ilperugino Pentaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 5174 days ago 56 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin
| Message 1 of 75 21 February 2011 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
Have you ever taken any language by the hand only to discover it betrays you every time, being ungratefull?
Have you ever decided to move on, and leave that evil elusive language way behind?
Have you ever found yourself - after endless study days, months or even years - with nothing on your empty hands, but linguistic sand?
Have you ever wandered alone, saying to its cold natives, "would you talk to me?" getting a "I like you, but as friend" kind of answer?
Do you think that, after such a long but hard relationship, you have reasons to divorce, or it should be "until death do you part"?
IlPerugino
Edited by ilperugino on 21 February 2011 at 11:50am
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lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 75 21 February 2011 at 12:19pm | IP Logged |
No.
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nissimb Tetraglot Groupie India tenjikuyamato.blogsp Joined 6414 days ago 79 posts - 102 votes Speaks: Marathi*, Hindi, English, Japanese Studies: Korean, Esperanto, Indonesian
| Message 3 of 75 21 February 2011 at 12:43pm | IP Logged |
I have a thousand reasons to divorce Japanese, but since I earn my bread and butter from it, I san not do so. The only option is to have other "wives" and "girlfriends"!!
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ilperugino Pentaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 5174 days ago 56 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin
| Message 4 of 75 21 February 2011 at 1:28pm | IP Logged |
Or, rephrasing: is there any language your are studying that is to become a ex-language you want not to remember?
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ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French
| Message 5 of 75 21 February 2011 at 1:50pm | IP Logged |
I've divorced Latin but it was an arranged marriage anyway so there are no hard feelings.
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LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5766 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian
| Message 6 of 75 21 February 2011 at 2:06pm | IP Logged |
This sounds like the relationship I have with French. I did it for seven years in school, not really doing a whole lot of self-study during those seven years, unless you count doing the homework which I don't. I dropped it completely at the end of school and didn't speak or listen to a word for over three years. I actively avoided it because I hated it. Now as fate would have it, my girlfriend, who is Belgian wants me to try and learn it again, even though she knows I hate it and have less motivation to do it than I have had for anything else at all up to this point. And yet even though I hate it, I feel I have to do it, partly for her and partly because I am proud and stubborn, and see myself as failing if I don't carry on, which I can't accept, either. I'll carry on because I have to, but I'm not learning very fast and even though I'm not actively opposing it anymore, or at least consciously; every little thing that knocks my confidence will knock it for days and sometimes even weeks, and I won't touch French during that time and it drives me mad when it's spoken to me, at which time I reply in English, sometimes with a sharp tone to indicate that I want them to switch to something else other than French. It is a constant source of argument between my girlfriend and me, which is a shame because everything we argue about always has a fairly direct link to French. It upsets her particularly because we both know I can do it - we speak German a fair bit, I speak Welsh to my mother (which was half learnt as a second language) and she knows I can get by in a number of others, but French is massive hurdle that something in my brain just doesn't want to have much to do with.
Jack
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ilperugino Pentaglot Groupie Portugal Joined 5174 days ago 56 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin
| Message 7 of 75 21 February 2011 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
LanguageSponge wrote:
I actively avoided it because I hated it |
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Well Jack you put it very precisely; while most of our effort towards a second language is to do it (remember, write, speak or even think) actively, when we have an ex-language it soon becames such a love-hate-relationship.
But, by the way, donĀ“t let French do to your real relationship what happened between you and French...
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polyglHot Pentaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5066 days ago 173 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish, Indonesian Studies: Russian
| Message 8 of 75 21 February 2011 at 3:34pm | IP Logged |
Never. As I need all of my languages to survive in the countries I reside in I wouldn't
dream of simply giving up.
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