Do you learn languages for communication or for content?

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I’m kinda curious what it’s like for you other users? I have a few languages I wanna learn to speak and use in a professional setting.

But also a lot of languages, most of them, I just want to understand to be able to hear what people are gossiping about or just to read books in the original languages. It’s all because I thought it so cool when a person on TV would be able to translate a phrase in French off the cuff. How worldly it seemed. Since LingQ is so comprehension oriented, I’m curious what your thoughts are.

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Mostly for communication and traveling to those countries from my side. Culture too

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I’m 61, and I just want to extend my life and maintain my health. :crazy_face:

Seriously though, I really like French and I want to communicate at near native level. When you understand French, you realise that our stereotypes of the French could not be more wrong. I’m curious about German. There are even rumours the Germans have a sense of humour.

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I studied both French and Mandarin before going to live in France and Taiwan for two years each in the 1980s, where I used them on a daily basis. Between those two overseas trips I studied Italian in university, but never ended up going to Italy. I still hope to do so one day though.

After my wife and I came back from Taiwan we studied Spanish because we also wanted to go to Mexico for two years. Then our son was born and those plans got put on indefinite hold. Fortunately my wife kept up with her Spanish because she ended up teaching English as a second language to mostly native Spanish speakers in her job as a high school teacher – where she also taught French,

One of her English students was a recent Chinese immigrant, who soon aged out of the public secondary school system. My wife’s Mandarin wasn’t as good as mine but I was able to tutor the student privately 2 or 3 nights a week at his parents’ restaurant for about a year. I did it as an unpaid volunteer to help the guy out, but it was one of our favorite local restaurants and his parents often sent me home with something delicious.

Now that I’m in my mid-sixties I’m coming back to those languages because I’ve always had a very bad memory, and I’m trying to both resurrect them and keep myself mentally active. I also look at other languages from time to time, just because I find them fascinating.

Ask a simple question, get my life story.

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Don’t believe everything you hear.

Personally I’ve been starting to learn languages simple for enjoyment and out of curiousity. I neither need it for private nor business reasons. Although it is helpful to at least have a basic understanding of a language and the culture of those who speak it when watching series and movies from that very country with subtitles. There are just so many nuances that get lost in translation. And beeing able to understand English has proven very useful, too. So maybe one day what I’ve learned will have an unforseen benefit.

However, my experience is that the most joy comes from the things that are the most useless. :laughing:

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For communication mainly. I am a tour guide and it’s much better to be able to communicate with people in their native language if you can. I also like being able to speak the native language when I travel.

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Keep sending this man simple questions… great life story!

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Greek for my wife’s family (to hear what they are saying about me [not much]).
French for travel.
Irish because I can regain a simple level without too much effort.

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Even though I already answered and the answer is communication I do find the “content” part having been a great bonus.

I had never really read much classic literature, cause I felt I should rather spend time on learning science, programming etc. but because of my studies I have now read a lot of it: Le comte de Monte-Cristo, Les Miserables, Don Quixote, Wuthering Heights, Ondskan, Treasure Island, Animal farm, The Great Gatsby, Great expectations, The catcher in the rye, Kejsarn af Portugallien, De kleine zielen etc. I feel these were very much worth reading.

I have also learned a lot about history, geogrpahy and culture. Listening to El hilo and Radio ambulante has taught me much more about Latin-America. Listening to Dutch history channels has taught me a lot about the history of Indonesia and Suriname.

So while it’s not the main goal, the “content” part has been a great bonus.

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This is a great topic :). Personally, every language I have studied started with a desire to communicate because I was going to a country that spoke it. And I wanted to speak well enough to not look like a tourist, or to look as little like a tourist as possible :joy: I also learned quickly that speaking the language decreases the cost of actually being a tourist in most places by about a factor of 6. So there’s that too :rofl:

Once I’ve started studying a language, however, I have every time become deeply engrossed in the culture and the country or countries far beyond the language, and developed a desire to become fluent and travel to that place or those places as often as possible.

And… part of that cultural fascination has been a desire to consume native content in that language. I watch YouTubers so I can understand how people really talk, but I also want to read the classics in their native language.

