no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Guys, when I was a freshman I begged my parents to get me a HS jacket that actually said, instead of a sports team, "orchestra" on the back. Yes, it was that bad. What's worse is that my dad still has the fucking thing and tries to convince me to wear it every single winter. :/

hahaha i did varsity swimming but i did not et the jacket bc lol

Yeah, I know - exactly. I went to an all-girls HS (read: was socially inept), had braces, Sally Jesse Raphael lolhuge glasses, a varsity ORCHESTRA jacket and was fat until I was about 16. I was NAGL. Pretty late bloomer tbh.

tbh i think i just bloomed like 3 years ago.

Does anyone else agree/identify with the statement that their adult mental/emotional journey is about getting back to being 10?

in a lot of ways, i sure do. i can tell it's taken a long time to even start to get away from learning in my early teens to be super cynical, negative, etc., feeling like a complete freak and weirdo, which tends to happen when people say you are that. small towns. high school was the worst! i switched schools, my parents split up, and the few kids i hung out with were messed up in the head & treated each other (and me) pretty horribly. i was prob awful to them too in my own way, and didn't realize. i think everything started to go wrong around 6th-7th grade when i started feeling like i was ugly, had bad glasses, didn't know how to dress. patriarchy oppression machine + catholic church (what's the difference?) it's nice to know other people had some of the same experiences.

wait i thought "since" and "fence" did rhyme!? now that i've tried to say both words about a dozen times, i can tell how they don't rhyme, but i'm pretty sure when i normally say them, they do.

they are completely different vowels!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not if you say it like "sense". it's supposed to rhyme with "wince" i suppose?

most of the U.S. : fence rhymes with sense; it does not rhyme with since or wince, which rhyme with each other

other parts of the U.S.: these words all rhyme: sense, fence, since, wince - though some pronounce them all with the short "i" and others pronounce them all with the short "e"

ie substitution is a linguist's worst nightmare!

here's a thing - that's sorta gender related, maybe, in the sense that women are supposed to be other-focused and conciliatory and such. My accent changes depending on whom I'm speaking to. I occasionally feel like I don't have a "real" accent, because of this. I was having drinks with a friend, who grew up in Chicago a while ago, and she said I totally have a Midwestern accent, and then I suggested that I have a Midwestern accent when I'm talking to her or her & her husband because they both have Midwestern accents.

my dad picks up other people's accents when he's talking to them and he's not very conciliatory or other-focused!

I lettered in band! And theater!

allow me to drop some SLA here:
that's not necessarily gender related -- sometimes one's attachment to one's phonological patterns (or language in general) is sometimes referred to as the language ego. People with strong language egos maintain their original phonological inventory even in situations where no one else is using their dialect. They also have difficulty learning new languages because they are very attached to the way that they speak, for whatever reason. This is not you.

People who do not have strong language egos often shift dialects and have less difficulty learning new languages because they are willing to hear different sounds coming out of their mouths and are comfortable sounding different than they usually do.

This is not to say that there aren't sociolinguistic reasons why women accomodate or even mimic the dominant speaker's dialect, but men do it too. Depends on how you look at it I guess.

Before I became a sullen teenager, I was a language nerd -- in 6th grade for national reading week (or whatever it was called) I went with my mom to have a special tshirt made. On the front it said "I LOVE TO READ" and on the back it said "ME GUSTA LEER" and guess who everyone made fun of that national reading week.

:(

Amanda, that shirt is awesome and people who made fun if you are the herkiest jerks ever and I totally would have hung out with you.

Aww! :(

Interesting post. Where does one's "language ego" come from? Does a strong language ego impair the un-spoken aspects of language learning, or just cripple your chances of speaking convincingly?

I love the idea of learning foreign languages, but actually I only really speak English. My French and German accents were both terrible and I'm not confident at speaking other languages out loud; when I have lived in other regions of the UK I've enjoyed learning new slang or noticing accent differences, but I haven't picked up the accent naturally and would be scared to try it consciously in case it sounded like mockery. I would love to change this but I guess it is too late to weaken my language ego.

i never thought of it that way. i am good at learning languages because i can memorize a lot of small things and patterns well. but i am not good at making accents. i hated taking french because it sounds crazy to me and impossible for my mouth to make those ridiculous sounds. i still got like a 100 in the class. does that mean i have a strong language ego or i'm just too cool for school?

Does a strong language ego impair the un-spoken aspects of language learning, or just cripple your chances of speaking convincingly?

yeah this is more what i mean

i would think the answer is no but at the same time i'm better at writing (well, not on internet message boards lol) than speaking irl too. maybe i just don't value speaking that much.

irl = in english

It's never too late, but it can be painful and difficult during the process. Take it from one who knows...

I'm not sure where it comes from precisely -- what's important is to recognize where yours is and, if you wish, be aware of the implications it has on your language learning. I'm sure that there are ramifications for written language as well, but usually it affects spoken language more because it's subject to more ridicule. On the other hand, I will add that a lot of people I work with (native Spanish speakers) have no problem speaking to me in English, but refuse to write email because they're afraid of making mistakes. They often don't realize this is why they "don't like" email, but this is why. They're afraid of being judged. It happens. (Of course I wouldn't judge them, but fear doesn't care about that)

I teach people to speak another language all day long (except during winter/summer breaks, natch) and I see all types -- but in general, successful language learners are not afraid to make mistakes, sound weird, or hear unfamiliar sounds coming out of their mouths.

