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Should you learn slang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 1 of 51 21 November 2012 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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In another thread I got into a bit of a shouting match over a recent publication on a regional variety of French. One of the issues was the content that I felt contained material that was misleading because it inaccurately portrayed modern informal and slang usage in that variety of French.
I cautioned readers about using this language with native speakers because some of the material was very stigmatized and typical of uneducated blue-collar workers. Many of the readers expressed the desire to be able to talk with ordinary people in informal settings and felt that knowing this kind of language would be helpful. I fully acknowledge the desire to understand and speak everyday language that can be quite different from what is learned in the classroom or the textbook. And I'm not prudish or snobbish. All I'm saying is that unless one is a native speaker some features of popular speech can have all kinds of connotations and associations that should be handled with care. Things like nonstandard grammar, swear words, insults, ethnic slurs, vulgar terms and low prestige phonology should be approached with care. Let me give an example. The verb form "ain't" is prominent in American English slang. It is heavily stigmatized as bad English but it is widespread and used in many popular songs. Should learners of English use it? I say yes but with caution in the sense of learning when and when not to use it. I'm curious as to what others here think about using slang and low prestige forms in the their target languages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 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 2 of 51 21 November 2012 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I couldn't give a shit less about prestige. I speak the type of language that is
associated with the people I'm talking to. If that is prestige or not is uninteresting, what matters is adaptation to the situation you're in. In fact this is probably better, because using the formal language makes you sound bookish and distant, but if you speak like them you will become one of them much more quickly. For example, when I type Russian on VKontakte I use the Russian way of expressing the happiness smiley. In the same way, I use the expressions they use in response to what they say. This makes it much more easy to talk because they feel I am one of them ("sometimes I forget that you are a foreigner") which is the best compliment you can get. The only thing I might be careful with is cursing. And this isn't restricted to my foreign languages: I speak a very different register of Dutch depending on whether I am in a meeting or at home, and I might use specific dialectal words at home that other people don't know because they're just how I express things with my family. Just like I will use certain words more in Belgium if I am in Flanders etc. etc. It's normal. Edited by tarvos on 21 November 2012 at 1:24pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4625 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 3 of 51 21 November 2012 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think all forms of the language that are actually used in real life are definitely worth learning. We all use colloquial terms in our native tongue, maybe not during a business meeting but certainly among friends.
40 years ago, my father's German friend (who was studying for a degree in English) came to Scotland for a visit. Upon arrival, he said something like "I haven't brought my grammar book because I already know what the grammar book says. Now we can go to the pub and find out how the people really speak." That always stuck in my head when my dad told me. Edited by beano on 21 November 2012 at 1:30pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mahasiswa Pentaglot Groupie Canada Joined 4435 days ago 91 posts - 142 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Malay Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Persian, Russian, Turkish, Mandarin, Hindi | Message 4 of 51 21 November 2012 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a general rule I would avoid learning swear words and I wish I hadn't. Being in Quebec, sometimes a
certain familiarity is used by openly swearing. If I didn't know the basics from listening to rap music I would have been left out of the breaking-the-ice that a solid tabernak can give, though of course I learned more when I was living there. I remember one francophone friend telling me "I now see a certain poetry in swear words" when discussing the etymology of 'te criser un'. Spanish swears seem the most variant. German cusses I pick up a lot from watching movies. It's a good way the dictionary describes taboo words, 'familiar'. I don't know when I'll learn Arabic swears. I know only one or two in Malay, one of them being 'cacat'. It's equivalent to the way American teenagers would use the word 'retarded' only a couple of years ago, to mean 'bad'. The Malay word literally means 'handicapped'. But learning slang is one of the first things I try to do now, so long as I'm learning it from a contemporary piece of media. Watching Freaks and Geeks recently I rejoiced to hear the exclamation 'Man alive!' This is something you wouldn't hear current English speakers saying among each other. But reading a German blog recently I came across the word 'futschikaka' and asked a Skype friend what it meant. I knew it was basically a rare synonym of 'Quatsch', but I wanted to hear this idea validated by a friend. So I know if I ever find myself needing to swear among little German children, I'll probably be saying 'futschikaka'. My morphology prof says the f-word at least 3 times per class. English is not her first language but she decided a long time ago that she would prefer to be colloquial than formal, and it makes her seem very fierce to many students, but to me she is very approachable. I talk to her about Turkish language all the time outside of class. There's one young woman who seems to be her best friend because the prof will exemplify her by name from time to time about things like interest in the material or showing up on time. But living in Quebec taught me that there's official French for kissing ass and working for the government, then there's real French which doesn't tend to use English cognates for anglophones' benefit, and often shortens prepositional phrases and common phrases down to a nub. (Oh, and Atwood was just interviewed on the CBC in French last night and her French is awful. It's basically a dialect of English to her, with hardly any French tones, rare use of non-cognate words, and short sentences filled with many pauses. I would prefer to learn languages than to become a writer who can't truly speak more than one language. Polyglottery has taught me so much already in linguistics, psychology, philosophy, history, literature, and anthropology, I don't think there's anything more enjoyable in the world for me.) And learning MSA and Egyptian Arabic at the same time, slang has a completely different meaning. Slang makes up an entire dialect. It seems to me an easier task to learn an Arabic dialect than an Italian one, because finding resources for Italian dialects takes a bit extra effort and the dialects differ more slightly. I do understand a little Sicilian, but I have no plans to understand Lombardi. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5985 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 5 of 51 21 November 2012 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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This reminds me of when a well meaning Japanese person told me quite seriously that I should avoid watching Japanese TV shows because of the risk I might learn bad language!
I think when it comes to slang, context is everything, and it's a sensible idea to stick to a safe register for all but your close friends. However, if you want to be able to understand contemporary native materials a certain knowledge of slang is essential. And as far as I'm concerned, what is the point of learning a language and then not enjoying time with books, films etc in that language? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 6 of 51 21 November 2012 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
But "s**t is cool" is not the situation you are in here on HTLAL. The word s**t is far more stigmatising than 'ain't', and is almost always less appropriate. In fact you don't hear it much among educated English-language speakers. You rarely hear it here on HTLAL, and I think that is a good thing. Often L2 speakers use these kinds of words in their L2 but would never use the equivalent in their L1. Somehow, in L2, it doesn't sound so bad to them as it sounds to natives, and they think it is cool. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4847 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 7 of 51 21 November 2012 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
I think this is the typical example for American prudery when it comes to swear words. What other nation would *beep* "offensive language" on TV and wash out children's mouths with soap? "Scheiße" must be the most frequent German word at all, and "kurwa" is considered to be some kind of punctuation mark in colloquial Polish, because more or less every sentence contains it. Americans being uptight about cursing is not representative for the rest of the world. And by the way, the American shows and movies I watch use "shit" and "f*ck" quite frequently, and I don't think the directors and actors are uneducated. So, to answer the OP's question: Of course one should learn slang, but you should know when to use it. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 51 21 November 2012 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think everybody probably agrees that context is everything when it comes to using slang. But that's the problem. As a learner and a foreigner, how do you know what is right and what is wrong?
And while we tend to focus on cursing because that is the most spectacular part of slang, I also think it's important to look at forms of language that identify you as uneducated and uncultivated. I find this very striking when I listen to interviews on the radio. I can tell the social background and the degree of education of a person just by the way they talk. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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