Speaking another language

Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by OurJud, Nov 14, 2015.

  1. Necronox

    Necronox Contributor Contributor

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    I know that feeling lifeline. I'm French-English bilingual, but the problem is that I'm so familiar with both that I sometimes forget which I am speaking. It has regularly been a mistake of mine to speak to French to English speakers or vice versa.

    On a side note, has anyone gotten to a point where you speak two language at once? for example using french grammar and English words (making for some pretty hilarious phrases)? or some other combination of two language resulting in a weird and wonderful mix?
     
  2. Lifeline

    Lifeline South. Supporter Contributor

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    Oh sure, that happens with frightening regularity too. Again, with speaking German, managing to find the right (German) vocabulary but inserting it in English grammar. I can't think of an example right now though, I try to forget it as soon as it happens ;)
     
  3. Lifeline

    Lifeline South. Supporter Contributor

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    Just happened. Did you know...

    "shilde" = contraction of shields (english) and Schilde (german)
    Besides: "wollen toeten um humans zu ihnen zu machen" (I can't even translate that one :D)

    And most troubling is that I did not even notice. Okay, maybe that was due to a bit of white wine at the airport.. ;)

    Happy next week!
     
  4. Vito

    Vito Member

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    I'm from South Texas along the border, around here we talk Spanglish. I can think and speak in Spanish and English at the same time. It's not by choice. George Lopez does jokes about it, they're totally true.
     
  5. DancingCorpse

    DancingCorpse Member

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    I used to be alright at german, I stopped honing my foreign beak though and got lazy so I'd need to start all over again. I also started learning spanish some years back but only began mastering the basics (TENGO UNA RESERVA is my go to if everyone starts speaking spanish somewhere). I found german a lot easier and can still compose adequate but peculiar exclamations every now and then if the moment takes me, I usually say I'm a chocolate (insert object) and I have boring/difficult eyes and funny carrots.
     
  6. Rani99

    Rani99 Member

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    I don't think that I'm fluent in any second language, even if I do sometimes think in English and most of the time when hearing people talk or in my English lectures, I do not need to translate in my mind, it feels very natural, BUT... when I hear, or I usually read something that is beyond my English level ( I'm C1), then it's hard to understand, or I reread a couple of times if it's a text. And also I'm not very good at grammar or tenses ( yeah, this one is hard for me in all languages ). Also I forget a lot of words when I want to say something, but when I see them, I know what that means, even sometimes I don't know the equivalent in my native language. I speak French ( far from fluent ), a bit Russian and I understand a bit of German, can read Japanese ( though I might have forgotten everything, don't know ). Oh and my native language is lithuanian ( it's supposed to be one of the most difficult languages as I've heard) .My main goal is now to get that beautiful British accent.
     
  7. Shbooblie

    Shbooblie Senior Member

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    I used to be quite good at French, reading this thread has made me want to pick it back up again, with perhaps a few others thrown in the mix for good measure! Didn't know there were so many languages on these boards!
     
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  8. Jeff Countryman

    Jeff Countryman Living the dream

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    I'm recently (about 5 years now) mute and learning American Sign Language (ASL) only because it's helpful - but not particularly 'useful' since I don't live nor work in a deaf and/or mute environment. ASL is considered a 'language' but it cannot be written, so it has some issues in that respect. At any rate, to answer the 'thinking' part of the original poster's question ----> yes and no. Yes, I need to translate into English what is being said via sign language....and No, I'm so used to common ASL signs that I now can do it automatically and without thought. I suppose the answer is that it depends on the person's comfort level with the language and how it comes naturally to them.
     
  9. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    But that level of mixing would actually be indication that one was not a proficient/native speaker of that language. It does not mean fluency to mix by using the wrong grammatical structure - it means actually a poor command of the language. Think about it - that's exactly how non-native speakers speak. I can often translate my parents' English word for word back into Cantonese and find that in Cantonese, it makes perfect sense. In English it is comprehensible, but by no means advanced English. (Their paasive English is advanced but their active English is probably more like upper-intermediate)

    I think though the distinction might be in whether you are aware of this. My parents aren't. But when i speak Cantonese and find it's in English grammatical structure, I go back and correct myself. I still see that as insufficient grasp of the languagw though.

    The level of mixing i would find acceptable would be inserting foreign words and certain phrases into another language. Whole sentences or half clauses, but always in each language's grammatical structure.
     
  10. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    I've noticed this happen to me on a grammar level with both Swedish and French, but it may be because I'm not fluent in either. What happens is that I've had my brain dunked deep in the language for a while, like maybe I've been reading a book in either language. Then I start forming sentences in either Finnish or English, but my brain halts for a second when it's time to e.g. make a relative clause or combine a noun with an adjective. It's like a glitch of sorts, and definitely doesn't happen often.

    I'd guess it'll depend on the language(s). Maybe mixing up French and English is easier than Cantonese and English?

    Oh, I can say for sure at least one grammatical feature of English has entered my native tongue! The passive you. It's a clear, atrocious interference, and I inwardly cringe whenever I use it.
     
