Do You Speak A Second Language?

I didn't know that term before, but I think I have the acme of all language ego.

Ha ha ha @ language ego.

I think that I am one of the worst students in my class because I just blurt random Cornish things out in class all the time, regardless of whether it's the right answer or even appropriate sometimes. My teacher, OTOH, thinks I am one of the best students because I produce loads of actual Cornish, all the time, regardless of whether I'm saying "cabbage soup!" or "Gary has the key." Language is one of those things you have to be just not afraid of getting it wrong.

Ha, I don't think that's a problem for me – I have this awful Peggy Hill pronunciation style (just on account of picking up vocabs from signs, from conversation, etc, and never learning anything formally) but I still try to use Spanish words all the time. Universal reaction from my students (about a third of whom have Spanish as their primary language) or from my brother (who went on a mission to Chihuahua and is fluent) is "what are you saying? why are you saying that? godddddd" and it just makes me lol. But when I understand a Spanish word here or there that a student says they think I am a total badass. I think it would really help make me a better advocate for those kids, and able to talk to their parents, which would be super helpful. Plus it's just a cool language. I've never been able to figure out how to roll my Rs but everyone says if you speak it long enough it just happens eventually.

If by gendered linguistics, you mean languages that have masculine/feminine/neuter cases, I'm completely fascinated by them. Like, how inanimate things get assigned to which case. (Why is chi (house) masculine and eglos (church) feminine? What's the thinking behind that?) Makes you think how random concepts of gender really are.

Well, not that random, assuming you're talking about grammatical gender:

sci.lang FAQ - How did genders and cases develop in IE?

I took a few German classes in high school and college, as did my roommate, and we'd hang out at home and go shopping and speak the most garbled, fucked up, silly blend of German and English. But any excuse to try on all the fun different words! Why not! Languages are cool.

Yeah, it's just a physical thing your tongue has to learn, there's nothing mysterious about it. I started a Spanish speaking thread on the sandbox to practice once...maybe la hora ya llegó.

One of my personal complications is that I work with Spanish speakers from all over the Spanish speaking world, and there are very different vocabulary and pronunciation conventions from one person to another. I decided a long time ago that I would not attempt to ape my conversational partner's style (la española, la puertorriqueña, etc) and would just speak the dialect I learned the most from -- español bogotano.

also i knew f hazel would show up before too long!!

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

i have high language ego! that's my biggest obstacle to speaking spanish on the reg because i am v conscious of saying things correctly in my native language and like to think i can express myself v well in english. i get super bummed when i realize how limited i am in spanish and then i start thinking "how can i express this really great idea in english using the 5 words i know in spanish?" then i'm like, "wait i know more than 5 words!" and by then i've been sitting there for 10 seconds hemming and hawing and i pull up google translate while i'm on the phone with a parent and hoping that it works. this was very difficult when trying to tell some mom that her son smelled like weed but didn't have anything on him.

My parents are bilingual Cubans and brought us up the same. I speak as much Spanish as English these days.

Well, what I mean by random is... what Emil.y pointed out - why is moon masculine in Germanic languages and feminine in Romance languages (and also Celtic languages, apparently)? Why is ship feminine in some language groups and masculine in others? It doesn't seem nearly as neat a division as that link suggests.

Oh, it isn't neat, but it isn't random either. There's definitely an arbitrariness in the way languages change over time, but if you had the entire history of the Indo-European language laid out before you, you'd see that differences like E.mily pointed out that seem bizarre and random in the present are in fact the result of a set of systemic and to some degree predictable historical processes of language change. Noun classes in Indo-European languages seem random now because they are semantically empty, pretty much. You can bet that in their original form they were not, and made useful, non-random distinctions.

Yes, and those non-random distinctions reveal much about the cultural narratives of what constitutes "masculine" or "feminine." They have meaning and context within that culture - like a lot of narratives about gender and what it means - but compared one to another, it reveals the arbitrary nature of deciding what it means to be "masculine" or "feminine."

I realise I'm not explaining myself very well.

