erinja:This is probably why your first foreign language is the most difficult to learn. You're learning grammar of both your language and the foreign language.

I've found this true for some of my classmates who haven't done a linguistics course at uni or even some who have .

I do feel though that my linguistics lecturer could sell his notes to highschools around Australia and then they could teach kids it quite easily, since his notes were so good you could do the entire course without having to attend the lectures (spare the tests of course).

@ Donniedillon
Haha, well, it FELT long when I was writing it, but I was feeling a bit snappy at the time

As a beginner, I feel I will be stuck as an eternal beginner and that it will speak poorly of me in general. It is not so much the concepts and grammar that get in my way but the application of them. I could take sentences and translate them either way without much problem, but the issue seems compounded when making unique sentences of my own. Even in English, which is my birth tongue, I have this problem. I don't think it language very well. As a result I speak slowly, weighing all my words, and tend to come off as oddly formal. In some cases to the point people believe me to be insulting them.

I have this same problem with Esperanto. It seems to be exacerbated by my applying a language that I am really just a beginner at. I suspect that at least a few of the eternal beginners who have been at it for years are the same way, having not a lack in study or motivation. But that it is a lacking of ability to think and process information in terms of language itself.

That is my suspicion anyway. And I cannot say how well-founded my own fear of becoming an eternal beginner is. I study daily, so the motivation issue is not a worry. Perhaps I just have poor self-confidence.

Sorry for the rant/apologia. But it actually feels somewhat better having gotten that off of my chest.

I knew a very good Esperanto speaker who spoke very slowly. I thought it was a bit strange, and I had all kinds of theories about why he spoke so slowly (maybe to help the beginners understand better?, I thought) and then one time I heard him speak English, and it turned out he was just a slow talker.

I think that at less than a year into your studies, it's too early to proclaim yourself a potential eternal beginner. I'm talking about people who have been involved for 10+ years, regular contact with other Esperanto speakers, etc, who still can't convey basic thoughts.

The best thing you can do is seek help from others - when you have a problem with something, just ask! And don't just study the language, use it. Penpals are easily found in the Esperanto world.

rusto:
As a result I speak slowly, weighing all my words, and tend to come off as oddly formal. In some cases to the point people believe me to be insulting them.

In my opinion there's nothing wrong with speaking slowly. Probably you hear to your own voice and put it into an internal audio loop which you can retrieve long time after you spoke it. You also mentioned "weighing all my words" which sounds somewhat haptic (touch) which is related to an focus at the kinesthetic sense. So probably aside your audio looping you also produce somewhat body vibration feedback with your voice. There's absolutly nothing wrong with it. You confuse yourself if you try to supress it. It's you and that's fine.

Kinesthetic learning

Furthermore in my opinion getting a rapid fire speeding speaker should not the aim because that folks can not reduce the speed of their internal along racing pictures and due to this they articulate in a rapid fire manner which let probably every language beginner pulls out.

rusto:
I have this same problem with Esperanto. It seems to be exacerbated by my applying a language that I am really just a beginner at. I suspect that at least a few of the eternal beginners who have been at it for years are the same way, having not a lack in study or motivation. But that it is a lacking of ability to think and process information in terms of language itself.

Take care of that selffulfilling prophecy issue.

erinja:I knew a very good Esperanto speaker who spoke very slowly. I thought it was a bit strange, and I had all kinds of theories about why he spoke so slowly (maybe to help the beginners understand better?, I thought) and then one time I heard him speak English, and it turned out he was just a slow talker.

I think this is something language students need to be taught - while I'm not particularly good at any language enough to make a proper comparison, in my Indonesian classes I found that others would speak much faster than me, and I wondered how they did it, and felt that it made me inferior at the language since me talking in it at such speeds would surely get me tongue tied. After a while though it sunk in that I talk slow English to begin with, and I often stuff my words up too, where as they talk stupidly fast English.

I think ultimately that the speed you talk at is naturally separated from linguistic proficiency. Actually, people speaking slower is nice too, I can hardly understand my sister speaking fullstop when she's excited about something -_-