The True Difficulty of Language Learning: When Things Are Not The Way They Seem

If you know me even a slight bit, you know I love learning languages. And I love to do it the natural way: by absorbing the language (through listening and reading, but also generally immersing myself into the culture) and producing (saying at least ‘Hello’ to the speakers of the language if I can).

I definitely have to acknowledge that my unhinged personality helps with this a little bit: I am way too extroverted and the fact that I enjoy communication is just very useful in practice of producing the language. Either way, I have had an insanely positive feedback whenever I try to speak a language to the native speakers. People usually really admire my effort and want to help me, and that has pushed me even further, and made me love the effort of learning languages. As you can notice, I am very reward-oriented person in this regard.

But this blog is not just my personal reflection, it is about languages. No matter the reasons, I spent a lot of time in exposure to different languages. And I would like to describe the real problems of learning a language. If you have learned some language you know the inherent difficulties: you have to remember a lot of words, sometimes you have to learn a new alphabet, you must know how to pronounce sounds that are not naturally available in your language. You also have to train your mind not to use the other languages that you know, which becomes surprisingly difficult if learning languages within the same group (most notably for me Dutch and German).

All of these become quickly evident when trying to learn the language in the traditional text-book-spoon-fed-grammar fashion. My personal learning style, however, is to cut to the chase and try to learn the language directly by listening and speaking. I try to achieve fluency as fast as possible: this kind of learning relies highly on using intuition. But there are many more subtle challenges that defy intuition and I would like to comment on those in this blog. Let me explain what I mean.

False Friends & Casting Between Languages

Did you know that the word ‘meeting’ in Russian refers to a public demonstration? I would have never guessed this, and only by asking a Russian coworker in Russian, if he is joining for the ‘meeting’ (for the lack of knowledge of a better word in Russian) has given me the opportunity to learn about this. I am sure that yourself you have come across many situations where guessing just does not really work. I love to speak to Spanish and Italian people: these languages are in some sense so close to English, which allows the native speakers often ‘cast’ the word from their mother tongue to English and expect to get a pass. A nice example is when a Spaniard asks if you could give him an ‘explication’ of how something works (when they are of course referring to explanation). This is one of the inherent difficulties of learning languages, you have to learn to not trust yourself: what may be similar, might be meaning something completely different.

Expressions Without Translation

Sometimes you have the expression on the tip of your tongue, you might translate it by Englishifying it, by Spanishifying it or whatever, but sometimes there is just no way to translate! (ChatGPT complains that the correct form is ‘Anglicizing’ and ‘Hispanicizing’, but I chose to ignore this.) The concept can only be described in a different language, but the sense, the meaning of the word, just does not really exist in a different language. My favorite example for this certainly is the Dutch word ‘gezelligheid’. It could most closely be translated as ‘coziness’. It refers to those moments, when you are with people and you just have this good feeling of being together. It can be just two people, family, or a big group, but the feeling that you feel, the situation can only be described as such. Learning about such new concepts is for me one of the most enriching things about language. You literally expand your horizons with new concepts. You – quite literally – learn to see things you have not seen before: thanks to their language Russian speakers see two versions of blue, that are mostly indistinguishable for the rest of us.

Completely Different Grammatical Constructions

For most us the way we start speaking a language is to word-for-word translate sentences from our main communicational tongue to the new language. This makes sense, you just learn mappings of singleton words, or simple phrases, and you piece a sentence together. I find it very interesting when this approach fails. One of the experiences when it stopped working for me was when I started learning Spanish, as the language expresses the subject is through conjugation of verbs (instead of saying “I love you.” they say “Te quiero” which would be more like “You I-love”).

This is quite a major change one has to internalize to speak Spanish, one you have to tackle quite fast at the beginning otherwise the progress forward is slow. Sometimes, however, different constructions are way more sneaky. One that took me personally a long time was the expression of similarity in Dutch. In English, I would say “A is similar to B”, however, the Dutch language usually expresses this using a verb “A lijkt op B”, which would be more like “A resembles B”. The difficulty in learning to say this is not that there are two new words, it is more that expressing the same thing now takes a completely different form, which is complicated to parse into longer sentences.

Transferring Constructions & Idioms

The previously mentioned phenomenon becomes quickly apparent when one knows the native tongue of a person and also the new language. Example I would like to give is when I was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Germany. He said he was taking a course, but ‘it was just not making fun’. In English, one would saying ‘I was not having fun’, but the Germans use the expression ‘Es macht Spass.’ to put the source of the fun instead of ourselves onto the activity. The way of expressing things seems to be very difficult to unlearn in our brain.

Another example comes from translating idioms. In international environment it happens often that when trying to be expressive somebody says: “In my language we say…” which makes no sense to anybody else, and then has to be explained. For example, in Czech when somebody pisses you off, you would say that they are ‘drinking your blood’. Saying this in English sounds very creepy though!

Lastly there are just expressions with fixed meaning that is not directly literal and has to be learned. I remember the day I understood that the Dutch mean with ‘Weet ik veel.’ (literally ‘I know a lot.’) that they actually do not know what somebody is talking about, or they do not care. This I really could not have guessed from learning the individual words.

Subtle pronunciations Differences

Three years in the Netherlands, the measure of my proficiency has become the time until I was asked ‘So where are you actually from?’ The grammar and idioms were there, but there was still something missing: the pronunciation. I still cannot pronounce the combination of vowels “eu”, as for example in “keuken” which I pronounce the same as “koken”. Which is terribly wrong. Research shows however, that if you were not exposed to some sounds as a child you cannot produce them later on (apparently this is called perceptual narrowing). Most recently I had my mind blown by a Dutch friend who explained to me that ‘v’ and ‘f’ in Dutch are not pronounced the same. I would have never guessed: for me the way the Dutch pronounce it sound both as ‘f’ from my Czech mother tongue.

Emphasis and Intonation

Last, but certainly not the least of all phenomena is emphasis. This has struck me when my Spanish friend told me that I speak Spanish like English, and that is not good. That I need to emphasize more. And this makes sense, you would not expect Norwegian and Italian to be spoken in the same way (notably in the second case, you would be more expressive). And example from Dutch for me is the implicit use of sighing ‘he’ as the end of sentences when you expect some reaction, as in ‘Lekker, he?’ (‘Cool, huh?’). This needs to be acquired to achieve proper fluency.

Conclusion: C3 proficiency

This is my short account of issues when trying to achieve fluency in another tongue. It takes a lot more than reading a textbook, one has to really live it. Knowing the language means knowing the people, their expectations and their culture. When this is done properly one feels the language not only rolling off their tongue but also beating in their heart (which can lead to another set of problems but that is another story). You start to understand why something is funny, because the humour that comes from the language just directly speaks to you.

I call this the ‘C3 Level’ (as adapted to Common European Framework of Reference for Languages). It is when your comprehension is so good you have no trouble arguing over the phone, whispering in the lecture, quick gossip in fast-paced emotional conversation or following an exchange in the gym changing rooms (that is the hardest for me, tends to be chaotic, very reaction-based on short sentences, usually held among multiple people). The final step towards glory comes when you also understand puns or word-based jokes: somebody just messes up a part of a word on purpose, and you are on the floor laughing.

This is the proficiency us language learners are only dreaming of.