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Do you hate your native tongue? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| linguaholic_ch Triglot Groupie IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5039 days ago 69 posts - 96 votes  Speaks: English, Hindi, Bengali Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 44 03 March 2014 at 2:15pm | IP Logged |
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I have to confess that I did not care for my native language, which is Bengali. My
mother was a teacher of that language and has a great anguish in her heart that I did not take Bengali as my second language even. My second was Hindi and first is English. But recently I had regained my passion for languages and am starting to think about the richness it contains. I used to think Bengali is worthless, but it isn't. It is language I use to speak on the streets and daily life, although I use English more. I believe one's mother tongue is a part of a person's identity and culture. It was the language you first spoke when you cried Mother!. I regret for not learning Bengali, but I will do it someday. Regards, Chayan 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4225 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 10 of 44 03 March 2014 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
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I used to be angry about the very existence of the big differences between Russian and English because most of the music that I'm listening to is English and Russian music in general sounds bad to me. Sometimes I hate that past tense in Russian changes by gender and some other grammatical things (and sometimes I love it as well, hehe).
But to hate my native language? No. On the other hand, I think my native language is one of the most beautiful and complex in the world (though both these feelings are not really... visible, so to speak, to me) and I certainly just can't hate it. I wish I could be bilingual in Russian and English/ German, but, well, it's not like that I was to choose, eh? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4659 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 11 of 44 04 March 2014 at 1:04pm | IP Logged |
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I wish we could communicate telepathically,
no language transmission involved whatsoever. ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| icemanfresh Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 3922 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Tagalog* Studies: French | Message 12 of 44 04 March 2014 at 1:32pm | IP Logged |
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My Filipino vocabulary isn't as wide as my English one (because some words aren't as
commonly used as the English ones and Filipino seems to have a smaller vocabulary overall) but I love it just as much as any language. As a matter of fact, I took a bunch of philosophy and theology professors who taught in Filipino, and it was quite an experience. Maybe it's partly because people here are raised to be patriotic, but I also think that Filipino sounds beautiful in some ways. Now that I'm learning French, it's a fun exercise to make comparisons across languages. Like how French is extremely gender-sensitive, while Filipino has all gender-neutral pronouns. They say that each language encapsulates a culture's way of thinking, so I suppose each language has its own worldview to offer to the table. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| icemanfresh Diglot Newbie Philippines Joined 3922 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Tagalog* Studies: French | Message 13 of 44 04 March 2014 at 1:36pm | IP Logged |
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Btw, a lot of natives say that Filipino is easier than English, but that's only because
they never had to study which affix is used to conjugate each verb. :P It's just something people grow up knowing, so we don't formally study it in school. When I think about it, it's kind of arbitrary, and I myself often made those mistakes when I was a kid. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ElComadreja Senior Member Philippines bibletranslatio Joined 7229 days ago 683 posts - 757 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Cebuano, French, Tagalog | Message 14 of 44 04 March 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
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I would if I had to learn it now. ;)
3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4435 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 15 of 44 04 March 2014 at 10:01pm | IP Logged |
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Personally there is always a struggle to find an identity between 2 cultures. I have nothing against my
mother-tongue, culture & tradition but more against my parents' traditional / strict approaches to parenting. In their generation, parents are the "know-alls" in the family. You respect them almost to a god-like status and their decisions on your behalf (incl. your education, career choices, etc.) as they know what is best for you. There was 1 summer I went to Taiwan for summer exchange. Took a language course at an advanced level and did reasonably well. Afterwards there was nothing but complaint you should have done this, this and this... Going through 2 weeks of learning words & phrases and daily dictation isn't easy. You try your best to get through the language program and it seemed like nothing can ever satisfy the parents (mom especially because she was a teacher and insisted on her way of doing everything). In my younger days the family communicated in the mother-tongue at home while we speak English for daily correspondence. When it comes to writing Chinese characters, I was taught mostly by my mother. Over the years, many of my relatives lost their ability to write Chinese besides their given name. I am the only person who kept up. Of all the people in the family, my parents (my mother especially) has always been considered the expert in the Chinese language. Since Chinese writing is not an alphabet you can learn in a week, everybody looked up to my mother as the person who knows the most number of characters and their meanings. This never seemed to intimidate me. As a web designer, I've posted bilingual online content relying on dictionaries and encyclopedias for getting the correct terms from English to Chinese and vice versa. It is part of my job skills. In my mother's generation, they relied on their parents for knowledge. As I watched a few online videos posted by Moses McCormick, Steve Kaufmann & Luca, I've come to believe a lot of learning can be done through hard work and personal efforts. Every day I would spend a few hours listening to the news and watch TV programs in the mother- tongue. In my culture people respect their parents, teachers and authority. My other siblings have always resented the strict, traditional parenting and tend to associate writing the language as a kind of culture conformity. When it comes to learning languages, I tend to feel you need to give credit to yourself and push yourself very hard to overcome the stereotype you can never be better than your teacher or your parents. You are not maintaining your fluency because of your parents but because it offers a window to the other side of the world. You can communicate with people through social media and know what they are thinking. In this part of the world there are a lot of mixed relationships. You see the kids communicate only in English. Even among the people whose parents are first-generation immigrants, many who are born here would speak only in English. Yet people identify themselves according to the ethnicity (instead of just Canadian, they'd be labelled as Polish-Canadian, Korean-Canadian, etc.) and most have relatives in another part of the world. Edited by shk00design on 04 March 2014 at 10:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 3988 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 16 of 44 05 March 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged |
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Yes, in a way. My first language is a tiny dialect of Cantonese that used to be the main type of Chinese spoken in Chinatown's outside of China but is dying out. (You guys probably know what it is, at least Chinese posters here)
But since I learned English when I started going to school it is now really my native language so I'm fortunate in that sense. I would have liked to have been a Mandarin+English+Spanish trilingual but what can we do? :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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