Do You Speak A Second Language?

I respect you

When LL first told me about language ego, I was like "So THAT'S why I can understand spoken Spanish but can't speak it!" I've got such a big old language ego that I got tongue tied trying to communicate while vacationing in London because I was afraid of saying something weird or wrong or incomprehensibly American.

Anyway, took years of Spanish. Got to a point a few years ago, thanks to a job at an non-profit serving Spanish-speaking immigrant community, that I could understand conversations just fine but was never able to get over myself enough to speak it. Took a year of German once and really enjoyed it but never followed up. It's frustrating because I like the puzzle of languages and I think if I could get that ego in check I'd be pretty good at them. Also I am embarrassed to be a stereotypical monolingual American.

A person learning a new language needs a certain degree of comfort not being entirely authentically true to her/his perceived "real" self. Language is a tool used for communication (just like body language, behavior, etc), and communication does not have the same simple set of rules that grammar does. Some people are very grammar-bound in their studies precisely because they fear the leap into potentially dangerous social territory.

Not to be all mememe but I have taught students from all over the world, more countries than I can name and remember off the top of my head, and this is a very different problem from culture to culture. People who do this for a living (and not just to teach themselves new languages and pat themselves on the back for it) are concerned with larger trends like the pitfalls of communicative language teaching, etc. It's a whole field of study that generally gets no respect. Writing about it feels like work but I guess it's in the service of the professions, so w/e.

Feeling really kinda ouch about that whole "teach themselves new languages and pat themselves on the back for it" aside. I'm gonna ask you to explain that rather than try to unpack any assumptions in there?

Oh, I meant nothing personal by that whatsoever -- it was merely a reference to aforementioned "language hackers". I think learning a new language is always great no matter how one accomplishes it; what I tend to bristle at is when someone has a language learning experience ("I taught myself Spanish by watching Sábado Gigante!") and then assumes that everyone else will have the same experience ("Learning Spanish is as easy as regular watching of Sábado Gigante!") without considering the multitude of factors involved in learning a language. Ie, nothing anyone in this thread has done iirc?

I go in peace!

LL otm throughout this thread

just came back from the supermarket and somebody told my dad "it's so cool how quickly you can switch to english from your language"

¯\(°_o)/¯

Not sure whether this is what LL was getting at, but there must be a big difference in the experience of someone who has decided to take up a language for fun/holidays/personal development and has nothing to lose but the course fees and that of someone who *needs* to learn a language they might not have otherwise chosen for reasons of family/job/emigration.

Anyways: I used to be fluent in Irish at secondary school but haven't really used it since (it's still in my head somewhere), my German peaked at university but I guess I'm still fluent, I speak French well enough but find myself making stupid jokes all the time to distract from my vocabulary/grammar limitations (as LL pointed out, sometimes you find yourself inhabiting a different personality when you squeeze into another language). I'd like to pick up something more adventurous (Arabic or Chinese or something) but without concrete reasons I doubt I'd have the motivation to stick at it long-term.

Both my parents are Swiss and I grew up speaking the Swiss-German dialect. I learned English mostly from watching Sesame Street and other television shows. All my schooling was in French and that is the language I speak the most in my everyday life.

I don't really speak enough German anymore and find myself forgetting the language slowly, which sucks. I really need to make an effort to keep speaking it.

I live in Quebec, probably should have mentioned that

there must be a big difference in the experience of someone who has decided to take up a language for fun/holidays/personal development and has nothing to lose but the course fees and that of someone who *needs* to learn a language they might not have otherwise chosen for reasons of family/job/emigration

Huge difference! One is personal edification (voluntary) and the other is borne of necessity (and fully loaded with heavy political and personal issues). The difference is usually represented in my mind as the difference between teaching EFL and ESL. I am a lot more into teaching ESL because there is the element of necessity involved (students are motivated by a real desire to learn) and the psychological components of an ESL student's language learning experience are heavier but they're also more interesting to me than those of your typical EFL student. I haven't had nearly as much experience with EFL, at least not in the last 15 years.

Also I would like to note that few things impress me more than people who have a nativelike facility with all components of a language and have been entirely self-taught. I wish it were always like that, but alas it's not.

i speak mandarin chinese. university degree in chinese lang/lit. lived in china for pretty long periods. speak it for work everyday. i liked to think i could understand cantonese reasonably well and was cracking the pronunciation/tonal puzzle of it, but after leaving vancouver, i think i lost my touch.

i can speak french. i spent about 12 years learning it but i go from days where i think the only thing i remember is the notre pere and some days i can get by sort of in conversation. reading french is easier. i can understand parts of têtes à claques. there's a large francophone population in western canada, including many francophone immigrants from africa. nice talking to people in french again.

my best friend's parents were in the us foreign service, so he grew up all over the place. he first learned french in mauritius (and was compelled to take a german course taught in french when he knew neither), then lived in paris and brussels before going to west africa in the peace corps.

we hung out in paris a while ago and with some frequency ppl were like wtf are you?

he still had some issues in montreal, tho lol

I only speak English but learned French, Spanish and Italian...enough to read but not enough to converse that much. Plan on brushing up before I visit Europe again, though.

