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When your own language sounds weird? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 1 of 19 19 December 2014 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
Do you ever have the experience of saying something in your own language and thinking to yourself, "Is that right? It doesn't sound right." In another thread Serpent wrote:
This got me thinking about times I've said things in English and thought they sounded weird. The best example I can think of is a time when I said, "This is a whole nother thing." I thought to myself, is "nother" a word? So I stopped using the phrase until a few months later when I watched Star Wars again and Luke said it. If it was acceptable a long time ago... And yes, you can find "nother" in some dictionaries, although I think it's only ever used in the phrase "a whole nother". Dictionary and Star Wars aside, I would suggest you avoid using it on an essay for a C2 exam... maybe the spoken part but not the essay. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Xenops Senior Member United States thexenops.deviantart Joined 3828 days ago 112 posts - 158 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 2 of 19 19 December 2014 at 8:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Many times I can't think of how something is spelled in English, like the past tense of "he is". The best I could come up with after a while: "he WUZ"!?
And English is my native language. I also notice as I learn other languages, I'm more self-conscious of stumbling over words (say phlebotomist three times, fast!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 19 19 December 2014 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Now I have learnt one more English word. Phlebotomist phlebotomist phlebotomist.
As for my sense of what I can say in Danish I can't really recognize the problem. I may be in doubt about the ability of the rest of the Danish population to understand what I say, but hardly ever whether I personally would accept a certain formulation or not. However there are some borderline cases whre I may think strategically, for instance in the choice of using a Danish word or a loanword, or whether I should use a partly foreignese pronunciation of something. There are even a few cases where I know there is a rule, but I have chosen not to follow it. Like using - in compound words or ' before genetive -s. I find both extremely useful and I use them much more than officially permitted. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Slayertplsko Heptaglot Newbie Slovakia Joined 4836 days ago 24 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Czech, FrenchB2, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 19 19 December 2014 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it happens to me now and then. I think it's quite normal. It may be that I'm unsure
of a case ending or whether certain expression is correct etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 19 19 December 2014 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I get that feeling quite often while reading some Czech medical textbooks. Some
authors just love to use totally outdated words (especially as exemples, so they can confuse us even further) and some even make up their own words (including verbs!) that look like Czech but are definitely not in the official "complete" dictionary of correct Czech or any googlable text. I checked!). Really, everyone says "oh, medicine, the Latin must be hard". Nope, Latin is ok after a few months, it's the Czech that makes me wanna scream! :-D And I'm not alone. There is even a hilarious "movie" about it. It is a piece (4 mins or so) of a movie about Hitler with false Czech subtitles, so you can see the beast enraged (enraged in German) about the syntax, the choice of archaic vocabulary and too flowery and confusing style of the textbooks. Spoiler: It ends with the totally exhausted and desesperate man giving up and asking for student made resources. Edited by Cavesa on 19 December 2014 at 12:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| guiguixx1 Octoglot Senior Member Belgium guillaumelp.wordpres Joined 4095 days ago 163 posts - 207 votes Speaks: French*, English, Dutch, Portuguese, Esperanto, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 6 of 19 19 December 2014 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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It also happens to me from time to time, especially with the subjunctive. In French, it's
not always easy to know which form to use, even for natives. So sometimes I use one form, sometimes another one lol 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3679 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 7 of 19 19 December 2014 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just as an explanation about "a whole nother": it's actually a common phenomenon in
English where an exaggerating word is placed in the middle of another word. So, the word here is "another," and "whole" is just placed in the middle for emphasis. Another example might be "abso- f***ing- lutely". Totally legitimate slang! And now it bugs me when people over correct themselves in writing, saying "a whole other" because they clearly thought about it and decided "nother" was certainly not a word. Since I'm constantly looking up etymologies for things in English, I find I overanalyze quite a lot of normal speech and question where it came from and whether it's correct.... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5231 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 8 of 19 19 December 2014 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's called jamais vu--you're faced with a situation that you know is one you've been in many times before, but nonetheless it seems unfamiliar (compare with deja vu, which is facing an unfamiliar situation and finding it familiar). The first time I remember this happening was when I was very young: I used a sentence that had two "that"s in a row and I suddenly paused and thought that that couldn't be correct. Surely you can't have the same word follow itself. But, no, perfectly proper, it just suddenly seemed odd.
Not sure why this happens. Some short circuit in the memory system in the brain I'd guess. Edited by ScottScheule on 19 December 2014 at 5:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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