One thing that always annoys me on language learner forums is when people say they learned X language in (fairly short amount of time) but never list what sort of advantages they had going in. So for example, someone will say “I reached the N1 level (highest classification of Japanese understanding on the JLPT exam) in 3 years!” but what they won’t tell you is that they studied abroad in Japan for a year, or they had previous working knowledge of Korean (which is grammatically similar) or Mandarin Chinese (Which will give you a leg up on Kanji because of Hanzi) or that they had a huge amount of free time to study. These little advantages add up. People sometimes omit these advantages either because they don’t realize they have them or they wanna look more impressive to their peers.
Anyway, for those learning another language, don’t feel bad if someone gets there faster. Fluency is a vague and nebulous term to begin with anyway. Not only is it not a race, but you don’t know what advantages someone had going in.
windingear liked this
yawar-fiesta reblogged this from thefortressofscience and added:
For real!
yawar-fiesta liked this
jay-the-tiger liked this
zakartyger liked this
zakartyger said: For example I knew a guy who would wake up, study for 8 hours, eat, study for 8 more hours, and go to sleep. All because he really wanted to live and teach in Japan.
full-on-gray liked this
graws-things liked this
htodinth liked this
ruskystar liked this
sharkosupreme liked this
d-anana liked this
sixaughtfive liked this
famiel liked this
snorlaxnaps reblogged this from thefortressofscience
snorlaxnaps liked this
guyghoul liked this
lazypierrot liked this
nostr8answer-aka-lupin-things liked this
nerdcheetah liked this
expectgayness liked this
boringbun liked this
pandabear25 liked this
wulfiao liked this
thefortressofscience posted this