Speaking in tongues

[sistermagpie]

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?

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

My Latin teacher would be so proud of my if I dreamed in Latin. ::sigh:: Mostly I just mutter "Gallia est omnis..." Six years of it you'd think I'd be better at it! It was very popular in my high school for some reason.

There is something really funny about associating aikido and drinking with French.:-)

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

Well, I spent almost all of the lovely southern evenings at the dojo, and they were kind enough to let me train with them, despite my coming in speaking pretty much no French. Then they decided that I needed extra lessons in speaking French, so we'd go out, have a few demis, and they'd make me try to communicate without resorting to English. Two months of that, and, well... :)

I did my bachelor's in Classics. There was never dreaming in Greek, but there was in Latin. Oh, the memories.