunately, I've never got the chance to learn Greek at school (there are some humanist grammar schools in Germany that still offer it), but I'm catching up on it now.

As for English, I've always been an Anglophile, so I truly enjoyed learning English at school. I just love British RP accents. They sound so elegantly posh and sophisticated in a way no other language can sound to my ears. This is one of the reasons why I simply love Downton Abbey. It has the best English spoken on any TV show! Just listening to the Dowager Countess's Victorian upper class accent makes me happy in a way I can hardly explain. Well, my friends and family keep saying I'm half British, so maybe there's really something true about it.

[Seneca]

For me, that language would be Latin. Curiously, I enjoyed learning Latin at school enormously (but then, I also liked Maths...), but I never had a true affection for it. Maybe, it was just too logical and sober and I've never really liked the sound of it. Also, Roman literature is mostly very dry and, yeah, sober. There's just nothing about this language to really catch your imagination. The case and verbal systems are quite complex, so I enjoyed the challenge of translating Latin sentences, but it was all for the head and not for the heart.

Now that I'm studying Ancient Greek, on the other hand, there's a classical language I truly love. I like the complex grammar, the sound, and the literature related to it. It just has a totally different "feel" than Latin. Unfortunately, I've never got the chance to learn Greek at school (there are some humanist grammar schools in Germany that still offer it), but I'm catching up on it now.

As for English, I've always been an Anglophile, so I truly enjoyed learning English at school. I just love British RP accents. They sound so elegantly posh and sophisticated in a way no other language can sound to my ears. This is one of the reasons why I simply love Downton Abbey. It has the best English spoken on any TV show! Just listening to the Dowager Countess's Victorian upper class accent makes me happy in a way I can hardly explain. Well, my friends and family keep saying I'm half British, so maybe there's really something true about it.

How do you find studying Ancient Greek to be? It seems almost infamously difficult. It doesn't get the pub of challenging "difficult" languages like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, but it seems like on the rare times I see a log of someone studying it, it is a brutal slog! I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. How do you study it, if I may ask?

[Josquin]

How do you find studying Ancient Greek to be? It seems almost infamously difficult. It doesn't get the pub of challenging "difficult" languages like Arabic or Chinese or Russian, but it seems like on the rare times I see a log of someone studying it, it is a brutal slog! I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. How do you study it, if I may ask?

As I said, I simply love it! I'm still at the beginning of my studies, so I can't really give an expert's opinion on this matter, but I don't find it overly difficult. As long as you're only aiming for passive competence, it's very manageable, especially if you've already got Latin under your belt.

Yes, the case system and the verbal system are both complex, but if you don't worry about details too much, you're good to go. For example, I don't really memorize all paradigms. I'm happy to know the most important forms and look up more exotic forms if I don't recognize them. Having the definite article definitely helps parsing sentences, too. This is one of the major advantages of Greek over Latin.

As for Russian, I've never really understood why people deem it so "difficult". Yes, it has complex morphology, verbal aspect, and verbs of motion, but Russian still is the language I've learned to the highest degree on my own. And I've never had the feeling it was overly difficult. But, yeah, maybe that's just me. Arabic, however, must be a totally different ballgame, but I've never really tried my hands at it. As for Chinese: Yeah, tones and hanzi characters, that can really trip you up! I've never studied it seriously either, although I've had my dealings with Japanese kanji...

What's really challenging me right now, however, is Sanskrit. It has much more paradigms than either Latin or Greek, loves composite nouns and weird participle constructions, and it has sandhi. This basically means knowing all the endings is not enough, you also have to know how they can change depending on the first sound of the next word. All of this is insanely complex, so a friend of mine, who took Sanskrit at university, once said: "Sanskrit!!! I need a second brain!"

[Adrianslont]

What made you hate the languages that you were learning at the time? Was it because of a bad experience with a teacher?

I blamed all sorts of things - bad teachers, bad language partners, bad host country politics, bad advice from fellow learners, etc. But the actual cause was lack of confidence in myself. That's not to say that those teachers, etc, couldn't use a good chewing out, and I did open a big 'ol can of whoop ass on some of them, but the thing that really needed to be changed was my attitude.

