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Going native | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 24 20 August 2014 at 5:18am | IP Logged | |||||
Definitely :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6552 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 24 20 August 2014 at 6:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Negative to some, positive to others. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 24 20 August 2014 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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We are on a forum where people have claimed that dislike of a language is like racism, so sometimes
sensibilities go beyond my comprehension. I just wanted to make sure that the thread did not derail because someone decided to take offense. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 12 of 24 20 August 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know Solfrid Cristina's question was addressed to us as individuals, but I'd like to
turn it aside and cite Khatzumoto (of “all Japanese, all the time” fame, of course) as the most obvious example. I was almost going to say the most extreme, but who am I to say whether it should be considered extreme or not. But I often find myself wondering: "What if he'd put in all that investment of time and energy, and then eventually found out that he didn't like it so much after all?" Well, he was quite young (from my perspective!) when he started out, and I guess is not all that old now, so even if he gave it up now, he's still young enough to make a new start in his home country or another. But I do wonder why anyone would want to exchange their own culture for that of another country in such a wholehearted fashion. Edited by montmorency on 20 August 2014 at 4:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 13 of 24 21 August 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
My own background is a bit similar, if less linguistically diverse, and I can relate to not feeling particularly attached to the cultures of any of the places one has lived in (while also underestimating their influence on one's own worldview and behaviour), as well as to going through phases of obsession over cultures of places one has never been to. It's arguable whether or not I'm over my Japanese phase yet :) 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 24 21 August 2014 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Montmorency: I am not familiar enough with Khatzumoto to comment on his particular experience, but I
have been dropped alone in a foreign country as a child twice, speaking and living in that language only, and it does produce spectacular results. Now the fact that I then avoided foreigners (including Norwegians) like the plague, does not make me any less Norwegian, or make me love my own culture and country any less. I wear my national costume with pride come Independence Day, and dance and sing Norwegian folk dances with the best of them. What it has done, is open me up to other cultures in a whole different way. I feel like people from countries as far apart as Spain, Russia, Peru and Singapore are like family because I recognize cultural traits that are foreign to most Norwegians, but feel absolutely familiar to me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 24 21 August 2014 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
I can't personally picture why anyone would want to give up their home culture completely, but that's just a limitation of my personal experience, I suppose. There are plenty of people who have good reason to leave the past behind them and wipe the slate clean. But I can imagine why somebody would immerse themselves wholeheartedly in a new culture. This will make more sense, perhaps, if I use an analogy: 1. Take a child who reads voraciously, but who prefers books that few others read. For a remarkable portrait of such a child, see Jo Walton's Among Others, which is supposedly a fairy tale but really more of a character portrait:
(This book, by the way, is excellent, and I was not surprised by the prizes it won.) 2. Take somebody who experiences that solitary fascination and isolation, and introduce them to peers who finally understand, who get all the references. In the story above, Mori discovers a book club filled with other people who love the same books. 3. When somebody like Mori is finally surrounded by peers—and I've heard many stories of this happening in real life—it feels like a homecoming. Finally! People who get it. To put this in terms of language learning, I've now spent almost seven years fooling around with French in some fashion or another, perhaps three of those years seriously. I've found books that I love. There are songs that I know by heart. I've watched French children's TV shows from the 70s and 80s. I think that certain classical French writers are pretty awesome. I know bad French internet memes. I speak it at the dinner table. I sing lullabies in French and read stories to my kids in it. And who can I share this with? Trust me, it's not actually possible for an anglophone to say to another anglophone, "I think Baudelaire's prose poems are actually pretty decent, but his regular poems are strangely underwhelming." If I say this, people will think I am a pretentious twit. For that matter, I can't even say, "Amélie was way more brilliant in French," or people will think that I'm Hipster Belle. However, there is a group of people on this planet who read French books, who sing to their children in French, who watch French TV, and who get the jokes. They live throughout the Francophonie. This is the price of learning another language, and passing countless hours with its culture and with the people who speak it. Eventually it becomes a part of your life, and you no longer feel entirely at home without it. (And this is also one of the reasons, perhaps, that I love the time I spend in Montreal—it's fine city, of course, but it's also a city full of anglophones getting by in French, and francophones getting by in English, and everyone just takes that for granted. I'm no longer an anglophone with a weird cultural obsession, or an incomplete francophone, but just another perfectly ordinary person trying to get by.) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4870 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 16 of 24 21 August 2014 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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With Korean, I'm not sure I see any way of becoming proficient in the language without adapting to the culture (and to do that getting lots of input on it). While someone who only uses plain form may be able to speak Korean, but only a specific form of it. Without at least sort of knowing how to apply the different politeness levels, I don't think anyone could get by in Korean society. There are all those subtle things which will make you stick out like a sore thumb when you don't know them... Knowing the language without adapting to the culture at least in some aspects might actually do you more harm than good among Koreans who are not used to interacting with foreigners.
But in any case, language is tied to culture for me. If I'm not interested in any aspect of the culture, or if I actually dislike it as a whole, why would I put in the effort? I'd have no use for a language if I'm not interested in the culture it allows me to access. After all, culture is all about the people who speak the language and the contents they produce in the language... I just got back from Korea and enjoyed my adaption to the environment (though certainly not a perfect adaption). Some people might be concerned about what they perceive as changing their personality - but I don't think that's what adapting to a culture means. I think it's actually learning to express your personality in a different frame of reference. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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