Why is more likely to learn a language from a native speaker than from bilinguals or polyglots?

[Nabely]

I've noticed this happening. The bilinguals, trilinguals or polygots tend to get comfortable speaking English, the default language and you don't learn their native language nortoo much. Some of them won't spend hours every day, teaching you.

Meanwhile if it's a monolingual, then you'll learn both their language and culture. My friend once had a trilingual Mexican boyfriend. However, the guy had no interest in teaching her Spanish nor talking too much about his traditions. He became too Americanized and was ok speaking only in English to her. Why is it more to learn the language if that's all they speak but once they also speak English, you don't learn much?

[ShyViolet]

The best way to learn a language is immersion.  To be around people speaking it all the time, or a lot of the time, in a natural context.  For example, like living in another country for a year and having no choice but to learn the language in order to get by.  Or working in a restaurant where all the employees are native speakers of that language, so you're hearing it all day every day.  That is the best way to learn a language.

[Emilie Jolie]

1 hour ago, Nabely said:

However, the guy had no interest in teaching her Spanish nor talking too much about his traditions

I'm confused. Why is it the job of the multilingual guy to teach his girlfriend Spanish?  Could she not have learned it on her own?

I know many polyglots who are naturally gifted in language skills; the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn a new language, I guess. Many non-English speaking countries value language learning as a skill so they are used to speaking more than one language from school.

It's absolutely not the case in the UK for instance. Probably a touch of arrogance and laziness there - 'what's the point in learning another language when the whole world speaks English' type of mentality.

[Springsummer]

As an immigrant living in a bilingual town, I have to learn French on top of English.

So not fair. English speaker only need to learn French, and French only need to learn French. Now I have to be  trilingual, not just bilingual.

How the hell I can be fluent in French? It is a crazy language.

 

 

[snowboy91]

There's a few reasons for it.

If you're learning a language from a native speaker, they innately have a large vocabulary (having used that language in their formative years), and subconsciously know every single grammar rule and proper pronunciation (give or take accents or dialects). And they're probably more comfortable speaking that language in a way that they did at home - so the learner has to work harder to use it properly as compared to someone learning it as a second language, where it's all too easy to slip back to the native tongue.

Also if you're somewhere where only that language is spoken (immersion), you have no choice but to work out the language from what you know already, or what you can figure out. So you learn out of necessity.

That's why my German wasn't all that great until I went there for a month - I had to use it or fail to communicate with anyone. I've forgotten about 40% of it, but it mostly comes back after about 2-3 days of full immersion.