What does the intermediate plateau look like for opaque languages?

[Xenops]

Answer: Very foggy and hard to see.

If you would care to share (some sharing is caring--just not sickness), what did the intermediate stage look like with your opaque language? I'm most interested in responses relating to languages far removed from your native one--English to Mandarin, or Japanese to Spanish, etc. Is it normal to get discouraged or burnt out at this stage? How did you keep going? Are habits all it takes?

Thank you for sharing.

[sherbert]

Actually all languages are opaque based on my native language. But as usual, for me the intermediate level is characterized by restlessness and impatience to get to level B2.

I no longer feel that way about Russian, for example, as I have twice gotten a 2+ on the DLI scale in Russian, without instructors. I am not anxious about Russian language at this point, even if I can't understand a joke here and there. I agree with UK polyglot Alex Rawlings that it's much more satisfying to comprehend TL native content/media than conversing in the TL.

In weaker languages, like Spanish or Finnish, I torture myself with native content that is above my level. Like today I was watching a fast- paced Chilean TV show to take a break from the Mexican or Canarian Spanish that I normally listen to, and the way they were spitting out their almost Welsh-like Spanish caused me to have to re-watch the show with subtitles, and I got hung up on the word "escaramuza." Then I had to find out the meaning, which turns out to be "skirmish" and I felt that my Spanish should have been advanced enough to understand it, at least the written meaning, since they are similar, but my knowledge failed me. Finnish is more of a boutique language for me so I feel less pressure to be perfect in it.

When I read about pre-internet polyglots, I wonder how often they put their skills to the test, and whether their textbook French or Spanish or Arabic would have withered under the myriad of dialects the internet has to offer. Maybe they were languishing in intermediate prison like me but were unaware of it.

The more self-doubt you have, the longer the intermediate plateau seems, because you can't seem to shake the feeling that you are an impostor in one way or another.

[Querneus]

In weaker languages, like Spanish or Finnish, I torture myself with native content that is above my level. Like today I was watching a fast- paced Chilean TV show to take a break from the Mexican or Canarian Spanish that I normally listen to, and the way they were spitting out their almost Welsh-like Spanish caused me to have to re-watch the show with subtitles, and I got hung up on the word "escaramuza." Then I had to find out the meaning, which turns out to be "skirmish" and I felt that my Spanish should have been advanced enough to understand it, at least the written meaning, since they are similar, but my knowledge failed me. Finnish is more of a boutique language for me so I feel less pressure to be perfect in it.

For what it's worth, I'm a native and I didn't know the word escaramuza until you explained it just now... Maybe it's more common in Chilean Spanish or in the genre of the show you were watching than in my dialect or the content I'm used to, but I'm much more likely to see the likes of batalla, pelea, choque, pleito.

[Iversen]

In weaker languages, like Spanish or Finnish, I torture myself with native content that is above my level. (...) I got hung up on the word "escaramuza." Then I had to find out the meaning, which turns out to be "skirmish" and I felt that my Spanish should have been advanced enough to understand it

I would recognize it because one of the characters in 16 century commedia dell'arte is called Scaramouche in French (Scaramuccia in Italian, but it's the French word I would recognize). And then I could probably guess the intended meaning in the context.

As for feeling that you need to know all words at an intermediate level. No you don't.

If you read a normal text in your target language then there will be X words you don't recognize. If you are a beginner that X will be ginormous, and most of them will be found in a reasonably good dictionary - but it's not certain you can recognize them there because the words in a dictionary are given in some standard form and you are not supposed to know the complete morphology yet. If you are intermediate you should know the most important inflection patterns and the forms of the most important irregular words, but there will still be a lot of words you can't find. Even in a target language you know well enough to speak or write it there will still be a hard core of words you can't find in the dictionary.

And even when you are reasonably advanced - advanced enough to dare read original literature or sci mags or newspaper articles for fun - you may still find may 2-5 incomprehensible words on a page which you find irritating enough to look them up. And my experience with the languages I know best is that most of those words aren't found in the dictionary either. That means that even a dictionary with a 'vocabulary' of maybe 15.000 or 25.000 headwords or more doesn't know enough words to read a simple native text - so why should I know them all?

