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Extreme passion and a fear of loss | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 9 of 11 05 December 2012 at 4:44pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks very much for your replies, everyone. It was interesting to read them all and
know that again, I’m not completely alone on this one. I’d like to clarify one thing though: I never feel that German should prevent me from studying other languages; the fact is that it just happens that way, In my case, German is like a spoilt, bratty little child who is always competing for its parents’ attention, and, like some parents do with their children, I let the spoilt child have its way because it gives me an easier life. The parents always want to have it another way for a while, but usually end up giving up in the end. This is not something that gets me down though. If it really annoyed me, I would do something more permanent about it. Solfrid – your comparing your passion for Spanish with mine for German is interesting because you were one of the people here who I thought of while writing my original post. Like you with your Spanish, I have also passed it on to others and am only ever too glad to do so. Some of my friends continued their German studies on to university and always told me I was part of their reason for doing so. Many of my cousins also took up German in school instead of French or Spanish because they’ve grown up hearing it from me. Also as another parallel, I have not touched Dutch for the same reasons you’ve not touched Portuguese. I don’t want anything to corrupt my German. Julie, your post also struck a chord with me. I also feel “at home” when speaking German. Almost literally – sometimes when I say certain things, talk about certain places or even see something or someone that reminds me of some German-speaking place, my mind gets temporarily taken back to one of my stays in Germany or Austria in the past. And when my mind snaps to reality, I catch myself smiling. Daydreaming is a wonderful thing. It is a fundamental part of me that I shouldn’t lose now. I am not completely convinced I’d recognise myself if my German vanished. Now that I think about it, German gives me the confidence to do things that I was not confident enough to do in English. It seems a little similar to Bao's post about Japanese, as I understand it. For me, German is a symbol of progress. I used to hide behind the “I’m a foreigner” thing and think “If I screw this up it doesn’t matter because I’m doing this in a foreign language”. Then my German got better, to the point where none of it was difficult anymore, and I began to do things in German that I didn’t have the confidence to do in English – shout at an inconsiderate neighbour, use the phone for something other than calling friends, talk to the doctor about medical problems or something like that. Then I began to question myself: “Why can I do these things in German and not in English?” So I tried in English. And it worked, eventually. My fear of losing German may come from that – the fact that for a long time, there existed things that I could do in German but not in English. And that might be why I’m afraid of losing it. I was thinking about this at work today after I read some of your replies. In the UK, or at least in the areas I went to school in, German always lost a lot of ground to French and Spanish in terms of pupil intake. I was working in a school in England earlier this year, and the German Department there have two very, very dedicated German teachers who keep German's popularity up to the numbers of French and have been much higher than Spanish for a couple of years now. And the results are very good - I don't want to get into another discussion about the ridiculous ease of language GCSEs and A levels though: In my eyes it's obvious that in the UK, French and Spanish are generally much more popular than German. But I never met anyone in school who was genuinely passionate about learning French or Spanish. All the genuinely passionate ones were Germanists. Does anyone have any theories, or is this a coincidence? LanguageSponge 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Tamise Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom jllrr.wordpress.com/ Joined 5243 days ago 115 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch Studies: French, Japanese, Spanish | Message 10 of 11 08 December 2012 at 6:01pm | IP Logged |
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For it me it's Dutch. I learnt German first, and picked up Dutch without a huge amount of actual studying and my progress has been quick, so that might be a reason for it, but Dutch feels very much like a language I'm at home in, and it's a very comfortable language to me. I read a lot in Dutch, and quite often find myself thinking in Dutch without having consciously switched from English.
At my school, the most passionate language teacher taught French - it was the German and Spanish people who were less enthusiastic, though admittedly the Spanish teacher seemed to have been roped into it and would have much rather been teaching French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5982 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 11 of 11 08 December 2012 at 6:36pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese is most definitely the biggest love of my language life. I just started it as a little geek project at a time in life when things were not working out as I had hoped they would. I had a passing interest in anime at the time (something I've now actually mostly grown out of) but since then I have totally fallen in love with this language. French is something which would be intellectually, rationally useful to me, and I definitely fell in love with Paris when I last visited, however I don't feel the same emotional attachment to French as I do to Japanese. It's hard to describe really, but I just get this incredible joy at listening to someone speak Japanese to me, and incredible pleasure at making sense of the written word.
I had bad experiences of high school German with incredibly bad teachers, but when I came to pick up some German in preparation for a trip to Germany this summer I was able to look at the language with completely fresh eyes (I think you could hardly even call me a false beginner, the tuition I had at school was so bad I didn't even know how to form the present tense). Anyway, I think if I had met German properly before learning Japanese, I could have fallen in love with German instead. I still got quite a warm feeling when trying my best to understand what was going on around me in Germany. But it can't compete with my love of Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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