[Mrs Bear]

[quote name='porca misèria' timestamp='1317810512' post='3138160']
If you take that attitude, you'll just end up in an expat ghetto, or totally isolated. Can't understand why people like that go anywhere in the first place.

When I first went to Italy I spoke not a word of it. The locals were incredibly friendly and helpful when I was struggling in the first few weeks. The harder bit was between about 2 and 6 months, when I could get by with more words than pointing-and-asking but was less than fluent, and they all wanted to try their "foreign" on me!
[/quote]

This invariably happens if you're an English speaker. Wherever you go in the world, unless it's a poor, peasant area, people want to practise their English on you.
A Swede or a Thai (for example) doesn't have this to impede them. They have to get on and try to speak/understand whatever it is.
No reason not to try, but it does make it that bit harder.

Mr B was based in Jakarta for a while and did make quite an effort to learn some Bahasa Indonesian. But even in a remote part of Sulawesi he had people eagerly asking him (in English) about the Premier League. And Mr B hasn't a f*cking clue about football. I was there on holiday at the time - it was quite funny really, seeing him pretend he knew what they were talking about

This post has been edited by Mrs Bear: 05 October 2011 - 11:42 AM

[thod]

porca misèria, on 05 October 2011 - 10:28 AM, said:

If you take that attitude, you'll just end up in an expat ghetto, or totally isolated. Can't understand why people like that go anywhere in the first place.

When I first went to Italy I spoke not a word of it. The locals were incredibly friendly and helpful when I was struggling in the first few weeks. The harder bit was between about 2 and 6 months, when I could get by with more words than pointing-and-asking but was less than fluent, and they all wanted to try their "foreign" on me!

Perhaps Italians are more friendly? Certainly I have found that the French show no interest at all in the anglais, nor do they wish to learn English. It is much like you have no interest in teaching English to the Pakistani bloke who speaks Urdu. I know the names of most things, I know lots of verbs. However my French is very limited. Knowing how to say "another beer please" is not speaking the language, discussing the stories on the news is. If you can learn a foreign language in a year, then you have a great talent. Most middle age people will still be restricted after 10 years of immersion. Don't try to tell me they are all idiots. They are ex-professionals and I know lots of them.

[ccc]

snowflux, on 05 October 2011 - 11:28 AM, said:

Nah, he was German all right. You'd probably have found it easier than me, what with those ch's being pronounced a bit like the ch in Scottish 'loch'.

Aye !

[Gone to Ireland.]

I am in a similar position to yourself an we are planning on leaving the UK next year.

I also work in engineering / IT in software development.

Where are we moving? We are planning on moving to the Republic of Ireland as there are many IT jobs, the cost of housing is low, we like the countryside and don't mind the rain.

[Mrs Bear]

thod, on 05 October 2011 - 11:42 AM, said:

Perhaps Italians are more friendly? Certainly I have found that the French show no interest at all in the anglais, nor do they wish to learn English. It is much like you have no interest in teaching English to the Pakistani bloke who speaks Urdu. I know the names of most things, I know lots of verbs. However my French is very limited. Knowing how to say "another beer please" is not speaking the language, discussing the stories on the news is. If you can learn a foreign language in a year, then you have a great talent. Most middle age people will still be restricted after 10 years of immersion. Don't try to tell me they are all idiots. They are ex-professionals and I know lots of them.

We've found Greeks very helpful if you make an effort. As someone said, they don't mind you doing your damnedest to murder their beautiful, ancient language.

Outside Paris, we've always found the French fine, too.

[inflating]

no lucky man, on 05 October 2011 - 09:32 AM, said:

This obviously makes it hard to process. As a simple example:

'I cannot find the key' would translate as 'I cannot the key find'

Same often with Polish, a Slavic rather than Germanic language. English is a Germanic language, so German is actually much easier than Polish

A lot of the time in other languages it's topsy turvy - sentences would literally translate to Keys, to cut a new one, where do I go? or Please, hospital I ask of you sir/madam, tell me the way to it

Once you get used to that, your're half way there

porca misèria, on 05 October 2011 - 09:46 AM, said:

My time in Germany was the one and only time in my life when I had a telly: watching it helped with picking up the language!

