Learning a foreign language???

Question

What are important things to be a good language learner? In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of learning English? Please tell me then....

Answer 1

I think its important to want to learn the language. Most kids who take lanuguages in school hate it beacseu they dont see the benifit and its boring. If you haev a reason to take it or a need beacsue your going to soemwhere, or moving to somewhere you force yourself tto learn it out of sort of survival. Right now in the world there is a huuuge advantage for learning english. I was travelling in south america last year, and when I stayed in hostels there would be 12 people and we would sit around at night and just talk.. and even though they were all from different countries they all knew perfect english. They alwyas told me it was a necesity beacseu everything in the world is primarily in english and it makes life so much easier. I always felt guilty before I learned spanish that I could only speak english yet some of the europeans I met were working on their 5th language liek it was nothing. Its definatly super important especially with how close the world is today with communication. Diplomatically and for the future it is benificial and more convienient if everyone knows a few languages. The only disadvantage I can see of learning english is the fact that if you are born into it, it is the most common language and more universal so you arnt forced to learn any other languages and i think thats a huge loss, and almost lazy of us.

Answer 2

Learning english can be a big advantage, given how the world looks right now. Disadvantage: it's pretty tough. It's my mother tongue (which I suppose I'm lucky for) but there's a lot of irregularities, a lot of idioms, and a lot of words we just make up on the spot (normalcy is a good one).
But on general language-learning: don't be afraid about making mistakes! It's the only way you'll learn. Books and notes can take you places, but you really have to speak it and hear it spoken to get the full effect of how things work.


And about the first poster: yeah, it is a bit bad that our society (state-side) is pretty neutral on learning new languages (I'm trying to learn spanish and now russian to compensate), but don't feel bad about europeans learning more languages than us. French, spanish, and italian are all romance languages, stemming from a common ancestor. Making the jump from one to another probably isn't that hard if they're all in the same language family.