What role does talent play in learning languages?

Open Forum
41

What’s wrong with you, why are you bringing that in here? We ain’t talking with you about politics, we didn’t ask you for all of this ship you’re throwing up constantly. You’re intentionally falling out of context of LingQ and learning languages. You’re presenting yourself as inadequate so what attitude do you want towards your person and your beliefs after that? Actually, this behavior is the worst ads for any beliefs and views, I’m getting gayer after each of your comments.
Or probably you’re getting paid by the Prigozhin’s farms and actually you are just a Russian troll? These guys don’t give a damn about context and don’t have their own beliefs, they’re just getting paid for copy/pasting everywhere to promote polarization into society and, of cource, commercial interests of the current government. $ 0.25 a comment, by the way.

I personally don’t mind to get know someone’s views about anything now and then, but one should have a healthy sense of proportion and relevancy.
Behave yourself! >:(

42

Oh boy.

I’d say the conversation evolved naturally into other areas, as conversations tend to do. So unless there is a pedantic conversation police that determines what is acceptable or not, then I think we are good.
But since you have been unfortunatly triggered I will stop now I promise. I can use my time better than this.

“”“You’re presenting yourself as inadequate”“”

Inadequate in English doesn’t mean exactly, what it means in Russian. It’s a false friend.
Inadequate means “not up to the task” “unworthy” “not good enough”.
In English you want to say “indecent” for what you wanted to call me.
Hope this helps.

“”“I’m getting gayer after each of your comments. “””

That’s ok. I love you as you are.
Gay guys tend to be lovely and very interesting, but some of them have trouble understanding that they can’t have a piece of this seksy Tommyboi. :PP

“”“Or probably you’re getting paid by the Prigozhin’s farms “””

Wow. Being called a Russian troll by a Russian)))
I’m not a fan of Tsar Vladimir either, and I know that there are Russian troll armies that want to aggravate the polarization in the West, as a part of mutual PsyOps infowars.

Maybe the time will come, when you realize that Russian trolls didn’t create any polarization out of nowhere, but start to think about why things are happening as they are.

I’m a heavy listener of Echo Moskvy, and I largely like the old Berliner patient Aleksey N.

So the accusation is quite sad and absurd. But I am accepting now that another Dark Age around 2200 is inevitable, and there is no talking to certain people.

No hard feelings S.I.! I didn’t mean to trigger you. I meant to encourage other normal and intelligent people to engage with certain truths about our world and future, while triggering the Francisco types.

Путин должен уйти!
:wink:

TomOfVienna out.

43

TomOfVienna out

That’s my boy.

44

By the way, what’s wrong with the English meaning of inadequacy? It’s precisely the same as it in Russian. To teach Russian what’s the meaning of a word in Russian is inadequacy too.

You are not being good enough at getting fit into context.

45

@ S.I.
You are absolutely correct about the basic meaning. But you have to know by experience what the actual usage is and what the finer shades of meaning are. Dictionaries should be understood as descriptive, rather than prescriptive, since languages change and words are subject to semantic shift.

Maybe I’m wrong about the Russian one though, please help me out.

“”“the fact of not being good enough in quality, ability, size etc for a particular purpose.”“”

Exactly right.

In English, this is the meaning and it stays around this more basic meaning. In the vast majority of cases, or any I’ve ever seen, “inadequate” shows up when someone is not good enough in some concrete physical or mental way.

For example:

A man with erectile dysfunction may be inadequate at satisfying his wife.

Francisco is inadequate at being an academic psychologist.

Now, in Russian the meaning of адекватный seems to have shifted more into the abstract, in fact meaning “worthy”, “morally good”, “decent”, “orderly” and this seems to me exactly what you were trying to call me. неадекватный
~= “indecent”, or possibly “inappropriate” though that usage wouldn’t have been entirely grammatical.

East Slavic beauties trying to buy a husband from a higher rent country always talk about how he must be адекватный (decent, orderly, morally good). They are not talking about the potency of his gentleman-sausage as would be more like the English context of this word.