Even now I'll get to hate, or maybe a better word is fear (fear of failure), a new language occasionally. It's usually short-lived thankfully. I remember once while learning Korean last year I got freaked out and just quit completely. I hated it. The next day I was super motivated - how could I stop for a whole day? I was going to lose everything! lol. I made great progress that day, and overcame that particular problem (some grammar issue I think), and then I loved it! It's interesting how I put myself through stuff like that. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be though. The new leo just spends much less time obsessing over his faults than the old leo did.

This is the best post (Leosmith’s reply) I’ve read in this forum for ... a long time. At least it resonates with me. And it gives me something additional to consider when reading other people’s posts. I don’t understand how one can hate a language at all but I’ve certainly been fed up with learning languages. Fear explains much. And obsessing over ones own faults is not a good thing to do - nor is obsessing over other people’s faults!

This is also the first time I’ve noticed the expression “Open a big ol’ can of whoop ass”. It put a smile on my face. I don’t think it will ever come out of my mouth naturally though.

Edit: clarified whose post I was referring to

[DaveBee]

As for English, I've always been an Anglophile, so I truly enjoyed learning English at school. I just love British RP accents. They sound so elegantly posh and sophisticated in a way no other language can sound to my ears. This is one of the reasons why I simply love Downton Abbey. It has the best English spoken on any TV show! Just listening to the Dowager Countess's Victorian upper class accent makes me happy in a way I can hardly explain.

If I watch a Julie Andrews film on TV, I find myself listening closely whenever she speaks. She pronounces every syllable, without sounding forced or unnatural; no-one does that!

[Xenops]

What made you hate the languages that you were learning at the time? Was it because of a bad experience with a teacher?

I blamed all sorts of things - bad teachers, bad language partners, bad host country politics, bad advice from fellow learners, etc. But the actual cause was lack of confidence in myself. That's not to say that those teachers, etc, couldn't use a good chewing out, and I did open a big 'ol can of whoop ass on some of them, but the thing that really needed to be changed was my attitude.

Even now I'll get to hate, or maybe a better word is fear (fear of failure), a new language occasionally. It's usually short-lived thankfully. I remember once while learning Korean last year I got freaked out and just quit completely. I hated it. The next day I was super motivated - how could I stop for a whole day? I was going to lose everything! lol. I made great progress that day, and overcame that particular problem (some grammar issue I think), and then I loved it! It's interesting how I put myself through stuff like that. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be though. The new leo just spends much less time obsessing over his faults than the old leo did.

This is the best post I’ve read in this forum for ... a long time. At least it resonates with me. And it gives me something additional to consider when reading other people’s posts. I don’t understand how one can hate a language at all but I’ve certainly been fed up with learning languages. Fear explains much. And obsessing over ones own faults is not a good thing to do - nor is obsessing over other people’s faults!

This is also the first time I’ve noticed the expression “Open a big ol’ can of whoop ass”. It put a smile on my face. I don’t think it will ever come out of my mouth naturally though.

I appreciate nooj and leosmith bringing this up, and like Adrianslont, I can relate to frustration. I say that I don't "love" Spanish but I "love" French, but I can't say I'm in a continual honeymoon stage with this language. Some days I don't have a lot of motivation to tackle it, and sometimes I look to the side and think "that language looks more fun than what I'm doing". I would be interested to know what motivations people have to continue the marathon of language learning. It sounds like leosmith doesn't like to quit anything he started. In some cases, like Cavesa's, learning the language was mandatory. For the rest of us, what keeps us going? When you hit a wall, how do you climb over it? How do you keep a language in the "love'" category rather than the "dislike" category, which can be a result of burn out, disenchantment, or boredom?

[nooj]

For me it's interactions with people. Learning a language by yourself can becoming boring. The isolation invites boredom. Actually meeting and talking with people is like an adrenaline rush. The point should be to hook up an IV so you can small doses over long periods of time, that is to say, having constant contact, instead of being isolated and then suddenly meeting a speaker which makes you feel good. Consistency is I think the key to good language learning.

[haziz]

Ironically it is my mother tongue! Arabic. And literally learnt from my mother and father, who I loved dearly (they are both deceased), and did study up to 6th grade in School. I just have very little use for the language and have very little interest in the culture or society. I know this sounds harsh, and I sound extremely ungrateful or even pathological. It is however unfortunately true that I have far greater interest in other cultures or literature.

