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Emotional associations with languages | ||
Tags: Reasons for study | Motivation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 26 03 November 2014 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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The emotional aspect of learning languages is a factor for me too although its prominence varies since it coexists with other factors.
My study of BCMS/SC, Russian and Ukrainian are good examples of how (un)important emotions can be. For BCMS/SC, I was keen to study it initially because I had befriended a Croat who also persuaded me to visit Croatia for an upcoming vacation. For some time the positive emotional association reinforced my practical need and desire to study. However I was turned me off for quite some time after the trip because of Croatian linguistic purism (see this post for what happened). However my feelings toward it have improved over the last year after having decided to visit Serbia despite what had happened. Having a good time with my Serbian hosts as well as my lengthy intra-comparative analysis of BCMS/SC repaired much of the emotional damage wrought by a handful of Croats superimposing politics on language or (mis)casting non-linguistic differences with linguistic ones. For the longest time I skipped Russian because I never needed to know it, it didn't (and still doesn't) have a pleasant ring to it after having had my ear attuned to other Slavonic languages (my brain registers Russian as something like Ukrainian or Slovak with completely fouled-up vowels and stress patterns. This could be akin to how a German might feel when first hearing English i.e. "What's with all of the screwed up vowels and diphthongs?!") and Russian has carried too much imperialist baggage and too little soft power for me (unlike English which definitely has clear colonialist/imperialist undertones but perhaps incongruously still has a fair bit of soft power). Despite my emotional unease, I've found that I can muster enough motivation to learn Russian when I treat it as just a tool. In my case, Russian will be a tool for the upcoming Turkic challenge, and the promise of being able to wade into several otherwise inaccessible Turkic languages is too strong for me to pass up. Lastly, my emotions have affected how I've looked at Ukrainian. For some time, the language was interesting enough and with some persistence I also managed to build a decent stock of resources. It also helped that I befriended a few Ukrainians along the way. Unfortunately, I've fallen out somewhat with those same friends, and my feelings are mixed whenever I come across Ukrainians now. Ukrainian now gets very low priority, and the Turkic challenge will makes it even easier for me to drop it from my rotation. Oh well. See also "Ever fallen OUT of love with a language?" and "Which is a greater source of motivation?". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 26 03 November 2014 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, corporal punishment of Children speaking anything but Mandarin in school are not unheard of in China, either (as well as punishment by lowering grades), and yes, if I was studying French and Occitan in the beginning of the last century, I'd probably have similar emotional reactions toward French. The difference is that these things are distant to me, both in time and in terms of language (I've never studied a language opressed by French), so naturally the emotional reaction is not as strong.
Though in the case of France, regional languages are still not treated with enough respect. AFAIK, France has still not ratified the European charter of regional languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 11 of 26 03 November 2014 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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The only negative feeling I've ever had about a language was toward French, and that was due to a horrible teacher I had in high school.
I don't think I have any negative feeling toward the language any more, and have even thought I should study it again. Here's the thing about that, though - because of my other romance languages, I can read a decent amount of French, and that sort of negates any want or need to study the language any deeper. Perhaps if I lived in a French-speaking environment it would be different (I know it would), but even visiting Francophone countries, I don't really feel any urgency for the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4638 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 12 of 26 03 November 2014 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | ||
France is actually on its way to ratify the charter, a Constitutional amendment went through the lower chamber of Parliament earlier in the year and is now in the senate. But it may be too little too late. And I agree that I would probably also have had a more emotional reaction to French if I was a student of Alsatian or Breton back in 1920 or a Catalan speaker living under Franco's regime. Still I won't blame the language for the despicable acts of som of its speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Improbably Diglot Newbie Norway Joined 4935 days ago 34 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English | Message 13 of 26 03 November 2014 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I try not to have negative feelings towards certain languages, and it really bothers me when they influence my language learning, despite my best attempts at keeping them at bay.
