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A questionnaire - yudantaiteki - 2011-09-18
And you don't even really need to "blame" yourself -- it's an unrealistic idea that you'll ever be able to do things in a second language as well as your native one. Of course there are a small number of people who develop this ability but most people will not. I've said this before, but the best way to rate your own language ability is how well you can do things you want to do. Get rid of arbitrary classifications or extremely vague and wide-open goals (like "read anything in Japanese as well as my native language") and focus on what you really want to do with the language.
A questionnaire - Nagareboshi - 2011-09-18
yudantaiteki Wrote:And you don't even really need to "blame" yourself -- it's an unrealistic idea that you'll ever be able to do things in a second language as well as your native one. Of course there are a small number of people who develop this ability but most people will not. I've said this before, but the best way to rate your own language ability is how well you can do things you want to do. Get rid of arbitrary classifications or extremely vague and wide-open goals (like "read anything in Japanese as well as my native language") and focus on what you really want to do with the language.Exactly! For me learning is a way to unlock another part of the world. And Japanese became more than a key ...
My goal is to experience people, country, media, books ... in the original language. Not only in Japanese, but also in those languages I learned in the past, that I can enjoy all of that whenever I want to. No need to say I am advanced in this and that language. Come to think of it its rather stupid to classify oneself as being Beginner, Lower Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, Pre-Advanced, Advanced. It shows or it doesn't. And so someone can come and talk to a "Beginner," and the person comes to the conclusion: "Wow! You are pretty advanced for being a beginner."
On the light side of classifications - if someone sets a goal, and the goal is native like fluency in all skills - like I do, this only means the person is in for a whole life of learning a language, and by using this language, is learning about new things and gets to know new ways of thinking. In the end it doesn't matter if we are self-proclaimed beginners, intermediate, advanced, because we cannot look into the future and say how far we can get. One might stop, the other might move on to other languages, nobody can tell. So we can happily say where we are now, but it doesn't mean anything, to anyone else than us.
A questionnaire - merlin.codex - 2011-09-18
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