[Ольга]

Which one(s) and what was your history behind it? Forced to at school? Obligated by moving to the country? Did you end up liking it, or do you still not like it?

German.
I have a pretty long history of German learning.
First of all, I need to say that I started to study German at school. Our teacher was young and inexperienced (but not these concrete facts made her my enemy), she knew nothing about child’s psyche and pedagogics! It looked like she never took a university textbook on young learners’ tutoring in her hands. From the very beginning, she started to give the lowest marks without any cause to many my classmates and me as well. She gave me a “zero mark” for the second lesson of German in my life just because I did not paint an orange and did not handwrite the name of this fruit in German.
The second my unsuccessful experience was at the university. I happened to be in a multi-levelled group with a young and highly-inexperienced teacher (again) who just didn’t know what to do with us, ignored everybody besides two girls in the group who already knew German at the level C1 and passed international exams and who were so selfish and arrogant that kept silence only when there was something interesting for them and the teacher connived that. I desperately looked for a good tutor to manage the university program and could not find, I don’t know why, but it was really hard to find a highly professional German teacher. I even hired a professor from another Russian city, but it turned out that she did not have any teaching skills at all, and what’s more, was greedy and vulgar.
Besides, I really dislike some parts of German history (the second World War, etc).
But this year I can congratulate myself on overcoming all my sensitive issues with German! I entered a Master’s program in Linguistics and our group was separated into two groups (strong one and weak one, and as doing a Bachelor degree I changed the language (I got the final mark not for German, but for French), I happened to be in a weak group where I marvelously managed the curriculum for the first semester). Of course, my German’s story has not finished yet, I will have to do 2 years of German course more, but at last I have found good resources for learning German and good teachers (self-learning textbooks, audio courses, my favorite German private tutor, my own methods and ways which work only for me, etc).

[Cavesa]

What made you hate the languages that you were learning at the time? Was it because of a bad experience with a teacher?

I blamed all sorts of things - bad teachers, bad language partners, bad host country politics, bad advice from fellow learners, etc. But the actual cause was lack of confidence in myself. That's not to say that those teachers, etc, couldn't use a good chewing out, and I did open a big 'ol can of whoop ass on some of them, but the thing that really needed to be changed was my attitude.

Even now I'll get to hate, or maybe a better word is fear (fear of failure), a new language occasionally. It's usually short-lived thankfully. I remember once while learning Korean last year I got freaked out and just quit completely. I hated it. The next day I was super motivated - how could I stop for a whole day? I was going to lose everything! lol. I made great progress that day, and overcame that particular problem (some grammar issue I think), and then I loved it! It's interesting how I put myself through stuff like that. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be though. The new leo just spends much less time obsessing over his faults than the old leo did.

This is the best post (Leosmith’s reply) I’ve read in this forum for ... a long time. At least it resonates with me. And it gives me something additional to consider when reading other people’s posts. I don’t understand how one can hate a language at all but I’ve certainly been fed up with learning languages. Fear explains much. And obsessing over ones own faults is not a good thing to do - nor is obsessing over other people’s faults!

This is also the first time I’ve noticed the expression “Open a big ol’ can of whoop ass”. It put a smile on my face. I don’t think it will ever come out of my mouth naturally though.

Edit: clarified whose post I was referring to

How can one hate peas or broccoli? Football? Metal music? The orange colour? Long skirts? It is not rational but it is very common, everyone irrationally dislikes something to various degree. Some languages are just hate at first sound You don't need to be fed up with it.

And I think it is wrong that so many people simply cannot see this exists. If schools embraced it and tried to find ways around this (as some part of all those people you are forcing to learn a particular language is much more likely to fail), instead of just shaming people who don't like the language, the system would work much better.

This is the worst for kids and teens. Adults can decide to force themselves to something they hate, or to let it go. But all those well meaning parents forcing a kid to a hated language are doing much more damage than good. And even the more understanding ones have to wiggle within the limits set by the schools system.

I am completely convinced, that the overall foreign language proficiency in the population would improve enormously, if people were given more choice, and could make it freely, based on both rational reasons and this irrational stuff.