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  11. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    I barely have a grasp on this one. Does atuo-correct text speak count? It is kinda like code breaking. :p

    I tried to learn another language, but I only have bits and pieces in small amounts.
    Apparently my brain had other plans to spend more time accumulating other things
    it finds of importance to learn, instead of learning another language that it believes
    it will never use. Also math falls into that category at a certain point. :p
     
  12. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Swedish and Finnish probably both have genders right? (I've not studied either lol) I'm almost sure Finnish has cases - I've heard it's got like 15!? - and does Swedish have cases? I suppose the similarity of the languages would have an impact - I only speak two so I wouldn't know lol. Neither Cantonese nor English have cases or genders, although obviously English has remnants of them in words like: me, I, mine, my etc. It wouldn't be possible to be "confused" as such because such things don't apply to Cantonese, whereas I imagine if both languages had genders and cases, it would be easier to use the wrong one 'cause the two would feel similarly correct? This would actually be an interesting thing to look up :D

    What's the passive "you"? And how do you use it in Finnish if such a word doesn't exist in the language? :D
     
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  13. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    @Mckk Finnish doesn't have genders. It's quite different from most European languages.

    The passive you is when you use the pronoun 'you' to denote the passive tense, in other words, when the pronoun 'you' is used to denote the passive tense. ;)
     
  14. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    I didn't know the passive voice was a "tense"? Or maybe you've just totally lost me.

    Finnish doesn't have genders? Well I guess that's one aspect where perhaps it's easier than other European languages then!? :D
     
  15. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    Oh no, not a tense as in "past tense". I mean when you want to talk about something that basically lacks a subject, an actor. In Finnish you wouldn't use 'you' like we sometimes use in English. But it's a grammatical feature that has entered our language from a foreign language, in this case English I believe (because in Swedish instead of 'you' you'd normally say 'man'). It's incorrect but common enough to become unnoticeable in everyday speech.

    Yeah, no need to learn how to spell feminine and masculine nouns or adjectives. :D
     
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  16. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    But do you actually have 15 cases? I am a little aghast you haven't corrected me on that front :ninja:
     
  17. KaTrian

    KaTrian A foolish little beast. Contributor

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    Yeah, 15 cases. :eek:
    But I believe there's more in Magyar so... it could be worse. :D
     
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  18. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    No, I've not had this particular phenomenon happen to me, but I'm going to guess that this is at least in part to do with what I do for a living. It's a regular thing that when I turn in a translated document, the recipient will question a sentence to the tune of "But that's not how they phrased it in Spanish", to which I have to answer, "I know, I phrased it for you the way we would say that in English. If it were as easy as just plug & replace of words, you wouldn't need me and I would be out of a job."

    I will say that after a long project of translating English to Spanish, when I come back to English, possessives sometimes feel weird to me. The whole "apostrophe S" thing looks, I don't know, informal or strange after you've been in Spanish Land for a while. I think it's because you can form possessives in English the same way we do in Spanish, using of, but clearly it's not the typical form. In English we say "That's my mother's car" not "That is the car of my mother".
     
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  19. S A Lee

    S A Lee Contributor Contributor

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    @OurJud My Spanish teacher during my GCSEs summarised the point rather well. When you're not as competent in a language, you spend time translating for yourself in your head and thus can fall behind by the time you have an answer. As you improve, you start thinking in the language that you were using in order to keep up with the conversation.

    @Necronox Not by accident, but I learned the words 'douche' and 'retard' in French before coming across its use in English (they mean 'shower' and 'late' respectively), I take the mick out of that by saying 'showersac' instead of 'douchebag' as both a way of flying it under the radar and just to demonstrate how nonsensical I find the word.
     
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  20. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    I've never really gotten fluent at another language, although, like @Wreybies, I'm a DLI grad (Korean). I took a bit of German in high school, then the 47 week intensive Korean class at DLI. That was probably my best foreign language, my classmates and I used to have conversations in Korean without too much difficulty, although god knows how badly we warped it through the lens of English. Funny thing about DLI is that it provides both a strong motivation (if you "rock out", Marines would generally end up someplace like mortars, for which there is no Air Force equivalent) and limited opportunities for practice, as, due to security reasons, we were discouraged from speaking our target languages off-post. The command assumed that the school was a prime target for foreign intelligence agents. Not so much of a problem for the Spanlings, but if you have a white guy speaking Korean, or a Puerto Rican dude popping out in Russian, odds are they didn't learn it from their grandmothers.

    After that I took a brief stab at Turkish, which, surprisingly, has a similar grammar and structure to Korean, and didn't present too much trouble for me. Alas, it was only a summer study abroad program, so my abilities didn't have a chance to progress very far.

    And then there's the elephant in the room. More than a decade and a half in Japan, and my language ability is still miserable. First and foremost, sloth must be to blame.

    [​IMG]

    Yes, you. It's all your fault.

