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Forgetting native language in homecountry | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 17 of 18 12 December 2014 at 10:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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What is "high fluency" in this context and where did you find this article?
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| dinguino Nonaglot Groupie GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4753 days ago 55 posts - 96 votes Speaks: English, German*, FrenchC1, Catalan, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Turkish, Russian, Irish | Message 18 of 18 13 December 2014 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly, people always make mistakes because one can never know 100% of a language. There are always areas you don't need and so you don't know how to express an idea you never speak about (speaking of vocabulary). When you hear a new word, you try to analyze it, to detect a pattern because a pattern is easier to remember and apply to a certain word group than remembering every single word. Language is a living organism that is constantly changing. Today's frequent mistakes will be the rules of tomorrow. It has always been like this, but it is such a slow process that our life time is too short in order for us to grasp it. Grammar rules are systematic patterns that rely on analogy. Analogy means less effort. Things like twenty-oneth are false analogies, because you thought "As a general rule you add -th to a cardinal number in order to form an ordinal number." That is a natural "productive" mistake that makes sense in some way. Nothing dramatic really, it just shows your brain is active. And if more people would begin to say twenty-oneth it would less and less harm your ears. Finally your kids would end up saying it this way and it would be a new grammar rule. As I said: Today's frequent systematic mistakes are tommorow's rules. In earlier times, the English language had a very complexe verb system comparable to Latin. The word order was loose because the belongings/relations between the words were understood by the words' endings. Nowadays English has a very strict word order because there are no endings left to distinguish between the cases. From this point on people needed a different method to mark relations in a sentence.
I don't think so. Exposure is overrated in this context. I have passed about two months without speaking my native language and I was surrounded by foreigners speaking different languages, so I didn't even hear it. I was thinking in a foreign language and there have been days that I didn't even think about my mother tongue, it was as if it didn't exist. But I didn't forget it. After that long period it was weird to hear German again, but I only needed some hours/days to be comfortable with it again. Well, at the beginning I still answered in French when I was in the supermarket, or sometimes I just said something in French to my brother without noticing it. But this kind of thing stops the longer you stay in your home country and are surrounded by other speakers of your language. Today I sometimes lack vocabulary in German and I either know it in a different language or don't remember it at all, which can be annoying. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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