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Should you learn slang? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4471 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 49 of 51 10 December 2012 at 9:05pm | IP Logged |
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Here is another vote for OP's initial message. I think learning slang should be really low in your priority list and should only come when you have attained a fairly good command of the language. Of course, you can always learn it "just for fun" before.
As previously said by someone in this thread, slang is like the cherry on the cake. If you can speak the language well and with fluency, appropriate use of slang will show a great understanding not only of the language but also of the culture and in a way, make you less of a foreigner and more "one of them". However, this is not something you can fake by learning slang early on; use of slang words with not enough fluency, too many grammatical errors or unsufficient cultural knowledge will not fool anyone. You have to naturally pick up slang; if you learn it like you would a textbook, trowing in your slang words will not prevent you from sounding bookish and distant. It will sound artifical or even forced. The other issue with slang is as already pointed out how quickly outdated and how group-specific it is. At first, it seems more important to be able to converse with ease with everyone. I am also really surprised as some of the reactions in this topic, like the fear of sounding bookish and distant, to only be able to higly educated people and so forth if one does not know and even use slang. How often do you use slang in your native language in your everyday life and if the answer is not always, do you sound bookish and distant then ? I think of myself as using informal, colloquial French most of the time, especially with new people. I also disagree with the underlying implication that people who are not "highly educated" would not be able to speak with you if you are not using slang. In France, we expect that a 7 years old child is able to juggle through different registers of language; it does not take "high education" to master that. Edited by Tsopivo on 10 December 2012 at 9:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4369 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 50 of 51 10 December 2012 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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My preference is to know informal language passively, rather than actively. I don't use as many colloquialisms or slang in my native language, so for me to deliberately do it in a foreign language would be awkward and unnatural. I do think it's important to know whether there are any connotations to using certain words and phrases. For example, there are native English speakers who will use phrases like "I seen," "We was," "I is" etc. It's perfectly understandable, but it is usually associated with a particular social status. That being said, I don't know if an obvious foreigner would automatically bring that association upon himself. If someone has a foreign accent and speaks that way, the native speaker would probably just assume they made a mistake. Really, it's something that is definitely good to know passively, but active use should probably depend on where you hear it.
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| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 51 of 51 10 December 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
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In my opinion, even if you are not going to use it, you could learn it passively - it is useful for movies or books.
Maybe in real life you would use words like 'police officer', but I think I have never heard anyone reffering like this to 'blue people', they always use 'cop' in American movies. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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