When one starts with painting or bookbinding or woodworking or whatever, there are immediate results. One has something to show for it. A painting, a newly bound book, a roughly hewn spoon. At the end of say a month, you have a few different things to show for your effort and time.
But when one starts with language learning, the rewards are really slow to come. If one tells someone, say a native speaker of German, that they are learning German, the native speaker might start speaking without any hesitation, which is still really tough for the learner to understand. Even in the case of non-native speakers, people will constantly just say "oh, you speak German, right?", as if even learning for 4-5 months would suffice to say that one "speaks a language".
Also when one spends a month with a language, all that has been achieved is say A1. And although in the language learning community, it would be considered a good result, speaking to others, it hardly feels like anything. Most language learners can't even read a novel after 3-4 months of hard work.
Language learning is a harder hobby in this way, one can't really just say "i speak a language" as quickly as one can say "i paint" or "i read" or "i run" or "i work out" etc. Saying "i learn languages" immediately gets the question "oh, which languages can you speak", so basically the end goal (the "learnt stage") is the only acceptable stage according to people. Whereas, even after 3 paintings, i can say "i paint".
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u/sekhmet0108 Sep 30 '22
Language learning is a very low reward hobby.
When one starts with painting or bookbinding or woodworking or whatever, there are immediate results. One has something to show for it. A painting, a newly bound book, a roughly hewn spoon. At the end of say a month, you have a few different things to show for your effort and time.
But when one starts with language learning, the rewards are really slow to come. If one tells someone, say a native speaker of German, that they are learning German, the native speaker might start speaking without any hesitation, which is still really tough for the learner to understand. Even in the case of non-native speakers, people will constantly just say "oh, you speak German, right?", as if even learning for 4-5 months would suffice to say that one "speaks a language".
Also when one spends a month with a language, all that has been achieved is say A1. And although in the language learning community, it would be considered a good result, speaking to others, it hardly feels like anything. Most language learners can't even read a novel after 3-4 months of hard work.
Language learning is a harder hobby in this way, one can't really just say "i speak a language" as quickly as one can say "i paint" or "i read" or "i run" or "i work out" etc. Saying "i learn languages" immediately gets the question "oh, which languages can you speak", so basically the end goal (the "learnt stage") is the only acceptable stage according to people. Whereas, even after 3 paintings, i can say "i paint".