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For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

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Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#61

Post by sotix »

nyanmatt wrote: post #59

I've noticed something else particular to my native tongue. It lacks emotion. I just don't really know how to express myself in English. I can speak very technically and logically, but I'm stumped when it comes to matters of the heart. My Japanese, on the other hand, isn't fluent, but I'm able to tap into way more emotion. It feels as if I'm singing when I nail a great sentence in nihongo. It really lands with the li…

I think it might be that English isn’t very expressive. It’s much more technical and to the point. I find Greek and Spanish significantly more expressive when I speak them and particularly when I hear natives speak the languages.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#62

Post by jamager »

OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #15
Arc_Orion wrote: post #6

This makes sense. I have fairly good L2 German production, but I go from conversant to barely coherent when fatigued. My L1 English production diminishes, but not nearly as much. Likewise, my friends who speak English as an L2, even those who have spoken it with a strong command for over a decade, will struggle when very tired. Though we usually speak in English (her English is way better than my German), I've had a…

Regarding the follow-up... I grew up speaking only Russian. I moved to the US when I was 15. I had 7 years of deliberate English practice prior to the move and became fluid in it within a year of moving. That was about 30 years ago. Because I moved alone, and didn't seek out Russian speakers for this 30 year duration, I only occasionally spoke Russian. The result is that now my Russian feels like a second language. W…

Language attrition: what we don't practice, we forget. Even the mother tongue.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#63

Post by jamager »

aragonite wrote: post #17

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your na…

Numbers in many languages tend to be harder to internalize, yes. Numbers in Danish are a whole other level, thou.

Consider e.g. the number 157. That'd be 100 + 7 + ((-0,5 + 3) x 20), only that they don't pronounce the "x 20" because then it is too long.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#64

Post by xtracto »

aragonite wrote: post #17

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your na…

For me it's the ten hundreds or similar way to call the thousands. It's something that I have to picture the number in my mind and then translate it to the equivalent in thousands.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#65

Post by tharkun__ »

mzs wrote: post #55
evertedsphere wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression from having asked people about this exact problem—I meet plenty of recent immigrants here in Paris—is this goes away quickly if you have to, say, work a customer-facing job where handling money is part of your duties, but much slower otherwise. (Of course, you can also simulate that experience by drilling this for ten minutes a day until it becomes second nature.)

Not really though in my personal experience. You only need to learn conventions about how to say currency values out loud because you enter the numbers at a register and it presents you with a total that you read out like, "That'll be twenty-one oh seven," or, "twenty one dollars and seven cents please." All the money handling and change making you do in numbers in your head.

This! Internally it's still not-English, while the result can fluently and easily be said in English.

I do find however that it also depends on "when the number was remembered". For example, relatives phone numbers I remember in my head in non-English, as I learned them in that language. But my credit card number I recite in my head in English in order to write it out on order forms.

And numbers for calculating and such for a very long time was still non-English but I think it's habit. In my head, nobody tells me "Sorry dude, what language is that? I can't understand a word" and so there's never any real incentive. It's also faster to do that part in your first language and only say the result out loud while thinking about words (especially entire sentences) in your first language and then translating and saying it in English makes for awkwardly long pauses or really bad sentence structure. I think that provides again more incentive to learn English sentence structure and to think in English to begin with, so that words come out "right away" as you think and formulate.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#66

Post by BirAdam »

aragonite wrote: post #17

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your na…

Eh. Once I start dreaming and thinking in a non-native language, the only things I revert to native on are things like philosophy where extra cognitive load actively hinders my thoughts. Numbers/money aren’t really expensive in the same way.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#67

Post by brabel »

a_c_s wrote: post #12
brabel wrote: post #7

If you learn any language as an adult, chances are you're never going to become as fluent as a native speaker, no matter how long you live in a second language environment. I say that as someone who has done it myself, and seen a lot of friends and family going through the same process. Children are a different story. They can learn a language and start speaking just like native speakers, local accent and all, within…

Sorry to be a curmudgeon but I get tired of all these claims about how well young children speak second languages. A young child saying "Vanilla ice cream please!" often sounds more like "Ganiwa ishe! cweam! pweese!". A typical 4-year-old speaking English substitutes many sounds for another because they developmentally aren't able to make the right sounds yet. Their intonation is also all over the place. If an adult…

My example above was of a 5 year old. At that age, she already spoke her own language fluently so that anyone understood her well (of course, they still have a smaller vocabulary at this age as they haven't been able to talk about all sorts of topics yet). Do you think a normal 5yo normally still speaks blurry?? Or a 6yo? At this age, and even up to perhaps 12yo, as far as I can tell, they're able to absorb another language quite easily, and it only becomes harder around age 14 or so... though of course I haven't run an experiment or anything. I expect your learning curve becomes worse gradually between the ages of 14 and 30, maybe very slowly up to mid 40's.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#68

Post by User3456335 »

aragonite wrote: post #17

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your na…

It might depend on whether you do a lot of counting in your non-native tongue. Since I studied maths in English (not my native language), I also do counting in English when I'm thinking in English because to me counting in English is just as easy as in my mother tongue.

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#69

Post by snowpid »

Arc_Orion wrote: post #6

This makes sense. I have fairly good L2 German production, but I go from conversant to barely coherent when fatigued. My L1 English production diminishes, but not nearly as much. Likewise, my friends who speak English as an L2, even those who have spoken it with a strong command for over a decade, will struggle when very tired. Though we usually speak in English (her English is way better than my German), I've had a…

What is L1, L2 Proficiency?

Re: For polyglots, there's something special about their native tongue

#70

Post by porompompero »

aragonite wrote: post #17

In my observation of non-native speakers working & living in the US (a group to which I belong), there's also something special about number-words. If you are a non-native speaker, even if you boast near-perfect English pronunciation and fluency, and are accustomed to using English in all aspects of your life, not just for communication but for e.g. personal note-taking, and even if you haven't spoken/written your na…

This happens to me not in my native language but in the language in which I learned mathematics.
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