The problem with opaque languages is that it takes longer to learn a large enough percentage of the words to be able to read or listen extensively (read: for fun). Until I have reached that level I simply don't do it systematically - I study bilingual texts instead and do wordlists. And when I can start to read without having a translation In my hand I have to pass a stage where I can guess most of the meaning with a limited number of look-ups. I wouldn't feel that I was able read or listen truly for fun before I just would feel tempted to look a couple of problematic words up per page (and ignore the rest). And that's where I am with the Germanic and the Romance languages plus Esperanto. As for Greek and Latin, well - almost there. Slavic languages: only in their written form and still with too many lookups. Ditto for Bahasa Indonesia - but at least its grammar is easy. Irish and Albanian: not there at all.

[tiia]

I only learned Finnish as a German, which is so far the most different one from my native, where I actually reached a high level. However, my native German has influenced Finnish directly and indirectly (through Swedish) and that is something that becomes visible at intermediate to advanced stages (compound words and technical vocabulary, comma rules as in German...) A beginner doesn't notice these things so much.

I would say that the biggest differences were in the beginning stages, as those take a lot of time. People give up at the beginning stages, because they never get to the point, where they could use the language at all. Once being able to start deciphering books, it becomes easier to do something on your own. Starting to be able to read fiction, felt like a big success and it also enabled me to keep in contact with the language on my own.

But in general I would say the main issues at the intermediate level were not due to the differences between the languages (since that's more at the beginning stages), but something that is probably true for most less-learned languages with fewer speakers:
- lack of learning material, especially for intermediate and advanced stages
- lack of media in general and even more lack of material that is interesting to you
- often no access to the media/material that exists (geoblocking, no shipping to foreign countries)
- (native) speakers of the language were hard to find (= lack of practice)

I know that Finnish is not even the most different language ever and compared to all the languages that exist, it has quite a lot of speakers and a decent amount of material. But compared to FIGS it's of course still a different story.
Oh and note, that nowadays things have become easier. Nowadays there is more material! (Some of it even written by teachers that I had.) There are way more options online, than there used to be.
But most of it is still aimed at beginners.

[luke]

In weaker languages, like Spanish or Finnish, I torture myself with native content that is above my level. Like today I was watching a fast- paced Chilean TV show to take a break from the Mexican or Canarian Spanish that I normally listen to, and the way they were spitting out their almost Welsh-like Spanish caused me to have to re-watch the show with subtitles, and I got hung up on the word "escaramuza." Then I had to find out the meaning, which turns out to be "skirmish" and I felt that my Spanish should have been advanced enough to understand it, at least the written meaning, since they are similar, but my knowledge failed me.

For what it's worth, I'm a native and I didn't know the word escaramuza until you explained it just now... Maybe it's more common in Chilean Spanish or in the genre of the show you were watching than in my dialect or the content I'm used to, but I'm much more likely to see the likes of batalla, pelea, choque, pleito.

"Skirmish" makes me think of refriega from Cien años de soledad:

refriega.png

I would recognize it because one of the characters in 16 century commedia dell'arte is called Scaramouche in French (Scaramuccia in Italian, but it's the French word I would recognize).

Which reminds me of...

[rdearman]

What does the intermediate plateau look like for opaque languages? Well according to one art AI, it looks like this:

1c7e72e99-b3cd-498b-9ebf-608f1ddd3662.jpg

[luke]

What does the intermediate plateau look like for opaque languages? Well according to one art AI, it looks like this:

It looks beautiful. I wonder what AI thinks it looks like for the average human.

Or is it saying that it looks like you're sitting on your behind gazing at a formidable mountain?

[rdearman]

What does the intermediate plateau look like for opaque languages? Well according to one art AI, it looks like this:

It looks beautiful. I wonder what AI thinks it looks like for the average human.

Or is it saying that it looks like you're sitting on your behind gazing at a formidable mountain?

I believe it is the latter.

[Iversen]

Opaque languages are prettier than I thought, but they also look slightly artificial.