I used to know French well enough to dream in French.

I learned Spanish, French, and German in school and college. I got good enough in French to make phone calls and interview people in it. I have only retained what I have probably from listening to French music.

I hear lots and lots of foreign languages at work, but I don't try to speak any that often. I can understand if people think something is pretty in Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Yiddish, and Russian.

I speak French, German, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Hungarian in addition to my native English - all to the point where a ten-minute conversation wouldn't be a problem. I have also taken classes in Russian, but I'm weak in that. I can pretty much make myself understand in Portuguese and Swedish, though only on an emergency basis. I can understand about 75% of spoken Yiddish, but would greatly fumble if I tried to speak it. I'm at my limit, I think, but I'd really like to learn Welsh as my final language.

Ich kann Deutsch, aber meine Vokabeln sind furchtbar. Ich moechte mit jemand sprechen ueben, ENBB wir sollen uns einander helfen!

i speak english + hebrew (not nearly as well as i speak english, but enough to qualify under thread guidelines, and a few different dialects), read + speak yiddish just below qualifications of thread (but always getting better!), read (and understand pretty fluently) but don't speak Judeo-Aramaic.

also native anglophone

x-post YES!! I am the opposite, btw. My vocab is pretty good. It's the rest I struggle with. Also, it doesn't help that when I am with my family I do this which is to say that they'll talk to me in German and I respond in English because I get nervous. I didn't read the whole thread thoroughly but that is probably something to do with the ego thing. Anyway, I think we should do this.

And to answer WCC's question: Ich spreche ein Bißchen Deutsch.

incidentally from the wiki page about Jewish Babylonian Aramaic The language has received considerable scholarly attention, as shown in the Bibliography below. However, the majority of those who are familiar with it, namely Orthodox Jewish students of Talmud, are given no systematic instruction in the language, and are expected to "sink or swim" in the course of Talmudic studies, with the help of some informal pointers showing similarities and differences with Hebrew.[4] <-<- this is how i learnt it!

a purely comparative approach, interesting!

ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch
ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch
bitte langsam, bitte langsam
bitte sprechen sie doch langsam
ich bin ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch

does anyone know anyone who speaks Klingon?

xp I was shocked to discover that "Ich bin Ausländer..." is unknown in Germany.

i can still say the alphabet in german

h-k is monstrous

Another bizarre "learning aid" seared in my memory:

Wie heisst das auf Deutsch?
Das heisst Salat
Wie heisst das auf Deutsch?
Das heisst Spinat
Und das hier ist Milch
Und das ist Tee
Und das sind zwei Eier
Das ist Kaffee

(to the tune of the Blue Danube if that wasn't selbstverständlich)

I got an A in German GCSE but can now remember nothing at all of the language except for one poem I wrote when we had to write a poem. It went like this:
Ich habe eine Schlange
Meine Schlange hast viel Durst
Er geht in zum Kafe
Er hat Getranke und eine Wurst

I may not have remembered the proper grammar.

― Tom, Monday, August 20, 2001 8:00 PM (10 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Je parle Français mais pas très bien. :-( Ich spreche kein Deutsch.
Ik spreek natuurlijk Nederlands, omdat ik opgegroeid ben in België.
Of liever ik spreek meer Vlaams dan echt Nederlands.
I speak English from the age of about nine, I guess
Apparently Belgian teenagers rank third when it comes to speaking English as a second language (in Europe).
Nihongo benkyo shimasuta demo sukoshi dekimasu yo Nihongo wa totemo kirei desu yo.

"I don't really speak enough German anymore and find myself forgetting the language slowly, which sucks. I really need to make an effort to keep speaking it."

I wonder if this is a Swiss problem (there are so many of those), because of the really sizable gap between the various Schwyzer Düütsch dialects and the standard written form. I have been outside the Anglophone world for well over a decade, and although I have my moments of weirdness in English, constant access to written English that closely resembles what I used to speak on a daily basis seems to me to make forgetting English impossible.

I did 5 years of French and 1 of Spanish at school, but that's all. With a phrase book and a bit of practice I can get by in either in terms of shopping, eating out, etcetera, but I couldn't have a conversation, and certainly not 10 minutes. My pronunciation is pretty good but my vocabulary lets me down - in Spain I often find I get replied to by Spanish people in French, which I take as indicative of a lack of any attempt at speaking other languages by most british tourists.

My Mum's French, so I ended up speaking 75% French until I was old enough to attend school.

Unhappily monoglot, by thread criteria. I can read French well, but am moronic in conversation - very high language ego. I think maybe a month of being in France might get me up to ten-minute conversation level.