Top advice, watch the news channel and comedies, anything that helps your brain recognise the general phonetics and where words begin and end.

The first words you will learn apart from the courtesies will be for foodstuffs, money, emergency service names. It takes about a year to be basic, 3 to 5 to be reasonable.

You can also try www.busuu.com as they have a community teaching languages to each other.

My favourite Polish sitcom btw, can't resist including it here

[snowflux]

inflating, on 05 October 2011 - 11:47 AM, said:

...
A lot of the time in other languages it's topsy turvy - sentences would literally translate to Keys, to cut a new one, where do I go? or Please, hospital I ask of you sir/madam, tell me the way to it

Once you get used to that, your're half way there

In highly inflected languages such as German, where the articles and the endings of words indicate their function in the sentence, word order is usually quite flexible and is often changed for emphasis. This contrasts with English, where the word order usually dictates the meaning of the sentence.

For example:

"The dog bites the man."

could be simply rendered in German as

"Der Hund beisst den Mann."

or, if you wanted to emphasise that it is a particular man being bitten:

"Den Mann beisst der Hund."

It's the "der/den" that is important, not the position in the sentence. We don't have this freedom in English.

This post has been edited by snowflux: 05 October 2011 - 12:18 PM

[Austin Allegro]

ccc, on 05 October 2011 - 09:48 AM, said:

This is true however if you make these mistakes people will still understand what you mean - even if they screw their face up a bit. The same cannot be said for other languages like Polish or Hungarian. Say something the 'wrong' way and they won't have a clue what you are saying.

This is why I thin languages like German and English are probably so much easier to learn to get by with. You may sound like a bit of a divot - but the other person will get the jist of what you mean. Do the same in Hungary or China and they won't have the faintest clue what you are talking about.

Correct. It is a double edged sword. In Hungarian every letter of its 44 letter alphabet is pronounced in one way only. So you always know how to pronounce a word, which makes reading aloud quite easy. However, there are very subtle differences between some words so you have to get it right or you will be misunderstood, sometimes spectacularly (the words 'bus stop' and 'f*ck off' are very similar for example). You can't do the French trick of letting your voice trail off at the end of verbs if you can't remember how to conjugate them!

They also don't understand things being abbreviated, so if you point to a tram and say 'station?' which most people will take to mean 'does this go to the station?' they will think 'no, it's a tram' because you have to say the full sentence which is something like 'this the tram to goes the station to?' with exactly the right intonation and emphasis!

[porca misèria]

Mrs Bear, on 05 October 2011 - 11:35 AM, said:

This invariably happens if you're an English speaker. Wherever you go in the world, unless it's a poor, peasant area, people want to practise their English on you.

Up to a point, missus copper!

My Italian experience of that was a little different: people would practice their "foreign", regardless of whether it was English (the young), French (middle-aged people) or German (the elderly - and yes I'm generalising). Mostly I had trouble understanding any of the three, despite speaking two of those languages!

Of course, on the beaten track for tourism is a different story, where decent English is the norm.

[ccc]

Austin Allegro, on 05 October 2011 - 12:28 PM, said:

Correct. It is a double edged sword. In Hungarian every letter of its 44 letter alphabet is pronounced in one way only. So you always know how to pronounce a word, which makes reading aloud quite easy. However, there are very subtle differences between some words so you have to get it right or you will be misunderstood, sometimes spectacularly (the words 'bus stop' and 'f*ck off' are very similar for example). You can't do the French trick of letting your voice trail off at the end of verbs if you can't remember how to conjugate them!

They also don't understand things being abbreviated, so if you point to a tram and say 'station?' which most people will take to mean 'does this go to the station?' they will think 'no, it's a tram' because you have to say the full sentence which is something like 'this the tram to goes the station to?' with exactly the right intonation and emphasis!