Something like... the gender of nouns within a language is something which reveals something about that specific culture, and how they conceive of masculine as opposed feminine. But it reveals nothing about either the actual Moon - or indeed about actual, individual men or women. *Why* they draw the distinction is not arbitrary at all. But the actual distinction is arbitrary when compared to the distinctions that other cultures make.

Seriously, let's not make this about gender, though.

I really just want to see how people say "Yo hablo Espanol" or "parlez-vous Francais?" in as many languages as people on ILX speak.

(Sentence 1 being v v v out of character, sentence 2 being v v v in character)

Anyway, native English speaker, but I can get by in Spanish. Although if I don't get my ass back to South America in the next couple of years, I'm going to lose it. Only immersion will do it, and I'm too lazy to do it here in Texas.

I have great regard for polyglots. I am purely an Anglophone with mere fragments and smatterings of about three other languages. None come even close to fluency. To slave my pride, I tell myself that at least I have total mastery of english. Total mastery, d'y'hear me?

er, slave should have been salve

Total mastery.

had a six-week french-immersion course in quebec 20 years ago, after which i would have claimed to be capable of a child-like 10-minute conversation. (i even had a few dreams in french!)

that ability went away v. quickly

Mastery of my typing fingers, not so much.

i was good enough to converse in french and irish ten years ago but not no more

Native English speaker, used to be able to converse in some other languages. Let's just say I couldn't decide who to root for in today's match

I have limited conversational French and Russian but have always been too fickle to dedicate any length of time to learning a language properly. I'll be studying one for a few months and suddenly get the urge to learn Polish or Swedish instead. As long as i can get the gist of foreign-language pop songs i'm usually happy but i should make more of an effort to pick one and stick to it.

I speak Irish pretty well, I'm a little rusty cos it's hard to find fellow speakers, but I was close to fluent a few years back, and I did a radio show in Irish for a few years in my earlier 20s. could easily chat with someone at length.

I never spent as near as much time in the Gaeltacht but my spoken Irish isn't bad and would be good if I had someone to speak it with. I could still carry on a conversation though, but am always regretting that I never attained fluency. Still, I can read it and write it to a decentish level, and watching a programme in Irish will bring it all back.

I learned French from various places from about ten on and should really try to bring it up. I find it relatively easy to read and follow French newspapers etc. My issue again is practice.

I gave up German at 15 but have retained a lot of the vocab & grammar.

I'd love to learn a new language, Russian especially, but it would probably be better to work on the ones I (in theory) have.

100% correct on how it's taught in schools. It's more an academic subject with an almost obsessive focus on grammar and mechanics than something you speak. I was more confident speaking French at 13 than Irish at 16.

I have to say, my class has been very good at getting you up and chatting. Language teaching has changed so much since I was at school, and they'd throw months of grammar and declensions at you before you even learned to say "hello, my name is..."

Really? At my school (England, comprehensive, 80s) it was completely the opposite for French: months of phrases before going anywhere near grammar.

i grew up in btwn connacht/ulster gaeltachts but wasn't ever fluent, teaching of irish so poor- in a different way to the way other languages are poorly taught imo, browbeating and guilttripping shovelling of entire essays down the throat and somehow hoping it sticks.

I'll be studying one for a few months and suddenly get the urge to learn Polish or Swedish instead. As long as i can get the gist of foreign-language pop songs i'm usually happy but i should make more of an effort to pick one and stick to it.

Parlo italiano abbastanza bene, ma sono dieci anni da quando sono tornato in Inghilterra e ho dimenticato tanto.

i know German well enough to be the local go-to person when the odd deutsches Dokument comes our way and has to be translated. so a 10-minute conversation is a piece of cake. (I R BRAGGART)

i used to know French well enough to converse for 10 minutes, but my French language skills are rusty now so even if i still can i'd be way too self-conscious to even try.

i can get by reading Dutch (to the point that sometimes i try to read the Subjektivism board). Dutch is kind of a half-way linguistic station b/w English and German, though it differs enough from both to be a bit tricky. but i cannot understand spoken Dutch AT ALL so no 10 minute conversations.

my paternal grandparents were both fluent in Polish, but they never taught my father (or his siblings). they were old-school immigrants who felt that it was better for their children to integrate by speaking only English (plus they learned the advantages of speaking Polish when they didn't want their children to know what they were talking about). however, both of my grandparents came to regret not teaching their kids any Polish -- and my father also regrets not learning any (though it has no practical use for him these days).

