Asperger's and second-language acquisition

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Japanese for about 5 years, using a primarily input-based system. Consequently, I can understand far more verbally than I can speak. Basically, I use the recommendations at Antimoon and AJATT primarily, though I have been trying to increase my output recently. Because of social shyness, and the fact that I often prefer to be at home, I don't get many opportunities to speak.

I'm currently going through a brute force Chinese character-learning system using a combination of a list of the common use Chinese characters and various spaced repetition systems*. I find that since I've started, my reading andI writing ability have improved a lot.

Other than Japanese, I've made halting attempts at language learning; I ultimately took a different approach to Japanese and now find I've developed a sense of loyalty to the language and culture. In my senior year of high school, I took Latin I as an elective and did really well. I enjoyed being nerdy with the conjugations and declensions in both Latin and Japanese, but I found in the long run the deliberate study seemed to hurt my ability to learn the language, so I tried this different approach.

It hasn't been perfect, but I don't think I would know nearly as much had I continued with the old method.

*It's on wikipedia.

I speak 4 languages, English (natively), German, Spanish and Russian. Russian is the newest, Spanish I got bored of so I've not worked on it in a little while now, and German I'm fluent in. I have an easier time reading than listening, but I think that's generally the same for most people, whether they're NT or on the spectrum. I've always been the best student in all of the language classes I've taken - in my Russian class last semester, I didn't do any of the homework, and still got full credit because the professor knew that I knew everything I needed to and more. I had to pace myself to not totally outstrip the rest of the class, too. I did all of my language learning for Russian -during- that class - I didn't study at home, just went in, read through the chapter really fast, and then the rest of the unit was cake.

Also, my German professor, who I had for 11 semesters, told me my German improved the most out of anyone she's ever taught.

I have this problem in English. I'm a native French speaker.

I read scientific books in English, yet I have a hard time following an English language movie, unless it's subtitled.

Japanese is less of a problem though (I learned it long time ago).

Having a dialogue in a foreign language (Spanish, English) is a pain to me, even though I'm fluent as far as reading/writing is concerned.

I prefer English because of it's structure and vocabulary. Norwegian (my language) is crap. But still, learning languages is a piece of cake. The more "to the point" structure of a language, the easier it is to learn. But if we enter the realm of logical languages (math, computers, science etc.) then we can start talking business.

I speak Swedish and English fluently. Started learning English when I was 10 or so. I was also quite good at Spanish when I was younger but I sort of lost interest in it, so now I pretty much only remember some words and phrases. I understand it quite well when people speak it though.

I too am an avid language-learner; I studied French in secondary school for 3 years, began teaching myself Spanish at age 9 and I currently am still studying it, took Mandarin classes throughout most of last year, learn some basic German phrases and learn both Biblical and Modern Hebrew...I for sure can say that I have a good grasp on basic conversational Spanish and have pretty good reading/listening/writing/grammar skills. But the speaking 80% of the time goes HORRIBLY WRONG.- I guess I'm guilty of over-thinking things, as well as trying to process the incoming words of the person I'm speaking with...

...My social skills certainly don't help, either. :/

My English skills are more fluent than my German skills, and German is my mother tongue.

i always thought i should be good at learning languages because i am preternatually good at my native tongue, english. but i really struggle, especially with accents.

when i was in grad school the first time around, we had to gain a "translating competency" in a foreign language. i chose german (the teacher was great). one thing i learned is it's much easier to translate any language into your native tongue than the other way around, and typically easier to translate the written word, probably because it's less subject to regional accents and enunciation, as well as give you more time to think about the meaning.

for some reason i seem to have a natural ability to pronounce things in russian. if i learn a russian word and speak it to a natural russion speaker, i inevitably get a very positive response about how natural i sound. whereas if i try spanish or italian or german i'm sure i sound like a total american hick.

i wish, wish wish i had a natural talent for languages. i've had friends who can speak 6 or 7 languages. it's just so hard for me to learn new vocabularies. yet i can decipher very difficult "english" words based on my intuitive understanding of roots. i'm not sure why i can't shift that over to another tongue with the same basic roots and yet i can easily grasp a slavic dialect. forget norwegian or danish though. SCARY!

Daniel Tammet is an autistic language savant and also talks about it. For example he learned Islandic in a week.

Usually the passive vocabulary memory is much bigger than the active one. Also many languages are related to each other, so that some languages are using some similar words.

for example German and English:
comparing colors:

similar:
red - rot
blue - blau
green - grün
orange - orange

different:
black - schwarz
yellow - gelb

I wish there were literature on this topic, because I can certainly use some help myself. I am a native English speaker living in Mexico with a Mexican partner. I started learning Spanish two and a half years ago at age 48, and my reading of it is now good enough that I do professional translation (Spanish to English). I'm also pretty good at writing it. I'm a grammar hound in both English and Spanish, and my vocabulary has grown a lot.