Oh Lord. No wonder it took me two days to just work out how to ask for two pints.

porca misèria, on 05 October 2011 - 12:38 PM, said:

Up to a point, missus copper!

My Italian experience of that was a little different: people would practice their "foreign", regardless of whether it was English (the young), French (middle-aged people) or German (the elderly - and yes I'm generalising). Mostly I had trouble understanding any of the three, despite speaking two of those languages!

Of course, on the beaten track for tourism is a different story, where decent English is the norm.

I suppose to get around this if you really wanted total immersion - you could just pretend you didn't speak English.

See that outside the box thinking.

[porca misèria]

thod, on 05 October 2011 - 11:42 AM, said:

Perhaps Italians are more friendly? Certainly I have found that the French show no interest at all in the anglais, nor do they wish to learn English. It is much like you have no interest in teaching English to the Pakistani bloke who speaks Urdu. I know the names of most things, I know lots of verbs. However my French is very limited. Knowing how to say "another beer please" is not speaking the language, discussing the stories on the news is. If you can learn a foreign language in a year, then you have a great talent. Most middle age people will still be restricted after 10 years of immersion. Don't try to tell me they are all idiots. They are ex-professionals and I know lots of them.

My french experience is limited to traveling through, and I don't speak the language. But on the couple of occasions I've been in France I've made the effort and found the French friendly and helpful, too. Seems to me much more a matter of attitude.

Come to think of it, something like that happened just a few months ago in Brussels, of all places! Went into a Turkish-run restaurant and found they spoke not a word of English, so I struggled with my nonexistent French and eventually enjoyed a decent meal in a friendly place.

Likewise, if I found myself in the company of an Urdu speaker struggling with English but making an honest effort, I like to think I'd be helpful there. Not impossible, as I have family connections to Pakistan.

This post has been edited by porca misèria: 05 October 2011 - 12:47 PM

[Austin Allegro]

ccc, on 05 October 2011 - 12:43 PM, said:

Oh Lord. No wonder it took me two days to just work out how to ask for two pints.

Recently I was in a bar here that had only one draught beer. I said to the barmaid in Hungarian 'can I have a pint please?'. (well they use the metric system here, it's called a korso, but anyway) I had to ask three times and eventually she said 'a korso of what?' in English. I asked my girlfriend what the problem was and it turns out you can't just say you want a pint, you always have to say 'a pint of beer'. But to my English mind it was completely obvious what I wanted! Some of these foreigners are just stubborn!

[copydude]

There are some comments I would echo here.

In an international environment, particularly somewhere like Holland or Belgium, not too difficult to get by. Even doing an English language job, you need native speak to keep up with the office politics and so on.

I learned Dutch when I was 40. Easy grammar. And I was surprised how much better languages are taught now than when I went to school. You can learn quite quickly.

France is very sniffy if you're not fluent. I could work in Brussels with my French, but it wasn't good enough for Paris.

[swissy_fit]

copydude, on 05 October 2011 - 01:08 PM, said:

There are some comments I would echo here.

In an international environment, particularly somewhere like Holland or Belgium, not too difficult to get by. Even doing an English language job, you need native speak to keep up with the office politics and so on.

I learned Dutch when I was 40. Easy grammar. And I was surprised how much better languages are taught now than when I went to school. You can learn quite quickly.

France is very sniffy if you're not fluent. I could work in Brussels with my French, but it wasn't good enough for Paris.

Paris is not France.
Beautiful city, tosspot population, whose only saving grace is that the women wear very expensive knickers.
Mind you, to find that out, you have to be fluent.....

[singlemalt]

Never too late to learn a language as long as the desire is there. Few years ago wife's cousin learnt German for work, he was in his early 40's. He's now so fluent that when in Germany people think he's German! Apparently he even dreams in German. He does have the brain the size of a small moon though.