learner124

Patience is definitely key and most people who only speak one language have no patience for someone who partially knows their language to talk to them. I've been learning Spanish and traveling in Latin America and the only people I can successfully have actual conversations with in Spanish are ones who also know English because they seem to understand what it's like to have trouble expressing themselves. I'll speak in Spanish and they listen even though I'm slower than a normal person and I'll do the same if they talk back to me in English.

I think spanish and English could end up merging in some ways honestly. There's already so many words of similar origin, geographical proximity in the Americas and already the phenomenon of Spanglish has existed a long time. I think it would take at least a few hundred years though.

The written form of English and the way words are pronounced are so different it must be a nightmare to learn in some ways. I can recall when I was progressing through school even often seeing written words that I had never heard before and having no idea to pronounce them and would ask someone and the answer would be like, oh that's a French word and the 'g' is silent ( for example a word like benign). It's actually pretty bizarre to think about it now but realizing this has given me even more respect for people who learn English as a second language. Honestly I kind of feel like the language could be simplified and made more efficient for future generations and non native speakers to learn.

But you still had to have conversations with people to fully learn right? As someone learning Spanish I think I've hit a hard limit in terms of of my progress from just consuming media in Spanish and decided I need to start taking one on one tutoring lessons to really continue my progress.

Can people really fully learn a language this way? I've been learning Spanish and taken this approach of consuming media (music and videos) and I'm even at a level where I can follow a well spoken Spanish speaker in a video but I have realized I'm still at a beginner stage in terms of having actual conversations with people. I don't think most people can really fully learn a language without a good deal of direct conversation with other speakers of the language.