{"id":2896,"date":"2014-12-22T08:46:59","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T13:46:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=2896"},"modified":"2020-10-02T13:04:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T17:04:20","slug":"10-daily-struggles-of-learning-a-third-language-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2014\/12\/22\/10-daily-struggles-of-learning-a-third-language-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Daily Struggles of Learning a Third Language and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guest Post by Jakob Gibbons<\/em><\/p>\n

On my blog Globalect<\/em><\/a>, I share thoughts and stories about language, travel, and the many places where the two intersect. Lately my focus has been on language learning, as I\u2019m working on my third language (Spanish) while getting ready for my upcoming backpacking trip through Latin America. I learned my second language (Dutch) in about two years, which already made my head a confusing place to live, and now as I\u2019m working on rapidly learning language number three, it\u2019s starting to look like an Escher painting in there.<\/p>\n

Here are 10 daily struggles I\u2019m going through at the moment that most language learning addicts will frustratedly recognize from their mental I-seriously-can\u2019t-evens with learning a third language (or a fourth, or a tenth\u2026)<\/p>\n

1. After getting used to cycling through two different words for the same thing, you suddenly have to search through three or more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCould you hand me that\u2026 uh\u2026 you know\u2026 beker<\/em>? Right there? You know, the, um\u2026 beaker? No? The\u2026 wait\u2026 taza<\/em>! Oh, no\u2026 That thing you drink water out of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suddenly your head is lost in a maze of the English words you use with your friends and family, the words for the same things in a few other languages, and their awkwardly literal and nonsensical translations back into English or cognate almost-the-same-but-no-not-really equivalents (like \u2018beaker\u2019 for Dutch beker<\/em>, which just means \u2018cup\u2019). Suddenly simple social interactions are absolutely exhausting.<\/p>\n

2. You fill in sentences in one foreign language with words from another (and don\u2019t even realize it).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s like your brain is a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The master bed is obviously for English (or whatever your first language is), but all the newcomer languages get shoved into the same crowded guest bedroom instead of getting rooms of their own up there. Voulez-vous aller \u00e0 la Bekleidungsgesch\u00e4ft? <\/em>Because French and German are basically the same thing at the end of the day anyways.<\/p>\n

3. Prepositions plague your entire existence.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"I<\/a>

I spent about ten minutes staring at question number 2 on Transparent Language’s Spanish Proficiency test, reading it as “Rosa and Miguel from ____ cinema” (Dutch ‘van’ = ‘from’) and muttering angrily about how the question just didn\u2019t make any sense.<\/p><\/div>\n

Prepositions are usually tiny two- and three-letter words, and a lot of them are such basic combinations of letters that they appear in many different languages and mean different things. En <\/em>means \u2018and\u2019 in Dutch but \u2018in\u2019 in Spanish. De<\/em> is \u2018the\u2019 in Dutch but \u2018of\/from\u2019 in Spanish, which is van <\/em>in Dutch, but that same three-letter word means \u2018they go\u2019 in Spanish. Spanish uses contra <\/em>for English \u2018against\u2019, where Dutch uses tegen<\/em>, but tegen <\/em>could also mean \u2018by\/before\u2019 as in \u2018by nine o\u2019clock\u2019 (tegen 9 <\/em>uur) or \u2018to\u2019 as in \u2018talking to\u2019 (praten tegen<\/em>), whereas in Spanish you never finish a paper contra las dos <\/em>or hablar contra un hombre<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve got three or more languages all staking their own claims on these mini-words, not only do you start mixing them up between languages, but you suddenly wonder if your English uses of words like \u2018to\u2019 and \u2018at\u2019 sound right to other native speakers.<\/p>\n

4. Your phone\u2019s autocorrect goes absolutely berserk.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Autocorrect<\/a>

Autocorrect attacks in the middle of my Spanglish conversation. My poor phone is as confused as I am.<\/p><\/div>\n

Suddenly every text message is bi- or trilingual without you even meaning it to be, even though it makes zero sense. \u201cThat\u2019s so cool, omgeving!<\/em>\u201d \u201cHave you heard the new se\u00f1or <\/em>by Taylor Swift? It\u2019s zo <\/em>catchy, I cu\u00e1nto <\/em>get it out of my head.\u201d Your friends start screening your messages for foreign characters and eventually give up trying altogether.<\/p>\n

