By the way, I don’t know if it’s any consolation to you, but we’re all in the same SLA boat - just on different L2 seats.
For example, I have no problems in Bras. Portuguese with listening to scientific discussions about topics I’ve specialized in (international relations, for example). But dating shows, etc. kill me every time.
When I tell this to people who don’t have much experience with SLA, I get looks of disbelief:
“How is that possible? It’s just dating, not rocket science!”
I think we often forget how good native speakers are (regardless of their education level) and that they easily have almost 100k h under their L1 belts by their early 20s…
Yes, that’s true in all L2s because the older we get, the more refined our media tastes become.
For example, I’m obsessed with military history (beyond Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History”).
However, even my Spanish ex-girlfriend wouldn’t talk to me in Spanish about El Cid, the Conquistadors, or the elite Spanish infantry (los “Tercios”)
It’s just an acquired / more or less idiosyncratic taste…
Yes, I agree.
An exception may be “low hanging fruit” L2s (in my case: Dutch).
For me as a German native speaker, Dutch often feels like a dialect so I could have started with Dutch TV shows after a few days (cartoons, for ex.).
But I wanted to have a larger vocabulary first, so I’ve avoided TV series until now. That’s for later (i.e., after finishing my non-fiction books).
That’s great! I’ve got the European DVDs for Futurama. It didn’t occur to me to use them for learning French.
I’ll probably go with French audio/subs. That’s a combo I’ve had trouble finding. For instance all the great French movies on Criterion only have English subs.
My challenge is hearing the French words in the French audio.
OMG, this. I’ve been trying to tell people this for the longest time. Nobody seems to want to believe it. Natives have had an insane, and completely insurmountable volume of input compared to adult learners, and it’s of better quality too. The gap is so huge it’s actually a joke. There’s literally zero chance someone can “catch up” to that as an adult learner; no matter how good a learner thinks they are, there will always be gaps in their ability/knowledge. Natives seem like Mozart to learners, no matter what their level of education.
You shouldn´t take this personally, in the UK elderly people have been complaining about actors mumbling for years. In fact many people in the UK watch their favourite shows with subtitles on. Acting is also about presenting people speaking in almost any manner, podcasts are about communication. I can guarantee you native speakers don´t understand each other a lot of the time, and simply ask each other to repeat themselves. However if you´re from another country the excuse then can be made to switch to another language or assume you just don´t speak the language well. If we did the same to kids they´d never learn.
It´s not quite true, there are lots of things you can do to make your contact time with the language much stronger. If you think about it, the L1 learners, whilst having more time, often don´t use it for that much. I know native speakers in all languages who hardly talk or say anything, and some that have never read a book. Though they are hardwired to speak their native language by default, they are not as good at their own language as second language speakers!
If you do the maths, a person moving to a country at 15 years old, going to school, probably spends about 8 hours a day in contact with the language they are learning, they probably then have people helping them, slowing it down, explaining, then they have socialising. At the end of the year if they chose to integrate (this doesn´t always happen, i.e. kids of British soldiers in Germany) they will easily have 2000 + hours in a year of contact time, if not more.
However there isn´t really anything stopping adults from having 2000+ contact hours a year IF THEY WANT TO in this day an age.
You can convert your phone, you can choose to default your learning language to the target language, you can choose to read the press of your target language, listen to the radio etc and with only 5 or so hours a day of contact, you can have a similar exposure. I would argue you don´t actually need this as to some degree there are decreasing returns (how many times do you need to hear “yes” before you understand what it means?).
Therefore if you use your time wisely, you could with 1-3 hours a day, get the same experience anywhere. The thing is you need to have a way of converting what you know in your native language. That means having a friend who can answer questions, asking the right questions, and reading/doing activities. CLIL style learning is one of the things from my point of view everyone learning English has over English speakers learning another language. People who learn English are almost always “doing something” with it, whilst English native speakers learn foreign languages as an intellectual pursuit.
You don´t have to be very intelligent to learn a language, but you do need the right contact with it. You will find most of the time people learn languages better which they have an emotional contact with. I have friends who speak German professionally and they can´t socialise in German as they find it tiring, yet they can´t work in English and can chitchat all day in it.
this. I’ve been trying to tell people this for the longest time. Nobody seems to want to believe it. Natives have had an insane, and completely insurmountable volume of input compared to adult learners, and it’s of better quality too. The gap is so huge it’s actually a joke. There’s literally zero chance someone can “catch up” to that as an adult learner; no matter how good a learner thinks they are, there will always be gaps in their ability/knowledge. Natives seem like Mozart to learners, no matter what their level of education.