Previous experience learning languages
I say I’m learning Spanish from scratch, which is 100% true: I have never studied Spanish before and only know a smattering of random words in the language right now, before I begin. However, I have studied other languages in that past, to varying levels and with varying degrees of success, so maybe this gives me some advantages over someone who has never studied a foreign language at all. I suspect it is an advantage, though how much of one is very hard to say. I guess that will be one of the things I'll find out over the course of the next 12 months.
I've set out my previous experience with studying languages below.
As you can see, I’ve studied three languages in the past, reaching CEFR level A1/A2 on two of them and B1/B2 on the other. As of now, as I am about to start learning Spanish, I reckon I am at level B1 (French), A1 (German) and 0 (Irish).
I've set out my previous experience with studying languages below.
As you can see, I’ve studied three languages in the past, reaching CEFR level A1/A2 on two of them and B1/B2 on the other. As of now, as I am about to start learning Spanish, I reckon I am at level B1 (French), A1 (German) and 0 (Irish).
UPDATE: After four weeks of learning Spanish I can report that having studied French before seems to be as much of a hindrance as a help. I picked up the grammatical rule about the agreement of adjectives in Spanish pretty quickly because I'd encountered it before, but I do mix up French and Spanish words a lot, particularly common ones, such as saying "et" instead of "y" or "c'est" instead of "es".
IRISH
Like almost all people who grow up in Ireland, I spent 12 years studying Irish in school from the age of 6 to 18. Sadly, like the majority of people I know, at the end of all those hours of classes, homework and exams, I somehow managed to leave school speaking virtually none of the language. Fast forward 30 years and I would say I can now understand no more than a handful of common phrases.
Much of that outcome is down to how the language was taught, involving as it did rote learning of grammar, conjugating a seemingly infinite list of irregular verbs, translating and memorising dreary, turgid, rhythmless poetry, and the compulsory study of the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a woman who in the late 19th and early 20th century lived on an island populated by around 100 people, many of whom seem to have had the same name, where the chief recreation was enduring grinding poverty and keening over the premature death of ones children. It was actually far worse than it sounds. |
In Ireland, we call our native language “Irish”, not “Gaelic”.
Everyone who grows up in Ireland speaks English fluently, and this is the language spoken by the vast majority of people in their daily lives. Only 40% of people are able to speak Irish, and only 1.7% of people in Ireland use the language daily. |
I reckon that having grown up in Galway, which is close to one of the Gaeltacht areas where people regularly speak Irish as their first language, I probably reached A2 level on the CEFR scale by the age of 12. Somehow, by continuing my education in Dublin as a teenager, I contrived to reduce that to something closer to A1 level through a further six years of study. Today my level is 0.