My phone insists that every time I type \u2018btw\u2019 for \u2018by the way\u2019, what I really <\/em>meant was btw-verhoging<\/em>, or \u2018increase on value-added tax\u2019. Each day my c\u00f3mo<\/em>s and donde<\/em>s are seizing territory formerly reserved for my come<\/em>s and donderdag<\/em>s (\u2018Thursday\u2019), so that no text in any language is complete without at least a cameo from each of the\u00a0other two.<\/p>\n

5. You invent really weird false cognates (that no one understands unless they speak all your languages).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dutch-speaking Spanish learners (or the other way around) get the gifts of gratis <\/em>and parasol<\/em>, but just about any other resemblance between the two languages is a social landmine waiting to be detonated. Dutch duur<\/em> looks a lot like Spanish duro<\/em>, but you can imagine some of the odd sentences that would come out of confusing these two words meaning \u2018expensive\u2019 and \u2018hard\u2019. I\u2019ve asked for a carta <\/em>at a restaurant in Barcelona (kaart <\/em>is \u2018menu\u2019 in Dutch) when I simply wanted a men\u00fa<\/em>, which was fairly harmless, but you certainly don\u2019t want to fall victim to using the Germanic side of your brain to order a v\u00e1ter <\/em>(a refreshing glass of toilet) in a restaurant in the Spanish-speaking world.<\/p>\n

Somewhere along the way I picked up suceso<\/em>, which looks a lot like the Dutch interjection succes<\/em>, meaning \u2018good luck\u2019, but as far as wishing Spanish speakers suceso <\/em>goes, you could just yell \u201cevent!\u201d or \u201cincident!\u201d at English-speaking passersby and you\u2019d be saying the same thing.
\n6. Sometimes you can\u2019t figure out what language you\u2019re reading for a painfully confusing second.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you\u2019re just expecting Portuguese, and even though that website is in Tagalog, you read the first two lines six times trying to make sense of it in Portuguese before your brain makes the jump.<\/p>\n

7. You use the word order of your second language in a third one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you learn a Romance language with lots of inflections, you\u2019re blessed with relatively forgiving word order, but Germanic languages aren\u2019t quite so easy. Verbs in Dutch and German, for example, tend to come at the end of a sentence, and prepositional phrases go in weirdly specific places in the middle, yielding sentences like \u201cYesterday went I, after my grocery shopping finished was, very quickly to the school my kids up to pick.\u201d This word order sounds as crazy in other languages as it does in English, but sometimes your brain is just like, damn it, I worked so hard to learn how to do this, I\u2019m not stopping now.<\/p>\n

8. Thinking in your second language\/talking yourself in your second language when you study a third.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is there maybe a switch somewhere in your head that just turns the Mother Tongue setting on and off? Maybe there\u2019s just a shelf in your mind labeled \u2018not English\u2019 and you store everything else there. Suddenly your strong foreign language declares itself the governor of this new brain territory and you find yourself thinking and muttering to yourself in your second language while studying a third or fourth. \u201cOh, yyyyyy como se dice \u2018bicicleta\u2019 en el alem\u00e1n? No puedo recordarme\u2026<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

9. Having a small stroke every time someone asks you how you say something in English.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s this in English?\u201d is the native English-speaking multilingual\u2019s nightmare, because your answer is nearly always either 1) I have no idea, 2) an entire paragraph of English explanation that could have been easily replaced by one perfect synonym that you just can\u2019t think of right now, or, most embarrassingly, 3) that word in every other non-English language you know but, sorry, can\u2019t find the English word right now.<\/p>\n

10. Really appreciating your second language.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As you struggle through an inarticulate, almost-interesting conversation in Russian, you can\u2019t stop thinking, UGH NO BUT I COULD TELL YOU THIS SO MUCH BETTER IN ITALIAN. Suddenly your stable second language is a cushy, warm, fluffy home that you can\u2019t wait to run back to and take refuge in whenever you encounter a challenge out here in this big, mean, linguistically confusing world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

Guest Post by Jakob Gibbons On my blog Globalect, I share thoughts and stories about language, travel, and the many places where the two intersect. Lately my focus has been on language learning, as I\u2019m working on my third language (Spanish) while getting ready for my upcoming backpacking trip through Latin America. I learned my…<\/p>\n

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