Brun Ugle wrote:zenmonkey wrote:German is likely to be the harder of the three, an earlier focused start will get you along further, while not having to do maintenance and/or further learning of the other two languages concomitantly.
My order was the exact opposite. German is taking forever...Every other order can also make sense, but that's my logic above.
This quote is taken from the thread on the logical order to learn the languages Spanish, French and German, but since my reply is directed personally to you, I thought I’d put it in your log rather than cluttering up the original thread.
Have you considered that the reason you find German so hard might be because it’s your first real foreign language? From what you’ve told me, you grew up in Mexico and the US, so you have both Spanish and English as native languages. Maybe you didn’t learn English from infancy, but you still learned it pretty young. You also said that your parents used to speak French together as their “secret language”, so I assume you heard it often as a child and probably understood a good bit even if you didn’t speak it. So, when you decided to learn French as an adult, you not only had the advantages of being a speaker of another Romance language and English, you probably also had an advantage similar to that of a heritage speaker. You probably struggled a lot at first with speaking, but I imagine you understood a good bit, and you probably had or easily developed an ear for what sounds right because you’d heard it so much growing up. That makes German your first real, from-scratch, foreign language. And the first one is always hard. In my experience, the second and third are pretty tough too. I don’t know how many languages you have to learn before it actually gets easy. I’ll let you know when I get there.
All of that is true. Part of it is also environmental - I was in love with the French language and I easily submerged myself very quickly in a gigantic swath of music, literature, poetry. I'd lived within the French language very quickly and told people that I would leave the room if anything but French was spoken. I honestly submerged myself. Any language after that is going to be challenged and there is an internal push back because I already spend a lot of time with languages I love much more than newer L2s. German is nice and all that but where is my Apollinaire, my Dumas, my Jacques Brel? La Vie Reve des Anges? La Fée Carabine? I have a deep emotional commitment to French that I don't have to any newer language.
German may be my "first"
from scratch successful language but I can certainly count on two hands all of the failed and semi-successful languages I've tried to learn... From "rebate" languages like Catalan, Occitan, Italian and Portuguese to other more opaque languages like Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi ... where somewhere
early along the path I stopped.
German would be further along if I was actually spending time with this language. Treating it as true partner would speed things along. Unfortunately I'm an easily distracted something or other.
And I know this is just your attempt to get me to take on Norwegian and Japanese.