Reversely неадекватный would be an unemployed, unwashed, alcoholic gopnik-slob.

“”" You’re presenting yourself as inadequate so what attitude do you want towards your person and your beliefs after that? “”"
The usage here, in English, of “inadequate” is unusual and slightly unnatural, unless the English natives will argue otherwise.

Please inform me if and how I am off target in my understanding of the Russian. I shall see your answer and then really keep my word about not triggering you adequate people anyome.

Btw, while wallowing in my narcissism, admiring how adequate and seksy af I am in the mirror, I realized that the reason all these gay guys seemed so lovely and very interesting to me was because I was so open and nice to them, that they thought they had chances of eating my gentleman-sausage! Oh the pains of being a hot girl!

Bee Gees - Stayin’ Alive (Official Music Video)

Ok, ok, I promise this was the last post.
Have fun, girls.

46

It’s hilarious :smiley: He’s not only stepped in ship, he’s wiped his feet with his hand and then smeared his own face with the same hand, then he called others ‘girls’ as if being a girl is something bad or, probably, the situation somehow reminds him of girls that rejected him. And then he proudly tossed his soiled head and went out, but just around the corner so that he could see my reply and get the opportunity to plunge in ship completely at some point.

47

Ftornay I see our old “friend” here has spammed this thread to death, oh well, oh well…

48

Yep! This is one of those situations that manage to be hilarious and depressing at the same time

49

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50

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51

I feel this blog post you made is more about how a person should not get too comfy just believing they have a lot of talent and getting lazy or complacent in language learning, than what the role of talent in language learning actually is. That´s actually fine. Your concern and probably most people´s concern here on LingQ, is how they can best learn a language and your blog post is relevant to that question. The question of what role talent actually plays in language learning is of more interest to psychologists, linguists and other academics who are more concerned with the science of how people learn languages, than necessarily learning languages themselves.

52

I think any skill, not just language learning, comes down to a combination of talent and effort. Some would say one or the other. I think it’s both.
You can practice and put in incredible amounts of effort on your basketball skills and most people will NOT get to the level of a NBA player. Likewise, there are people who are naturally talented who never reach their full potential because they don’t put in the hard work or extra effort.
However, I also think effort leads to big improvements for the majority people even if they aren’t naturally talented. That’s why people shouldn’t compare themselves to others and only to their previous selves. Did you improve from where you started on this skill? Not: am I better than Joe who mastered 6 languages in 6 months? So I suspect the same basic ideas probably applies to language learning too.

53

That´s exactly it. It´s a bad trap to fall into the “I don´t need to work hard cause I´ve got talent” kind of thought, but that doesn´t mean talent doesn´t play a role in becoming better at whatever you are doing.

54

Well said, hard work is crucial, but the highest league is reserved for those who are both talented and hard-working.

55

At the end of the day though, the highest league is pretty irrelevant. 99.9+% of us are here to learn languages for one reason or another (generally for the love of the game) and don’t care to be “the most successful” language learner in the world. Often the level of obsession necessary to reach those types of heights creates unhappiness. I think there would be several people that are active in this community who could reach very high levels if they had the time.

56

Success in languages is also something that should me measured by what your exact goals are. Being good in a language on it´s own is actually of zero use, because it´s just a tool to communicate. It´s all about the communication you do. It´s like having a bunch of tools and knowing how to build and repair stuff really doesn´t matter if you don´t ever build or repair anything. So if someone does learn to be fluent in a dozen languages or whatnot but never uses it for anything except just learning, then so what? If someone here on LingQ stays on their computer all day and gets to a million known words in various languages but never goes out and communicates, that´s hardly success, is it?

Success would be using the languages for something, whether it´s professional stuff like translation, teaching, creating art, guiding, being able to work in the environment of the new language etc. or personal stuff, like being able to converse with people in that language, the success has to be in how you actually use your languages.