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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?
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 never truly appreciated my mother tongue, until I moved to France and had to get by in a different language -one that wasn't even English!- at daily basis. IMO, if I look at things "objectively" (and I use quotation marks around the word, because of course, when you talk about things like taste, nothing can never be truly objective), I think French is one of the most beautiful languages in the world, and Spanish one of the coolest, but after having lived abroad, I really, truly find Swedish beautiful as well, in a way I suppose I wouldn't have, if it didn't mean as much to me as it does. The fact that words simply mean more to me in my mother tongue, than in any other language, automatically makes a good poem, or other type of lyric, more beautiful then I would find it in English, French or Spanish. But at the same time, badly written Swedish poems/song lyrics/dialogue also makes me cringe infinitely much more.
do you find differences in yourself from one language to another?
Yes. If you ever want to learn to really speak, and not only understand, a second language, you need to throw away all those ambitions you may have of always being eloquent and always finding the exact right word for every single thing. Of course, it depends on how big your knowledge in the language is, but you have to accept the fact that you'll, at times anyway, sound stupid, can't be as witty, will sometimes sound like a three-year-old, because the thing of main importance is to make yourself understood at all. So, if I speak any other language, I always throw my inhibitions aside and I don't have the same standards on myself, which can really be relieving. At the same time, it can of course also be frustrating, especially if you live in the other country for a longer time, because sometimes you just really miss being able to express yourself on the same terms as everybody else. I've never lived in an English speaking country, though I spoke it quite a lot in Spain, since I didn't know any Spanish when I first came, and therefore was forced to make my first friendships in English. I tried to switch language later, when I'd learned more Spanish, but it was incredibly hard, because the friendships were already established in English, and it was hard to get back, since obviously both me and the other person, spoke better English and Spanish, so while switching language would have been better for us, from the "I'm here to learn Spanish" perspective, it obviously wasn't from the "I want to get to know you better" perspective. It was different in France, because while I couldn't speak French when I came, I had quite a decent vocabulary, having studied it for six years in school, so I could basically try to speak it from the beginning, and it ended up being the language I always used (except with Swedes), whether I was communicating with Americans or Norwegians. It would be interesting to take another six months in Spain for this reason, because this time, I could begin with Spanish, and thus have the friendships established in that language from the beginning. It would be interesting to see how I'd feel if I ever moved to a English-speaking country as well, if I would feel the same level of frustration, or if it would soon pass. I don't think I ever felt inferior to my Irish and American friends in Spain, though it was their mother tongue, but that probably had a lot to do with the fact that there was another language there where I could feel a whole lot more inferior to everyone, so I think that if that were really THE language, I'd have just the same moments of frustration.
From:
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The other thing where C is a great example is where you were talking about how you're just trying to be understood so you can't always be so precise...often that can lead to a person speaking really beautifully. Maybe English is a language that lends itself to that sort of thing since it's not very rigid in the way people are expected to talk--in America especially. Like, I love listening to young children try to communicate something that's just a little above their heads because they'll often come out with something really poetic that works. For instance, once I was walking down the street and a little kid and his father were walking near me. As they passed McDonalds the boy asked if they could go there for dinner and the father said no. So he asked if they could go there for dinner "sometime," obviously meaning "sometime soon." So the father said, "Sure. How about June 18th, 2067?" Totally taking advantage of the kid's not expressing himself perfectly. So now I'm listening closely as the kid frowns and tries to think of how to respond. He said, "No. I mean, can we go there sometime..." And I know the correct phrase he's looking for is, "sometime in the near future" but he won't know that. But finally he comes up with, "Can we go there for dinner sometime around now?
For some reason I just loved this. It wasn't like listening to somebody inarticulate, it was like listening to somebody who spoke creatively. I think the same thing can happen if someone starts with a different native language. If they get to the point where they're very fluent in the adopted language the more interesting influences of the original language can start to shine, you know?
The fact that words simply mean more to me in my mother tongue, than in any other language, automatically makes a good poem, or other type of lyric, more beautiful then I would find it in English, French or Spanish.
Yes! I don't know how young you have to be when you become bilingual for words to have the same weight in both languages. Heh. Makes me wonder if the porn experience is slightly different for native English-speakers on lj than it is for people writing in a second language. Like,
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Personally, I think it's all about exposure. English porn sounds less obscene to me than German porn, but that's because I've read tons of smutty fic in English and nearly none in German. I don't think I can really compare the level of obscenity unless I've had about equal exposure to both.
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From: (Anonymous)
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Oh, I'll second that!
And I think that's part of the reason why sex scenes or porn often sounds more natural in a second language as well. Lots and lots of it is amazingly badly written, really really incredibly cringeworthy, and the purple language that suddenly appears and hijacks the style of otherwise sane authors... Having a buffer of non-native language competence can help you connect with a scene in spite of bad writing in a way that is very difficult in your mother tongue.
- Clara