But listening and speaking...¡Aye carumba! After six good Spanish classes, two and a half years of total immersion every time I go outside, and many conversations with my Mexican girl, my verbal comprehension and speaking are no more than basic. It is all just too fast for me. Like others have said here, the most difficult situations are those with lots of background noise and with really fast speakers. Also, some accents just kill me.

I have heard that it's pretty common for people to be better at reading/writing than at speaking/listening. With reading/writing, you can go at your own pace and you can see where one word ends and another begins. But I think my AS definitely contributes to my difficulty with speaking/listening to Spanish. Even in English, I excel in the written word (I'm a professional writer) but have really had to work at speaking and listening well. (I'm actually a decent public speaker now, but that took years of hard work.) I seem to have some audio processing problems that interfere with my comprehension of the spoken word, especially when there is background noise. And the same social shyness that often makes me tongue-tied in English can really clam me up in Spanish.

So, I'll just keep plugging away and hoping that the light will come on soon!

My first language is Spanish because of my parents. I used to be better at Spanish, but now I'm better at English. Right now I am too scared to speak Spanish. I've tried, but I ended up stuttering. Apparently I didn't have an accent. I have learned other languages. In Spanish I'm better at understanding spoken Spanish if it's the right dialect. In other languages I find it easier to listen if I'm famiar with all the words they use. If they use a lot of unfamiliar words I find it easier to read because I can easily look up all the words I don't know. I often have this problem where I can understand what someone is saying in a foreign language, but I can't translate it into English. This caused a lot of problems in Latin class.

Since I'm from Norway, English is mandatory from the age of 6-7. So a second language comes more naturally to me than it might do to a lot of other people. I've grown up with subtitles rather than dubbing, so that has also increased my understanding of foreign languages. I think tv, media, movies and music has had a huge impact on my English skills. Other than that I've had four years of French and one year of Spanish, but I can't communicate in either of these languages, except for some basic phrases. I know a little Turkish as well, but the language I know the best is German, in which I am self-taught (English not includes).

Languages is a passion of mine, and I find great pride in being able to speak foreign languages (although my knowledge is limited. It always is, isn't it?) My problem lies with the grammar and sentence construction, but I find that people understand you, for the most part, even if the grammar isn't perfect, but I'd like to speak the languages correctly.

Most people who study a language, even on their own, get more written input than spoken input. The spoken input most people get is usually predictible, and may be repeated -- like playing tapes or dialogues over and over -- while written input tends to be more varied, since books or readings are usually longer. They're cheaper and easier to produce and more common, for most languages.

The vast majority of people acquire languages just fine, but do not learn them very well. There is a small proportion of people who can learn languages and become fluent through memorization of grammar rules and vocabulary. Most people cannot (as evidenced by the results of most foreign language classes in the US today, in terms of lasting fluency for the majority of students. Ask anyone in the line at Wal-Mart to say something in whatever language they took in high school if you don't believe it.)

Everyone with normal neurological function (even Aspies ) can acquire a language through massive comprehensible input. That could be oral or written, but everyone can acquire a language through oral input. After all, that's precisely how you acquired your first language. There is no "learning styles" distinction in language acquisition -- only in langauge **learning**. Understanding the distinction between these two ideas is crucially important in thinking about how to get someone to become proficient in a language.

The "immersion" thing is a myth, because while there is a lot of input, it is not comprehensible. Some of it might be, depending on the situation and how good a guesser one is. But by and large, you want to get into a situation where the input is 100% comprehensible to see really gratifying progress in speaking and listening skills. Google "TPRS" as a start.

I have varying degrees of facility in twelve languages. However, the route to the same degree of proficiency has been shorter and the results much more lasting when the language in question was done using comprehensible input instead of "learning".

Even in my first language, I can't very well tell you the grammatical rules, I just learned to hear/see, when it wasn't right, I don't necessarily know why it isn't.

I had French during my three years of high school (high school is for three years in Norway), but as I said, I only know a few basic phrases. Cramming works for a short period of time, it doesn't get saved in the long term memory. Most of it was just saved as a temp file, that deletes itself after a certain amount of time.

I can speak, read and write Spanish very well. I also took French, Italian and Russian and did very well. My dad, who I have no doubt was Aspie, taught himself German, Russian and Greek.

The way you put it made me laugh, but that's very true. Many things that you learn at school are temp files that delete themselves after a certain amount of time.

English is my second language. As some people pointed out, the hardest is listening. I can read, write and speak very well. I like learning the logic (though not always fully logical) of grammar. I think as an ASD person, I have the diligence and a logical mind to persistently practice/learn writing, reading, speaking and grammar. However, listening is not just a matter of effort. As I live in Australia, I use English at work and everywhere else and I usually have no problem in understanding other people (at least superficially). However, with some people who speak very fast or with a strong accent (mostly some native English-speaking people such as Australian and British people), I may have a hard time understanding them. Sometimes I'm not very sure if my difficulty in communicating with others is due to my ASD or my English listening problem. I've had difficulty following what's being talked about in a meeting even in my first language. So I believe my communication difficulty is mostly due to my ASD. Is it really? I don't know.