I never learned French. Did a bit when I was about 9, then a year aged 12, was so hopeless at the pronunciation and spelling I never went near it again. The bulk of my language learning (4 years!) was Latin and let's be honest, there is no such thing as conversational Latin. It's all grammar.

I'm glad I did it, mind! But it was v v different from how Cornish has been presented. But there is a deliberate attempt to revive Cornish, which focuses on making it a conversational language.

It's paradoxical that having a "high language ego" will keep you from becoming proficient in a language. I use a lot of Spanish at work and am always correcting myself as I am speaking . . . ( like I will realize I used a masculine form when I should have used a feminine form and I will go back and repeat it the right way for some strange reason) when it doesn't really matter cause I am getting my point across and if I am not understandable it will become apparent by a blank and perplexed look. I guess this is why speaking while drunk and/or talking to kids is always going to be easier . . . because there is a lower level of inhibition. I also love the community I work because if you stammer and stumble around enough while searching for the right word . . . they will just jump in and say it for you.

It's not paradoxical really -- high language ego means that you value (even prize) your language skills highly. Value them too highly and you find yourself unable (or at least experiencing psychological difficulty) to express yourself naturally in L2 (3, 4, etc) because your expectations are very very high -- often so high that you can't dream of reaching them, so you give up (preemptively or subconsciously.)

It's just a theory -- nothing regarding SLA is 100% "true", it's all speculation because we don't really know EXACTLY how the brain's machinery works -- but it's one that resonates with me as a language learner and teacher.

In sum, according to this theory, your language ego is not interfering with your ability to communicate, therefore it is not "too high."

Maybe not paradoxical, but crippling and not-self-serving? I taught English in Japan, where students had an innate fear of looking stupid/standing out, and no one would ever say anything in English (during English class) except for the few outlier/outcast types who didn't conform to the silent-student type. It made teaching converstational English very difficult, if not impossible. It also didn't help that the native Japanese teachers favored a call and response approach to language-teaching . . . they would read a passage from the textbook, and the students would repeat in en masse.

an excellent way to ameliorate language ego is by getting roaring drunk.

Right -- language ego sounds like it would be a good thing, but it is extremely self-sabotaging.

I taught English in Japan, where students had an innate fear of looking stupid/standing out, and no one would ever say anything in English

As you can see, there are many psychological/cultural/identity aspects to learning languages that people don't often think about until it's related anecdotally.

That's super common.

It's funny, this thread has got me thinking about why it has been so engaging learning Cornish. And part of it is, that it feels like this special project, this reclaiming of a cultural heritage - and this is not done in a guilt-inducing way, like some people have described learning Irish above (which it could quite easily be) but more as, here is this exciting, special thing we are doing together. And people are so enthusiastic about it, because of that. But also because it's a language that pretty much no one is a native speaker, there isn't so much the pressure to get it perfect. No one's going to shout at you if you mutate a word wrong. People are, for the most part, just so ridiculously pleased that people are learning it and speaking it.

But also, it helps that we have a fantastic teacher who is just unwavering in his belief that we all can and will learn it - that he kept saying "so long as you put something, in Cornish, on the paper, you WILL pass the test" when we were freaking out. And the power of other people's belief that you can do something is often a great help to make you actually do it.

When I compare that to my disastrous attempts at learning French - with a teacher who spoke at you in nothing but French, who shouted at you, in French, if you got anything even remotely not-perfect, and generally took the most condescending attitude in the world, like, how dare we mangle their beautiful language with our British tongues?

It's like, no wonder I got the complete fear so badly that I cannot speak French to this day, yet I will just spew Cornish if given half a chance.

Psychological component is totally important. Always think that there is a big subgroup of people who can't learn a foreign language because they don't know how to translate the persona they hide behind into the target language, the "language ego" you speak of. Not saying people don't have a right to hide behind a persona of course, but...

