anyone have trouble with foreign languages in school

[cduval04]

hello,

 

I am a 25 yo female in my 7th year of college....(haha I know I'll graduate by the time I'm 30) and I havent taken a language since 2nd grade when I was traumatized by TQ2 the french robot...(still remember how to count to 10 in french though ) I needed a language requirement, my mom suggested latin since many english words come from latin and also since I am a very literal person (science, fact, numbers minded, IT major)......so I am at my college on full acedemic scholarship I dont pay a penny....I graduated from community college with my AS & a 3.92GPA...I got one B the whole 4 years I was at comm college...the rest were A's

 

I am trying pretty hard at this class, we have a quiz every week, and so far we have had 3 and I have failed all of them miserably with a 47% a 15% (no not a typo) and a 48%. we have about 13 quizzes and they account for 30% of the grade. I thought that since I was doing fine on the HW that it was just test taking anxiety, so I took the third one after class in my profs office and still failed....the weird thing is most of the other students seem to be doing fine...(usually it is the other way around, I have been asked by profs to tutor students on more than one occasion)

 

so I found this article while researching memory (oh another thing the human brain fascinates me so I spend a lot of my free time just reading about it) and interestingly it specifically mentioned the tourettes brain in relation to learning a language stating the following:

 

"Although aspects of procedural memory may be abnormal in Tourette’s, declarative memory (memory of facts and events) remains largely spared. For example, “rule-governed” knowledge (used in language, for example, to combine parts of words together according to the grammatical rules of the language), which involves the procedural memory system, is affected, whereas “idiosyncratic” knowledge (which allows us to learn that a word is linked to an object), which depends on declarative memory and is learned and processed in the hippocampus and other temporal lobe areas in the brain, is not."

 

is my TS to blame for failing this class when I am trying hard, attending every class and still not getting it? I have never had really any trouble let alone this amount of trouble with any course I have ever taken.

 

I was just wondering if there were any TS adults out there that remember having a hard time with a language in school, or any parents of TS children that recall their children struggling with a language......it just doesn't make sense.

Edited October 3, 2011 by cduval04

[Chemar]

Hi

I can only speak for my son but he was an A student in Latin and he has Genetic TS

[cduval04]

Apparently I'm just a dumb a** then.....congrats to ur son he must be very smart....Latin is hard...takes a VERY good memory

[Chemar]

Not sure why you would make a comment like that?

Your question was specific to those with TS and asked if others with TS were struggling with foreign languages, and so I answered from our experience

 

For some people, languages come easy yet they struggle with other things

My son is not mathematical at all, but excelled in languages

Struggling with math therefore does not make him dumb..... or you dumb for struggling with Latin

[cduval04]

Not sure why you would make a comment like that?

Your question was specific to those with TS and asked if others with TS were struggling with foreign languages, and so I answered from our experience

 

For some people, languages come easy yet they struggle with other things

My son is not mathematical at all, but excelled in languages

Struggling with math therefore does not make him dumb..... or you dumb for struggling with Latin

 

 

sorry that was unnecessary....I just tend to be very self-deprecating b/c I feel like If I try hard enough, I should be able understand whatever the subject may be...

[justinekno]

I have two sons, one with tics and the other does not. My son who does not have tics is in his senior year of college. In high school, he was an honors student and took Spanish with no problem. Then he took Latin in his sophomore year of high school, thinking it would be a useful language to learn. He loved the language and even went to Rome on a school trip. Then came college where he had to take a foreign langauge and he assumed taking Greek would be a good transition from Latin. Oh boy, was he wrong! It was the longest semester ever. No matter how much he studied or how many times he met with the professor, he just couldn't get it. He was frustrated, like you, because stuff had come pretty easily to him before this class. It was definitely a life lesson for him. He ended up going back to Spanish the following semester to meet his language requirement and I stopped getting daily texts about hard Greek was!

 

My point in telling you our story is that it doesn't have to be about how smart you are or if you have TS or not, sometimes learning something new (in this case learning a foreign language) is just not for you. You've clearly proven how bright you are by the grades and choices you have made up to this point. Now it's time to prove your maturity by realizing that no one can "ace" everything and maybe it's time to look for other options or just buckle down (meet with you professor or advisor for suggestions, inquire about tutoring) and do the best you can and then move on.

 

 

Not sure why you would make a comment like that?

Your question was specific to those with TS and asked if others with TS were struggling with foreign languages, and so I answered from our experience

 

For some people, languages come easy yet they struggle with other things

My son is not mathematical at all, but excelled in languages

Struggling with math therefore does not make him dumb..... or you dumb for struggling with Latin

 

 

sorry that was unnecessary....I just tend to be very self-deprecating b/c I feel like If I try hard enough, I should be able understand whatever the subject may be...