    However, Japanese is a right bastard of a language. The grammar and structure are similar to Korean (and Turkish), so that's not actually that much of a problem. The thing that hurts me most (aside from the aforementioned slow-moving tree dweller) is the pathetic, miserable, overcomplicated excuse for a written language.

    Japanese has three written scripts, two phonetic and one of ideograms. The phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana, are, in terms of sound, identical to each other, but hiragana is for use with Japanese words, and katakana is for use with foreign word. Except when they aren't, because, as near as I can tell, fuck you, that's why.

    Then there's kanji, which is Chinese characters. When I was studying Korean, they also used a mix of phonetic script (hangul) and Chinese characters (hanja), but each hanja had one and only one pronunciation, so once you'd learned it, you were there. Kanji characters, on the other hand, can have up to five different pronunciations depending on context, and there's no way to know which is which. This results in furigana, which is when the Japanese basically subtitle their own language (it's actually a supertitle) by writing, in hiragana, the correct pronunciation of the kanji above it. Why not just switch to all hiragana, you ask? Well, northeast Asian (can't speak to the others) languages are chock-full of homophones, so unless you have the kanji to tell you which shi you are using, you could be talking about the number four, or death, or starting the verb "to do". Did I mention that they don't put spaces between their words?

    The result of all of this is that the key information is usually in kanji, and without knowing kanji, there's no way to look it up. If you're a non-English speaking Japanese person in New York, and you see a sign that says "The subway closes at eleven", you pull out your dictionary and start working your way through the sentence, word by word. It's slow and arduous, but you'll get there eventually. If you're an American in Osaka, however, and you see this: 私のホバークラフトは鰻でいっぱいです, even if you can figure out the word breaks, you've got no way of translating the first and eleventh characters, and #11 is pretty important. Try improving your vocabulary organically when you can't read.

    But anyway, back to the original topic. I have found that my Japanese is good enough that it has displaced a lot of my Korean. The languages are similar grammatically, and phonetically not too far off, which meant that the last time I visited Korea, I found that I'd start a sentence is Korean, get a little hung up in the middle, and finish in Japanese. Well done, Iain, now nobody understands you!
     
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  21. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Showersac - I like it :D

    This reminds me of the word "lump". In Czech, it means "villain."

    I thoroughly enjoy imagining Sauron as a lump :supergrin:
     
  22. Mckk

    Mckk Member Supporter Contributor

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    Hahaha thanks for the good chuckle :D Isn't 鰻 an eel?

    But if Chinese has dictionaries that allow you to simply write on the screen with your finger, then surely such exists for Japanese kanji? Searching the actual dictionary for Chinese is a pain in the butt and up until recently I couldn't even do it, because my formal education in Chinese is actually pretty limited and I never learnt the proper breakdown of all the radicals that form each Chinese character. Then I found the app Pleco and now I just switch to the "paintbrush" mode and write the word I see onto the screen with my finger, like a stylus. And voila, I can now look up words in Chinese!

    Anyway I'm guessing with kanji, the trick would be to learn the hiragana separate from the kanji to begin with. Like, you're not looking at the kanji to give you a guide in pronunciation, but only meaning - and if you know A means this and B means that, even though A and B are both represented by the same symbol, then you can assign the correct one to the symbol. I think I'm actually trying to explain how you should just read Chinese in general haha. Like, the sooner you ditch any attempt to look for a reason for things, the faster you'll be. I don't ask "why" when kanji has two different pronunciation - just like I don't ask "why" in Chinese. It just is. On the other hand, as a child I was baffled by phonics :D the idea that sounds merged together to make a whole new sound was just like, whaaaaaaa!?

    Children's books often have spaces between the words. Guess you just have to be familiar enough with the language to get it. My Japanese students forever forget to put spaces between their English words, and they also regu
    larly write like thi
    s

    And then I have to tell them that can't happen and the poor students then spend 10min trying to rub out this huge long sentence and rewrite it all over again. Sometimes they've already done several such sentences before I catch it and then I just don't say anything lol.
     
    Last edited: Mar 29, 2017
  23. S A Lee

    S A Lee Contributor Contributor

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    Haha, thanks. The plumbers at work get it, probably because they see the word on boxes for showers XD

    In German, 'gift' means 'poison'. Languages are funny like that.
     
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  24. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    If you washed out as a USAF student at DLI, the job you were headed to was "cement specialist". It's not really a job, obviously. It was just a bit of USAF DLI urban mythologizing. Given the wicked cost of getting a crypto-linguist up and running, I think all the branches basically sent you to whichever job had the shortest, least costly training.

    ETA: Reads back over thread and realizes I made this same comment about a year ago. Makes note to self: "Wrey, you are a one-trick pony." :whistle:
     
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  25. S A Lee

    S A Lee Contributor Contributor

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    In Chinese, they have subtle intonations you have to remember on top of learning the character. Getting those wrong can completely mangle your sentence. I had an English teacher who would occasionally use stories of her translating Mandarin to explain things.

    On a side note, I'd love to speak Gaelic, I know scant words from my childhood (my first two years of school were in the ROI in a school that taught both English and Gaelic) but I'm better at French XP
     

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