Learning the Language

Well, you should consider how close her native language is to the language she is immersed in. Is it like the difference between Spanish and French, or English and Japanese? That will dramatically change the learning time for languages. Yet even for an English speaker it is possible to become fairly conversationally fluent in Japanese with three months of immersion, so I would give an average of about three months. If that's too long a period of time, you could always pull a Babel Fish. Hahaha.

Haha a Babel Fish would be helpful!

The languages are fairly different, but she was exposed to the new language as a very young child. She only learned at a basic level then, since there is a social stigma leading to her speaking the majority language, but at least her accent is good! I knew the real-world child norms of two years to get to conversational fluency and five to seven to get to academic competency in English for ELL students, but that was obviously far too long for my purposes, and didn't quite fit the background anyway.

I can work with a few months, though. She can be frustrated for awhile more, as long as that angst ends soon!

I started a story like this once, where a woman was in a land where nobody spoke her language and she could not speak anyone else's language. My approach was to try to look at everything from her viewpoint and the viewpoint of the characters that she interacted with.

She didn't have a clue what anybody was saying, but could clearly understand tone of voice and gestures, etc. (Of course, depending on what the languages are like, it's possible for misunderstandings if a language has a very strong pattern.) One example from a TV show I saw was where these American G.I.s were talking to this Italian woman, who was very agitated. They knew she was agitated, but did not know about what, until they turned around a certain corner and came face to face with a German tank. Then they all turned to each other and said the Italian word that the woman had been saying over and over, which they figured out means "tank".

If you do decide to use magic, you could make it a part of the story. In the story I was working on, the woman encountered a wizard who could cast a spell that let her understand the local language, but the effects were only temporary. Fortunately her paths kept crossing the paths of this wizard, until they decided to start travelling together. I would like to think that having periods of not being able to understand the language made the magic seem more realistic than just having a spell that worked permanently on her.

Good luck with your story.

Honestly this is what it really boils down to. An English speaker learning Farsi, or Japanese, just takes a longer time to get fluent than say a Spanish speaker learning Portuguese.

How different is the grammar, the vocabulary, the culture and the sound of the two languages? Fluency is not just knowing what to say, but how to say it, and how the other person will take it. Languages have all kinds of fun verbal clauses like for when you speak to someone above or below your station in society, or different languages for the everyday people and for the ruling class, or just even the time of the year.

Having gotten myself to a decent level of fluency in Japanese (from English), and seen many other people do it, for most people (be they English, Thai, Ugandan, or Indian) it takes about a year of diligent study and deep immersion to become effectively fluent in Japanese. Fluent means understanding most TV, understanding most conversation, and getting the gist of a newspaper article. This sadly does not include the ability to enter high level discussions of politics, to read books cover to cover without a struggle, or for people to express themselves as freely as in their native tongue.

Learning a language requires a lot of swallowed pride. Being able to express yourself, or rather the lack of ability to do is, is the most humiliating and frustrating part of learning a new language. A person who values their intelligence will be confronted, daily, with the shame of having to speak like a child. Their opinions, no matter how carefully considered, will be dismissed. In a classroom, in your own country, it is easy for your classmates to empathize with you, and frankly it is not a necessity to speak it then. In a foreign country though, you have to get by on what you know, and it will always be less than what you hoped you knew. Words become a tight net through which every human interaction is constrained. Those times when you do make yourself understood, they are sweet victories.

In short I would recommend your language to be something not too distant from your MC's native tongue, and the whole process becomes a lot more believable. Childhood experience in the country will give less of an accent and will give the MC a good base from which to start. Learning the language could be more like "remembering something I've forgotten" rather than going from square 1.

Yes, mastery of language is truly the greatest weapon!

Yeah, there are a lot of conversations that consist mainly of not understanding someone's words, but seeing fairly emphatic gestures and tone so far!

Intermittent fluency would make things easier for me, but I think it might drive my MC over the edge, to keep having it and losing it! I may end up going for the old "and then, months later..." since my timeline is somewhat flexible.