Os Lusitanos and Don Quijote are two holy grails that I have yet to read out of sheer intimidation and ONLY wanting to read them in their native languages when I’m confident I’ll understand them fully. Esoteric historical documents? Even more exciting!!!

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I just cried a little about how many classics I haven’t read in my native tongue of English :rofl:

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In general: 80% content, 20% communication. Italian is different because I have an incentive to communicate. That’s 50/50.

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It’s been exactly the same for me. I’ve loved reading from a very early age, in fact the novels of Jules Verne were some of my favorites in primary school. It was also more normal back in the 1960s for kids to read books from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It’s been great fun for me to read several Verne books in the original French since starting LingQ, along with other French writers and old British works that had been translated into French years ago. Most of my time on LingQ is spent either reading the books that others have uploaded here, or ones that I have imported myself. I love being able to listen to audiobooks and read the text versions along with them. I have found sources for a ton of free French audiobooks, such as LibriVox.

I don’t know if my reading ability in the other languages I’ve studied will ever be equal to my reading level in French, but it’s fun to read shorter works in those languages too. Looking back I really wish that I would have minored in French literature and kept up my reading, instead of letting my French drop forty years ago.

Fortunately I have lived long enough to experience the current Golden Age of language learning, and it’s just going to get better.

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Curioso tópico, curiosa questão, curiosas respostas - todas em inglês!
Eu falo uma das 10 mais faladas línguas do planeta - o português - e, entre as respostas aqui escritas, só encontro uma menção à minha língua e em sueco (um título que nem conhecia): Kejsarn af Portugallien. Não vou aqui enunciar a importância da língua portuguesa na arte e cultura internacional, ela fala por si. Vou apenas tentar explicar a motivação do meu interesse em línguas estrangeiras, logo no LingQ: o melhor conhecimento possível sobre os diversos Referentes nacionais - os centros descodificadores de significados, segundo a teoria dos Signos de Saussure. A questão colocada, em inglês, “Do you learn languages for communication or for content?” é exemplo disso mesmo. No nosso Referente, nativo ou adquirido, “comunicação” e “conteúdo” não é dicotomia (or) relação adversativa - é relação de nexo semântico, logo, a questão nem se poria, à partida, nesses termos. Talvez algo como “(você) aprende línguas para conversação ou para seu (delas) próprio conhecimento?” (Do you learn languages just for dialogue or for their own knowledge?" Mais: no nosso Referente, nativo ou adquirido, o significante “content” não é imediatamente reconhecido como “conteúdo” mas como “alegre”, Igualmente, suponho, em castelhano, francês, italiano, línguas que também estudo; ou romeno, grego, russo, árabe, mandarim, que muito me interessam mas não sei (ainda) falar. Obviamente, todas estas observações terão lugar em toda a língua comparada, naturalmente: as línguas são processos/construções sociais evolutivas, mais ainda na Era da mundialização. Simplesmente entristece-me e revolta-me assistir, no fim da minha vida falante, à perversão do meu Referente nativo, tão rico em sentidos, pela aculturação mediática lexical de origem anglo-saxónica - versão Usa - através da versão crioula, já aculturada, brasileira, principalmente. O português brasileiro culto é registo belíssimo, o registo popular é delicioso de ternura, ambos contribuíram para o enriquecimento geral, integral, da minha língua pela música, a literatura, a tradução. A versão mediática “viral”, não: essa é pura conspurcação em 90%.

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For me it’s a mixture of both. My most advanced 2nd language is German, and I love being able to converse with people in that language, but I also get a kick out of simply being able to read German books. My next most advanced languages are French and Spanish, and while I can muddle along speaking French, my Spanish speaking skills are not there yet, but I love that I can read simpler books in both those languages. My youngest language is Russian, but still I enjoy being able to use my knowledge of the Russian alphabet to read street and shop signs in Russian.

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Como ando a estudar português, gostaria ver mais conversa nos “forums” aqui em português. Há um forum dedicado, mas não é muito popular. Acho que o último comentário foi de agosto.

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