I tried to learn English for years. At school, and then outside school, but I couldn’t make any serious progress.
And then I learnt Esperanto. Because Esperanto is regular and almost logical, in a few weeks I was able to speak to foreigners in a language that wasn’t my mother tongue. And that experience permitted me to speak English, even if I totally stopped to try to learn it. Something clicked in my brain. I’m still no Shakespeare, I’m sure there are tons of errors in this message, but I can now read (even novels), understand, write and speak English comfortably.
If one is raised in a monolingual environment, the brain begins to believe that there are no other other language it can speak as efficiently as the first language. And it’s true. But this shouldn’t be a barrier; and to make this barrier fall is one of the hardest parts in language learning. But the good news is that once it fell for one language, it fell for all languages. Of course there are other ways than Esperanto to make it fall, but it was the one which worked for me.
Thranduil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You can. Step 1 find a group that welcomes non language speakers. I used mmos to try. Can also just have 1 person. But I find guilds better since you get more exposure. Step 2 ignore grammar and just caveman it. Why many word when few work. Then when you no longer need google translate to understand and to talk learn grammar. Language is a tool for communication so focus on being understood before proper sentence and conjugation.
GregoryTheGreat@programming.dev 1 year ago
Yeah I live with someone who speaks another language. Shit isn’t easy and take longer than a few months.
Thranduil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It depends on what your goal is. If its simply to communicate it does not have to take that long sure it will be very broken
Me hungry me eat instead of I eat when I am hungry but as long as you get the message across you have succeded with communicating.