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 switch between languages depending on subject. i cannot talk about math in any sophisticated way in english and have a hard time expressing myself about my work or childbirth in german...different experiences and parts of my life are thus connected to different languages.

on the emotional front, i don't think it is english per se that is easier but rather that a foreign language fails to hold these deep-seated gut level connotations. there've been intersting debates by german fen about writing smut in english and how it is easier...some argued that english is a better language for it but others (myself included) strongly believed that it is rather a matter of distance. i think and read and speak and dream in english and there's rarely a moment when i default into german (sometimes i still mistranslate idioms or proverbs...), but i still "feel" more strongly in german, i.e., the german phrases and terms have more weight for me.

example: i was talking in a german's lj and used the term sex toy in german. not only was i uncertain it was the right term..it felt and sounded utterly obscene to me!

as for feeling differently/being a different person: when i first came to the states i totally felt like that. it was like the new country and the new language allowed me to create a new person...but we bring ourselves along with us wherever we go, and after 12 years here, i don't think my german self is much different from my american self...but it certainly felt that way early on (part of it was simply the vacation aspect of a year abroa, but the language did feel liberating in away, b/c it lacked all the connotations and different levels of meanings your own held...boy did i swear...not having any sense for the impact or sense of the words :-)

i never switch back and forth, and i've had this pet theory for a while that there are two types of bilingual speakers...those that are fluent in two languages independently and those that can think in both simultaneously. with a few awkwardnesses here and there i get back into german fairly quckly and easily and i speak english with little enough of an accent to have students wonder whether i'm from up north or canada or some other weird place with weird accents :-) but i could never be a translator, b/c the two languages exist independent from one another...there's nothing worse than having to do on the spot translations for family.,..i suck at it, which they have a hard time understanding. i wonder whether the age when you learned the languages has sth to do with it, b/c children who were raised bilingual seem to have easier simultaneous access...

Yes--like I said above, I defintely think in C's case it wasn't a case of English being more suited to emotional language than French but that psychologically speaking in a foreign language made her more comfortable saying these things. She described it perfectly in English by saying she was both "hiding behind the language" and showing her true self.

I had wondered also about exactly what you described, if different experiences of your life were just naturally connected to the language you were speaking at the time. The closest I come to something like that is when I'm talking about a book I read in French rather than English and I realize my impression of it isn't really the same as it is with an English book because I'm a little more removed from it. Usually I'll throw in disclaimers like, "At least I think this is what happened because maybe I mistranslated!"

part of it was simply the vacation aspect of a year abroa, but the language did feel liberating in away, b/c it lacked all the connotations and different levels of meanings your own held...boy did i swear...not having any sense for the impact or sense of the words

Heh! I love this--just like

leianora said above, but reversed. I was once doing a French immersion weekend which was very stressful--they put me in a level that was probably too far over my head because they placed you via a written test rather than an oral one (which was really dumb of them) and I somehow seemed to come out with the French word for "fuck," which I didn't know I knew. In my desperation to communicate I'd borrowed a word I'd heard in Shakespeare and I think its meaning might have changed since then. Oy.

i wonder whether the age when you learned the languages has sth to do with it, b/c children who were raised bilingual seem to have easier simultaneous access...

This whole line of thought fascinates me and I think you're right--some people switch back and forth and some people are one or the other. I have some friends where the father is American and the mother is Japanese and the kids, especially the older one who is 5, often has to translate. But what's funny is when you ask him to tell you the Japanese words for things he won't because in his mind everything must be ordered and he knows which people get the Japanese words and which ones get the English words. But he does translate for his mother too, so I think that will be a skill he will grow up to have. I'll bet kids growing up bilingual do usually wind up with a different relationship to languages than a kid who learns one and then learns the other.

see, i wonder if one can learn to be a better switcher. i never had to exist in both languages for any length of time, so i never had to learn...but i assume i might be able to were i do move back or teach german here ...

Probably. Again, it's probably exposure. I mean, try tackling a subject where half the terminology is in English and the other half in German, and see what that does to your mind... I had the hardest time sticking to one language in the end.

Speaking in tongues

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