Coincidentally, this applies to developmental learners as well. You have no idea how much resistance I get to the word "subsequently." "But no one uses that word!" "It's weird!" "It's stupid!"

Sigh. Back to work today, btw.

xp - part of communicating is speaking, so i would say you have a strong one

i really liked speaking spanish w/ my friend who is a native speaker but sometimes he would be like "say that again hahahahahaha" because he liked to hear certain words in my awful accent

I have native Spanish-speaking friends who encourage me to practice w them but yes, I am resistant to looking/sounding/feeling foolish so I don't. This isn't about accent (mine isn't completely terrible) or palette-formation issues, just my own frustration and/or insecurity.

However I FAIL at French and find all the sounds completely mysterious and un-form-able. And it might behoove me to study some German soon which arrrgh will be really starting all over since I've only done Romance languages before.

I can read and understand a decent amount of Spanish, and I'm good at... I'm not sure what to call it... figuring out the puzzle of other languages, maybe? Like, I took German and it just clicked and made so much sense. But speaking other languages makes me feel like I have marbles in my mouth.

Oh let me disclaim: most of my Spanish skills are focused on a specific subset of employment-related vocabulary words.

this is kind of moving away from the topic a little, but when i was a kid i had serious anxiety issues about saying certain words - not because i ~couldn't~ say them or pronounce them, but the words themselves made me feel uncomfortable. i started calling my step-dad 'dad' after a couple of years simply because i COULD NOT bring myself to say his name out loud ('lex') - it just creeped me out.

even now, as an adult, i sometimes get this.

Ugh, I had French lessons at school for 7 years and got good grades in it thanks to written/reading work but faced with the average French word I can think of about 6 different options for what vowel sound they want and which letters are silent.

German is a lot less mysterious accent-wise (at times I even kind of enjoy trying to speak it) but goddamn if I will ever get the German "eh" vowel not to sound like the most English "ay" ever while still keeping it distinct from the "ie" vowel (it's sort of halfway between the two, but my mouth doesn't seem to have an in-between). Luckily it seems a lot easier to be understood despite bad accents in German too, in my limited experience.

successful language learners are not afraid to make mistakes, sound weird, or hear unfamiliar sounds coming out of their mouths.

Yeah, these are all things which bother me in other areas too - suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that language confidence should be related to, e.g., would I dare sing in public (not at all, can't hit the notes, don't even sing in private much because of that) but I'd never thought about it.

Is it mostly people's names or a variety of words? xp to J.

it's a variety of words. trying to think of others, but my dad's name is the one that sticks out.

i had a terrible stutter growing up, so i feel you on that.

taking 7 semesters of various diction classes makes me wish everyone knew ipa bc it realllly helps so much in pronunciation! still, even with the rules right there, people who were fine speaking and singing in german and italian would freak out over french! i don't get it! to me, the hardest of all was english lyric diction.

also i've always been fascinated by code switching but language ego is a new term for me and i <3 it!

i'm excited about having a strong language ego

taking 7 semesters of various diction classes makes me wish everyone knew ipa bc it realllly helps so much in pronunciation!
this is why i can't read pronunciation threads -- 150,000 posts could be eliminated if people would just use ipa

hahaha yes!!!

i was so nerdy about it i used to take notes in class by writing them in ipa when i got bored.

i like code switching too because i work with a lot of generation 1.5 students

haha -- i used to do that too!!

usually it was too hard though

You are a bunch of cunning linguists.

i worked in a call center for a while and i would always catch myself switching depending on where the person on the other end of the line was calling from. it was kinda fun.

accents, not languages, though.

my grandmother (from long island) used to "code-switch" on the phone but her code switching was more talking VERY LOUD to her german step-mother as if she was deaf

Okay, taking a page from the meta-thread and also the shopping poll, do we even want to broach the shopping question here? Or should we continue just organically talking about linguistics and stuff? Which is already pretty cool, esp the language ego stuff which I didn't know anything about!

it's more fun here
we can talk about shopping but not about hating shopping? i mean like, let's embrace it!

i don't want to embrace shopping

shopping? i could talk about that..

i guess i'm not bad at learning languages.. i want to work on spanish, my french is pretty good including the accent, but i had to sit down with a tape recorder and record/play back many many times to get rid of the obvious anglophone sounds. also uh drinking a bit helps, to get past the worry about making mistakes! after a couple glasses of wine i suddenly remembered a lot of francais vocabulary that i hadn't used in years.

i sometimes have dreams in spanish and my accent is perfect

I mean basically ILX wimmenz are NOT en masse going to respond "OMG I JUST LOVE TO GO TO THE MALL WITH MY BFFS EVERY SUNDAY" because obv lols. So we can get that out of the way. But are we free of the pressure to go too far the other direction and disavow shopping entirely just because it might have too-typically "feminine" connotations?

How about having an informed-consumer approach in which you are interested in getting the best thing that you need/want for its own sake?

i need to go back and relearn things. i feel bad for forgetting most of it!
i tried teaching myself russian once but instead i just taught myself how to pronounce it by ipa-ing stuff instead of actually learning to read it/understand it.

i feel more free when i stay out of the mall, feminine connotations aside