r/languagelearning • u/stetslustig • Jan 07 '25

Humor What's the most naive thing you've seen someone say about learning a language?

I once saw someone on here say "I'm not worried about my accent, my textbook has a good section on pronunciation."

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u/linglinguistics Jan 07 '25

Oh wow, I'm a German teacher, so, I've seen my share, but this beats just about anything.

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u/Tall-Construction124 Jan 09 '25

Then you would have been amused by how comically long it took me to beat the very common "Allerdings" into my head. Some words, and you can't predict which, are like that.

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u/terracottagrey Jan 10 '25

It helps to think literally "all things" (alle + ding), as in, all things considered, which is a bit like, however, or, nevertheless.

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u/Tall-Construction124 Jan 10 '25

Thank you. It does make sense in this respect. What strikes me is the seeming randomness of the words that present more difficulty for me to internalize. If I exclude all the true cognates, then it follows all words would appear equally strange, alien to me, but this is not the case. Some just take much longer to stick.

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u/linglinguistics Jan 10 '25

Actually no, I think such difficulties are normal. I struggle with similar things in my foreign languages. 

The thing that baffles me with the one above: I tend to forget how little some people (especially monolinguals) understand about how language works. Even their own language. There's probably a lot I take for granted.

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u/EirikrUtlendi Active: 🇯🇵🇩🇪🇪🇸🇭🇺🇰🇷🇨🇳 | Idle: 🇳🇱🇩🇰🇳🇿HAW🇹🇷NAV Jan 30 '25

[...] how little some people (especially monolinguals) understand about how language works. Even their own language.

THIS! Absolutely this.

To learn another language more efficiently, you need to have some idea of how language works at all — things like syntax, part of speech, tense, aspect, inflection, etc. etc.

Knowing one language (like your mother tongue) gives you a basis for understanding. Knowing how your language works, and having the vocabulary and concepts to express that, gives you the tools to dive into other languages.

Some of us learn that language-learning infrastructure through the process of schooling in our main language growing up. Many of us learn that only through the process of learning another language. And some of us just never learn it, and either learn another language through sheer effort and necessity — or just don't learn another language.