Do You Speak A Second Language?

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

lexicography is hard!

i don't mean that to sound bratty -- it really is difficult to define a word accurately and concisely

What IS an ox?

It's a giant cow

Why is it so hard (for me) to distinguish in my mind between speakig various foreign languages? I feel like I only have the capacity for English and non-English, which is whatever other language i am speakig. When I leaned Spanish, I kept inserting French words. And now, when I need to speak Spanish, I will occasionally knee-jerk a command in Japanese. I feel like there's not enough room in my brain for all these languages to exist at once.

I finally felt smart enough to read f. hazel's link:
sci.lang FAQ - How did genders and cases develop in IE?
and it is amazing!

At least, it explains a couple of things that puzzled me abt ancient Greek (which I found quite hard work and do not remember any of at all) and then doesn't explain the giant new mystery that those explanations open up. I feel like my head has a new crack in and light is flooding in.

A person learning a new language needs a certain degree of comfort not being entirely authentically true to her/his perceived "real" self.

This is the one sentence I wish I had recognized the significance of before embarking on an adult second-language immersion experience. There is a huge (and justifiable, of course) emphasis on learning vocabulary and grammar, but coming to terms with the fact that your personality, as represented to those around you by what you say, is going to be massively different... that has such a huge impact on becoming fluent, because if you're a certain type of person it can really depress you and sour you on the language-learning experience. It's especially a mind fuck when you start dating a native speaker and have to navigate more serious personal interactions. You're typing with oven mitts on and you cannot take them off, even for a second or two.

I guess it's the aspect of language ego that isn't about speaking "properly" or being embarrassed, but literal ego... recognizing that if you're the type of person who places a lot of value on writing well, or being verbally witty or eloquent... things are going to be rough for at least a couple of years. You are not going to be you in your L2, you are going to be some new distorted version of you, and on top of a raft of other cultural upheavals, that's a big deal.

totally.

and if you're the kind of person that conducts entire conversations by quoting pop culture references, having to speak another language can make you feel like you have nothing to actually say.

then again the lovely emma b tells me she likes me better in french; "you seem more thoughtful"; i like to think it's because i actually AM more thoughtful, but it's usually because i'm like "wtf are they talking about"

(possible answer: they are quoting pop culture references)

you can't even keep an ear out for simpsons voices 'cos they dub that shit into native tongues.

The strange joy of (mis)translating pop culture references into other languages?

I got a kick out of managing to make a "nag difunell, nyns marthow meur ras" joke at the exam (that no one got, but I'm used to no one getting my jokes and references in my native language either.)

I guess I'm just completely used to being misunderstood. That the subtle differences among UK, US and SA English and trying to negotiate them have already destroyed my language ego, so why be scared of getting it rong in another language.

In fact, when speaking a second language, the chances are better that someone will think "oh, foreigner, she doesn't speak this language very well" and less that they will think "Jesus Christ she's clearly batshit/psycho/an arsehole" which I've come to expect in English

an ox is britain's new hope and arsenal's brightest star, after jack wilshere and kieron gibbs

is that english, ken?

ken c otm

lol "after Kieron Gibbs"

partly because of this thread, but mainly because i've been talking about it off and on for the last few years, i enrolled in an introductory Mandarin class last night! tbh this first course is probably going to be too easy for me (i lived in china for a few months a few years ago and still remember some mandarin, and definitely still have an ear for picking out tones), but it'll be great to bust out the workbook and begin learning it in earnest. last time around i was just picking up things as i lived there, which was nice, but i often felt like i was missing really essential components of the language.

Putting this here because it seemed like a good idea:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

That reminds me of a passage in this Roger Deakin book I'm reading, about an extinct Australian Aboriginal language - which had 3 different forms of the imperative! There was 1 for issuing straight commands, another whole tense for being insulting or patronising, and ive forgotten the third. My mind just boggled, like, what a fascinating way of looking at the world. And that's something that's been lost already, and more languages are vanishing.

With 6000 languages (and decreasing) there's so much out there for the collector of linguistic curiosities. Different grammatical forms depending on whether you actually witnessed the event you're reporting! Languages with 16 genders! Languages without numbers!

If anyone's looking for a challenge, two stalwarts of entertaining Linguistics 101 lectures are the Australian languages Dyirbal and Guugu Yimidhirr: Dyirbal has the (relatively) famous gender category containing "women, fire and dangerous things" and used to have a crazy taboo language inside a language:

There used to be in place a highly complex taboo system in Dyirbal culture. A speaker was completely forbidden from speaking with his/her mother-in-law, child-in-law, father's sister's child or mother's brother's child, and from approaching or looking directly at these people[citation needed]. In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialised and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the non-taboo language. This phenomenon, commonly called mother-in-law languages, was common in indigenous Australian languages. It existed until about 1930 when the taboo system fell out of use.

Meanwhile, Guugu Yimidhirr uses geographic directions for everything:

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

^ From this rather lovely article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html

Jawel, je spriche several toal'n.

(dutch french german english west-flemish)

women, fire, and dangerous things is also an excellent book by the excellent george lakoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-9rpJITY8

I know that sapir-whorf is looked down upon but imo if we're being honest with ourselves, it's probably true

I just started with a new doctor and we did half my exam in Italian as it turns out he studied medicine in Bologna.

I find my faculty for languages has improved as I've got older, my Italian is still pretty strong and I can converse in french better than I could and even follow conversations in german pretty well, I can catch the flow in catalan and spanish as well. Maybe it is not being told I am rubbish at languages by teachers that has improved me. (it's exposure more than anything).

Depends on what interpretation. Strong Sapir-Whorf is decidedly not true.

xpost

I remember reading about a study or a theory that said that children aren't more natural at learning languages, rather, since all that happens to the kid is being exposed to that foreign language 24/7, the kid is forced to pick up the language - sink or swim, as it were

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

One of my best grad professors worked half the year in Puerto Rico and half in AZ. He said another prof at the University in PR had been going on an attempt to pick up Spanish through straight immersion and absolutely no instruction of any kind, and hadn't gotten anywhere with it after living there for six years.

perhaps it would work if you did it Billy Madison style

Modern Sapir-Whorf-esque research naturally steers clear of statements like "the Hopi have no concept of time", looks more like this:

There were also observable qualitative differences between the kinds of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example, the word for "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny. The word for "bridge," on the other hand, is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy and towering.

www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf

I'd like to think that if one of us were air dropped into the middle of mauritania and we made every effort to pick up arabic, devoting nearly every waking hour to it, we'd become fluent in a year or two, no matter our age

This folk hypothesis was the rationale behind the amazingly named bill English for Children, sponsored by wealthy businessman Ron Unz, who tried to build a political career out of bilingual education. It mandates that kids can learn English in a year in a classroom immersion setting. Naturally, because it's Arizona in the 21st century, it's played out in some very bizarre ways. But in grad school I had to read a ****lot**** of research about how it's nearly impossible to attain academic proficiency in a second language in a year, though conversational L2 is doable.

So what it means is kids in AZ only get one year of focused English education (and how that's been mandated has been really controversial), with the basic understanding that no L1 support is allowed.

That's horrible bs. Sorry kids in AZ.

Yeah it's really awful, no L1 support makes absolutely no sense.

aw that's terrible. anyway like abbott said I'm just spouting off folk psychology and I apologize in advance if I'm stepping on the toes of anybody itt :/

An NPR piece on the "four hour block" that ELL kids get in Arizona.