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing your experiences! I think I will end up with the jump ahead in time, since my timeline can be changed a little.

Unfortunately the two languages can't be closely related, and they could be similar only if two cultures with absolutely no contact until a few decades prior to the start of the plot developed similar languages spontaneously. I have been trying to work the pride issue in, my MC is not pleased when she has to resort to telegraphic speech, especially when speaking to certain characters.

I may have to increase what her childhood exposure to the language was, just so that she gets somewhat of a better base in it than I had been giving her, even if it's gone unused so long she has to work to remember it.

What do you mean she only learned it at basic level?

What kind of exposure was it? Parents?

How long did it last?

When did it start and when did it end?

Is she better at nderstanding than speaking? Many children can understand a language they encountred early in life pretty well, even if they aren't good at speaking in it.

All lines are arbitrary; otherwise, we wouldn't have to draw them. ~Nicholas Vesiri

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Well, to add my own experience in to confuse the mix... I went to France when I was 16, and was thrown into a total immersion situation. I had studied French in school up until that point. Overall, it took me about three months before I was able to converse fluently - this doesn't mean I didn't occasionally need to look things up, but I was good for day to day conversation.

Keep in mind that age does make a difference. Childhood is usually termed a "critical period" in terms of learning language, in that if we don't learn a language before our teens, no matter how long we study or live in a place, we will probably never be as fluent as a native speaker. (In fact, this is what I did my undergraduate thesis on!) I dunno if this matters in your case - on a day to day level, it won't affect her ability to communicate - but it's something to keep in mind if your MC is ever forced to pass as a native.

You have different strengths and weaknesses learning as an adult - for example, I started Russian from scratch at the beginning of uni, and by the time I graduated 3 2/3 years later I was basically fluent, although obviously I didn't have the same vocab as a Russian my age would have.

Your soft palate (or part of it, I forget the exact mechanism) hardens at about the age of twelve which part of the reason why children who grow up speaking two languages generally don't find it hard to get a good accent in the same way that, say, a 16 year old or a 26 year old does.

Children will naturally pick up a lot of a language if they are regularly and consistently exposed to it, but similar they will lose a lot of it if they then don't hear or speak it for a long time. Could you have her talk to herself in the language while she grows up so that she is less likely to lose all of the feel for it? I'm not convinced that, with the level of language a two year old has, if she had not heard or spoken it in the interval before learning again that it would help her accent that much, to be honest.

It depends how authentic you're keen to make it. As others have said, the similarities and differences between languages will make a big difference, and obviously some people have a knack for picking up languages faster than others; speaking for myself though, I tend to find characters who pick up a whole language in the blink of an eye pretty irritating! If you want to combat that, you could have her get to a useful level of everyday competence reasonably quick (which isn't tooooo far fetched, in an immersion situation) but have her make some amusing/silly mistakes just so she's not so perfect! And/or give her someone who is good at teaching her the language and talks to her loads (children are excellent at that as they have no embarrassment about correcting mistakes, but a more formal teacher could work too), and maybe make it someone who knows some of her language so they can get her started and she can be sure of getting at least a few things right?

Anyway... just some thoughts. Good luck! I think it's great that you're using languages like this by the way, as a language geek I'm cheering you on!

Well, she had some ongoing exposure and I was thinking more a preschool level than toddler - if I had to go back to 2 word sentences I would drive myself insane! I'm going to play with the details a bit and see what works. I keep tripping myself up since my area of knowledge is typical/disordered child language & disordered adult language post-injury or illness. I know a typical 2nd-language learning adult is different, and I'm getting a lot of great experiences from people to give me ideas to work with!

Since she's heard the language at such a young age and used her basic skills on and off, I think her ear for the sound should be relatively all right. There aren't any structural changes that make speech harder to learn as you get older, it's more neural & a lot of that is set in babyhood.

I love language stuff, that's why I was so surprised to trip myself up on such a basic issue when I was writing!