Fragments of Russian and Polish knocking around my brain, but they're jumbled together and basically useless. I'd like to get one of them working properly (and working properly as a spoken language - push myself away from hyperliterate tendencies) but I can't see fitting it in anywhere for a bit. tbh, my real lang ambitions run more towards the dead ones - been teaching myself Ancient Greek, wouldn't mind trying to get latin (telling myself I'll do it in my 40s).

On paper, I probably know enough German for a rather boring ten-minute conversation, but that language ego thing gets in the way. I think I've managed a couple of very stilted and painful five-minute conversations outside class but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to tick the "ten minutes" box.

Similarly I learnt French for 6 years but I could never have managed an actual conversation as my accent was always too bloody terrible. Speaking German with an English accent doesn't seem quite as bad as speaking French with an English accent. I can't even hear what the vowels are doing or remember which consonants go silent when in French, never mind reproduce it.

I wish I could speak some languages as they're so much fun to look at. tbh I'm not entirely sure I could manage a 10-minute conversation in English that didn't leave me looking stupid - even in English I like to think for a while about what order to put which words in, and by then it's usually too late to say anything.

ah but you write beautifully tho

What's the watermark for this thread? I can converse in basic Chinese if I'm allowed to pause and think for 10 seconds before responding. Don't want to tick 'I speak language(s) other than English as well' when my training wheels are this brightly coloured.

xp lol zing etc. I suppose there is a certain irony in writing like an unedited and longwinded stream of consciousness while fussing so over editing my thoughts before speaking that I often don't do it at all, except they don't actually come out concisely edited (or even in the right order) when I do. They more just sort of... fall out. Until I realise people are staring blankly. Much like ILXing, then.

french & english no problem. spanish i can get by and have conversations with people but it's definitely peppered with grammatical errors and wrong verb tenses. spanish is weird because as a high schooler, since its veryy much like french you tend to coast along and just add -o and -a to the end of words hoping its correct. which is what i did. then i went to mexico for six months and my spanish was good but now since i never get to use it i'm a bit rusty.

yeah my French is like your Spanish & I'm at a conference now in the center of France which is naturally p much all native French speakers except for me & so I'm having to get over the ego thing & speak French & I find myself mixing the languages on the fly, like some kind of Mediterranean soup.

gonna give my talk in English, though, alas.

Having read the questions properly (yes I cannot speak English) I'm ticking option 1, because despite knowing a conversation's worth of Chinese there's no way in hell I'm fluent enough to do it naturally.

voted the first option - i know french well enough to read it but not well enough to hold a conversation in it

Dog Latin - What happened when you had French lessons at school - did you speak French better than the teacher?

Our French teacher was married to a Frenchman, and their sons were 1&2 years below me at school; they were totally bilingual, sat their French GCSEs at about age 12, aced them, and then did Spanish instead, as I recall.

dog latin, how good is your sister at french?

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Monday, 25 June 2012 14:52 (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh lolz
When you watched things on television as a child, did you care much about the plot?

NBS: I spoke French in England till I was about 4 or 5, but quickly caught up with English within the first year at school. It's incredible how adept the human brain is at learning languages at that age. Used to go to France for 4-5 weeks each summer, so that kept me topped up but on the whole our household became fully Anglophone by the time I was 6 or 7. So by the time I was actually learning French at school, yeah I was way ahead of the class and ended up doing my GCSE a good few years earlier. I'm told my accent is pretty much spot on when conversing. I can read the language fine. Writing is a bit trickier, as the only time I've really had to do much of it was at A-level, and all the verb endings and spellings are confusing. I do make a number of grammatical errors, even when speaking, but on the whole I'm pretty capable in French. I could survive there and not have to rely on English.

My sister teaches French in Egypt.

native anglophone. Learned French in high school from y7 through 9...made a halfassed attempt to teach myself Gaelic from a book in y10 and gave up in disgust...took an adult-education course in Italian but didn't follow through on the immersive side of it and lost the knack pretty quickly.

I love languages, I'm just not very committed to learning them I guess. Haha.

(xp) Towards the end of my time in Italy (teaching English) I had to do one-to-one lessons with this boy who was 9 or 10 (or thereabouts). His father was English and his mother was Italian (but spoke fluent English). He spoke English fluently with a rather plummy southern English accent and scarcely made any errors at all. He was really keen on Harry Potter (this is around the time the first film came out) and had read all the books, seemingly understanding almost everything in them*. Despite this, his spelling was really poor. Italian is largely phonetic (and the bits which aren't phonetic are very regular) and he couldn't get his head round the way the letters made different sounds when used in English, never mind the way the same letters could make lots of different sounds or often no sound at all.

*occasionally he would ask me for the meaning of a relatively obscure word, e.g. "What's an ox?", and I would think to myself "What exactly *is* an ox?" before reaching for a dictionary to translate it for him.

nothing is more frustrating that attempting to define a word in its language as opposed to just translating it; really exposes all of your vocab weak points