English: Very ambivalent feeling. There's so much wonderful literature, so many great TV-series and movies in this language, it's like a dream come true. But at the same time, if you read any forum or comment field on blogs and videos, you can rest assured that at least several times a day you will come across not just dreary negativity and unpleasant personalities, but sometimes also some of the worst bile and filth mankind could produce, in English. Granted, sometimes other languages are used, but I'm probably mostly shielded from the worst crap written in them, since I haven't studied them, and it's all Greek to me. German: Harder to pin down. Despite being my strongest language after Norwegian and English, I struggle to motivate myself to study it, mostly because of how it looks and sounds to me. I don't know why I find it so displeasing, I mean, back in high school it was one of my strongest subjects, one of the few things I actually worked on (by my own volition) during my free time, and sometimes I find myself thinking that, one day, I'll overcome my dislike, and actually start using the language more extensively. At other times, however, I wonder to myself if the only reason I want to continue learning the language is because it's the easiest one for me, and it would feel a lot less like work than focusing on other languages does. Japanese: I used to love the look and sound of it, and wanted to learn it for reading untranslated manga. But having a weeks worth of painstakingly made kanji cards for SuperMemo go down the drain due to computer problems broke me. Several attempts have been made to get started again, but every time I just come away from it feeling a little more negativity than before, and I've come to resent kanji. I doesn't help that all the series I wanted to read have been translated, and that my interest in manga and anime is fading. :P Finnish: I like how it sounds. Along with German, it's the language I keep returning to most often. But I also find it a difficult language, not least because there are comparatively few interesting resources to use in my learning process. Unlike German, very little gets dubbed into Finnish, and being a small country, there are limits to how much media they can produce (in particular, media that suits my tastes). Also, I have absolutely no friends or acquaintances who speak the language. Basically, I only want to learn the language because it sounds cool and has cool grammar, and because Finland is a neighboring country, and I feel like I should know it. Thus, learning it feels very lonely, and I often consider whether it wouldn't be better to put my efforts elsewhere. Common to all the languages I've studied and dabbled in, aside from English, is that I've never had any actual practical use for them. In fact, I've never used any of them in any practical situation ever. I'm not the traveling type, and around here the only foreign language you're likely to come across is English. Sometimes I feel like I should just give up on this whole language learning thing, and start looking for other, more useful (and no less fun) things to focus on. Needless to say, I struggle not only with the languages themselves, but also whether I should even bother learning them in the first place. It sucks. Still, I keep coming back, even though the frequent breaks means progress is very slow. :P 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4582 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 14 of 26 03 November 2014 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Like several other people here, I have a negative attitude towards French. I suppose
it's partly as a result of dreadful lessons at school and partly because I have had a couple of not very successful attempts to learn it since school. I do go through periods of wishing I spoke French - generally when I'm in France and can't understand what people are saying - but so far they haven't been strong enough to overcome my overall negativity towards the language. I think of learning French in the same way I think of learning to drive; something which I really don't want to do but which I will have to do one day, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I can do it. Esperanto is a strange language because it has some very positive associations and some very negative associations for me. Some of the best experiences of my life have come about through speaking Esperanto, so when I'm able to think about it rationally I overall feel very positively about it as a language. On a day-to-day basis I'm probably not so rational though and there is nothing in my life which causes me so much frustration as my involvement in the organised Esperanto movement. I think about walking away from Esperanto quite regularly but when it comes down to it I'm not sure I'll ever be able to do it. And if you want some truly irrational negative associations... Italian makes me really sad, because I had a close friend who went missing (presumed dead) in Italy a few years back. I spent weeks trying to decipher news reports on Italian websites and follow the investigation so whenever I see Italian written down it reminds me of bad times. I don't know how to order a cup of coffee or ask where the toilet is in Italian, but the word 'scomparso' will always be imprinted on my brain. Korean makes me angry. My boyfriend once decided he was going to leave me and go to live in South Korea. This was such a long time ago... it must be 7 years... but I still hold it against the Korean language. We were together in the language section of a large bookshop in London a few weeks ago and I found myself steering him away from the Korean shelves before he noticed them, just in case :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 26 03 November 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I dislike French too :D Mostly the sound, though - by now I'm fascinated enough with the Romance similarities to be able to look at written texts, as long as I pronounce things like in Portuguese, Romanian or English.
University has also made me hate English temporarily, again, especially the sound. By now it's over, but I still have little desire to read fiction in English. German has also been affected by formal studies, and blossoms only in their absence. Catalan is an interesting case. As a football fan, I associate it with FC Barcelona, and they were amazing when I was new to club football. Eventually I've developed a dislike towards them, but not towards the language, for some reason. Swedish and Spanish used to be too mainstream and boring for me, but I've come to appreciate them. Finnish, Portuguese, Italian and Danish are pretty much unconditional love. ♥ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4046 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 26 03 November 2014 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, interesting question.
Somehow every language changes my way to be and to think and not only to speak. I'm much more extrovert in English than in Italian for example. I associate French with Joy and Dutch with pain and I feel more religious in Spanish than in the other languages. I associate German with music and Persian with food, Japanese with poetry and Mandarin with fun. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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