[cduval04]

I have two sons, one with tics and the other does not. My son who does not have tics is in his senior year of college. In high school, he was an honors student and took Spanish with no problem. Then he took Latin in his sophomore year of high school, thinking it would be a useful language to learn. He loved the language and even went to Rome on a school trip. Then came college where he had to take a foreign langauge and he assumed taking Greek would be a good transition from Latin. Oh boy, was he wrong! It was the longest semester ever. No matter how much he studied or how many times he met with the professor, he just couldn't get it. He was frustrated, like you, because stuff had come pretty easily to him before this class. It was definitely a life lesson for him. He ended up going back to Spanish the following semester to meet his language requirement and I stopped getting daily texts about hard Greek was!

 

My point in telling you our story is that it doesn't have to be about how smart you are or if you have TS or not, sometimes learning something new (in this case learning a foreign language) is just not for you. You've clearly proven how bright you are by the grades and choices you have made up to this point. Now it's time to prove your maturity by realizing that no one can "ace" everything and maybe it's time to look for other options or just buckle down (meet with you professor or advisor for suggestions, inquire about tutoring) and do the best you can and then move on.

 

Thank you Justine that really helped, deep down I do know everyone has their strengths and weakneses TS or no TS but it is just hard for me when I just don't get something even when I try to get it. I have been hard on myself my whole life it's just part of who I am, but I gotta tone down the self beating if I'm going to succeed in life...I know that...it's just easy to forget.

Edited October 11, 2011 by cduval04

[guy123]

I'm kind of a language nerd so let me give you my 2 cents.

 

When I am interested in a language I find that I learn the words/grammar/syntax much easier.

 

When I'm not really into it, it feels like a chore.

 

What is giving you trouble with foreign language?

 

- Is the grammar hard?

- Is the pronunciation difficult?

- Do you have trouble understanding it when it's being spoken, even if you know all the words in the sentence?

- Does it use a different writing system that is giving you trouble?

- Does it have some aspect that doesn't exist in English (such as noun declensions, pictograph writing, intonation-based words, etc.) that you just can't wrap your brain around?

 

I think there has been some research done suggesting that your ears "learn" to hear certain sounds during your youth (brain development). By a certain age (I forgot what age), this part of the brain basically has an idea of how words sound, and of what sounds it will recognize. Since not every language has the same sounds, and even when languages have similar sounds, they are still different, sometimes people have trouble "hearing" other languages if they are significantly different from their own. Let me give you an example. I have studied Korean on and off for over 10 years. The sounds in Korean are pretty different from English. For example, Korean has 3 different versions of the hard "G" sound (as in the word "golf," not like the G in "general"). To my ears, they all sound the same. I understand the difference, one is normal, one is tensed, and one is aspirated, but I cannot *hear* the difference. If I try really hard I can sometimes tell them apart if the person is saying them by themselves, but in the middle of a sentence I have no idea which it is. Similarly, I cannot really pronounce them properly, either. Because I grew up speaking English, my brain only understands one hard G sound. So when I try to learn a language that has multiple versions that are subtly different, my brain is like "whoa, what do you mean those are different? They were all G!"

 

You'll also see this phenomenon in people who learned English as a second language and English contains distinctions that their native languages don't have. For example, some people for whom English is a second language cannot hear (or pronounce) the difference between short "i" (as in "slip") and long "E" (as in "sleep"). But to us, as native English speakers, those two sounds are totally different and we would never get them confused. My Spanish teacher in high school told us she couldn't tell the difference between "V" and "B" (they're sorta similar in the Spanish that is spoken in Chile where she was from). She said sometimes she would mess up and say "bowel" when she meant "vowel."

 

So I think that's something that can make foreign languages hard. I had similar problems in Korean and Spanish, both of which slur everything together, at least to my ears. I didn't really have much trouble understanding spoken German or Japanese because, for whatever reason, my ears are like "yeah, those sounds make sense. I can hear them."

 

Spanish was the first foreign language I studied and I remember being overwhelmed at all the verb conjugations. I was like "what is going on? English doesn't do this. Why does Spanish have to do it?" So when I would be writing or saying a sentence, I would have to stop and think "ok, how do I conjugate this verb correctly here." And Spanish has two different past tenses. I was like "come on, English only has one! What do you need two for?" So I'd have to be like "ok, which past tense do I use here?"

 

Languages can also be hard if they are grammatically or syntactically different from your native language. For example, German nouns do all this goofy stuff that English nouns don't do, so not only do you have to learn new words, you also have to learn new concepts. The form of the noun changes based on what part of speech the word is. Read "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain for a comical (but true) look at this.

 

Russian does the same thing but it's even more complicated.

 

English doesn't have gender. Spanish, French and Italian have two genders (nouns are either masculine or feminine). German and Russian have 3 (masculine, feminine, neuter). So if you're learning one of those languages and your only experience is from English, you have to remember which gender each noun is because it changes how you use the words in the sentences.

 

See how I just go on and on about this? Foreign languages are interesting to me but I'm kind of a nerd like that. If for whatever reason you don't like foreign languages, that might be part of your trouble. People tend to struggle with subjects they don't like. It's hard to be motivated for something when you just don't care.

 

What language are you studying and what part of it is giving you difficulty? Maybe I can make some suggestions or something to help you out.