sistermagpie | Speaking in tongues

Today was S's last day in my Saturday ballet class, because she's been transferred back to Germany, which is where she is from. She said she hoped one day to get transferred to India because she speaks Hindi, which I thought was really cool. She said Hindi sounded something like German and English because they're all Indo-Germanic languages.

C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.

So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?

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I speak Korean, but not enough to construct well-thought-out age appropriate sentences. I do understand quite a bit, though. I've noticed that my mother, who was born and raised in south Korea, can swear with much more conviction and better results if she's swearing in her native tongue. :-) Korean is the language where her passion lies. She can make herself the center of everyone's attention much easier in Korean, and her advice, when given in Korean, is much easier to understand, and often more intensely delivered. Does that make sense? When she's having fun and talking in Korean, her animation and sense of humor, which is wicked at times, comes off much better than it does in English. Although she's been living in the states for almost thirty years now, there are still words she has a hard time really understanding on an abstract level.

It is very unnerving to hear her switch from Korean to English in the middle of a sentence, but sometimes, there really aren't words to replace the ones you want to use when in the midst of a conversation. Most of the time when she switches, though, she's doing it to directly quote from an American person.

That reminds me of an acting class I took once where we had to do an exercise where we made an "impassioned speech." This one woman was able to do that in English, but when she had to do something similar where she was speaking to her parents she had a lot of trouble and finally asked if she could do it in Spanish (I think it was Spanish that was her native language at least...now I can't remember). Made sense, and even if you couldn't understand what she was saying from an acting standpoint you could still tell it did the trick. You could tell she was impassioned!

Things like humor would definitely work that way, I'd think, and I can definitely see how certain words would just always give you trouble if you weren't brought up with them. I met a guy once whose grandmother had named her two cats after two words in English she couldn't grasp the meaning of just that way. I think they were something like, "Likely" and "Definitely." LOL! It's especially interesting when somebody speaks the language well--like, I knew a guy who was Polish but when I met him I didn't realize it.

See, it really does sometimes seem like a person has a slightly different personality depending on what language they're speaking, if they are fluent. I know I've felt so frustrated trying to communicate in a language I can't speak--it's like a character in a book I read once said, "In English I am stupid boy. In Polish I am not stupid." You can know, intellectually, that the person really is smart but they can't communicate it.

Speaking in tongues

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