Whereas when you are on a roll speaking a foreign tongue, it feels like you are acting, playing a new part, doing improv- "Let me see what I can do playing the part of me, in this situation, with the constraint of my language skills such as they are." Of course if you are not feeling up to it, you may not be able to perform, like Charles Laughton sulking in his dressing room while the cameras are waiting.

communicative competence -- another theory, i'll let this explain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_competence

entire field of study related to the question at hand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-language_acquisition

Thanks for links, La Lechera. There is also what seems to be an army of "language hackers" out there blogging their experiences and opinions on the subject

please pardon me if i say that "language hackers" makes me want to barf

They do seem to be a little obnoxious, don't they?

I have just enough French from a distant "Four years of high school + one quarter of college" education that I can occasionally understand French film dialogue without resorting to subtitles for about 5 minutes or so. That's it. We lived in Germany for three years when I was a child (ages 7-9) and I came out of there speaking it at an appropriate age level, but lost it very quickly because I had no opportunity to keep speaking it or learning it when we moved back to the States. (I can count to ten in Russian and say привет, до свидания, спасибо, and меня зовут Филип.)

i wonder if plumbers feel this way about plumbing hackers
language teaching gets no respect! there, i said it.

I respect you

Tend to agree with latest two criticisms. For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing. I haven't gone too far in the Japanese course but I can well believe Ed that you could fake it without quite making it and learning that mysterious thing know as Japanese grammar.

Otoh have found it very useful to practice agglutinative languages, which have rules that are logical but abstract and maybe hard to internalize.

for me the fun of doing Japanese in Duolingo is figuring out the grammatical patterns, like, how to negate, how to turn an assertion into a question, how to change a verb's tense. all of those elements have been there. supplementing that with an explicit explanation of the rules seems useful, but in becoming able to use the rules, I like Duolingo's approach.

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

There are tons of books on Japanese grammar, not sure which are the good ones, if any.

How for along are you in Japanese, Euler?

For a language that is similar to one you already know, another Romance language if you know French or Spanish, a Scandinavian language if you know German, say, it is relatively easy to guess the answer and not really feel like you actually learned what you were doing.

Sort of agree with this, but on the upside, I feel like you can sort of conceptualize the language if you can connect it to English. With Swedish, there are a fair amount of words that are close to English words, and a few idiomatic phrases actually have equivalents in English. For example, the phrase for "agree" is "håll med," which literally translates to "hold with," and then I remembered reading the phrase "I don't hold with that" in 19th century English.

My practice regimen, outside of Duolingo, has been a) attempting to read crime novels in Swedish and b) trying to make up sentences in my head when I'm in the shower or riding on the train or whatever.

But did you study German before, Phil?

not sure what a good Japanese grammar book is, though

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, 2 October 2017 4:52 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It’s not the Japan Times Japanese grammar dictionary. I’m sure it’s a useful resource if you actually have some grounding but as a learning tool it’s obtuse.

But did you study German before, Phil?

No - I've only ever studied French (in school), Spanish and Japanese. None of the Japanese stuck - I can still maybe count to five, but that's about it.

So your Swedish studies are safe from Germanic interference then.

Yeah, but my wife - who studied German for several years - definitely noticed the similarities, and it has made things easier on her.

Well in that case...

I haven't been working on Japanese lately, since I returned from Japan. I'm still roughly where I was a couple of months ago. I'm going to Tokyo again in January so I'll pick up again in the next month or so.

I looked at the Japanese for dummies book but it's just romani apparently! That is not what I want.

romaji, duh.

I've got a couple Vlax Romani books you can borrow if you decide to take a radically different tack!

I've spent the last week on Italian in Duolingo and I think I want to commit to it as my third language. I only know the basics right now, but I'm trying to plunge in and puzzle through Italian news articles and opera libretti (also watching a Zelda Let's Play). There's enough lexical similarity with French that I can often pick up the gist of what's being said.

This is a fun reference page if you have one Romance language under your belt and are considering another one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

If you trust these numbers (data comes from Ethnologue/SLI International, who are problematic but probably OK with Romance languages info) JMM chose Italian wisely... it and French have the highest lexical similarity of all Romance language pairs! Well, tied with Spanish/Portuguese actually.