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Getting people not to speak English | ||
Tags: Language Banditry | Convincing native speakers | Immersion | Swedish | Learning Technique/Method | Accent | English | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 1204grandine Triglot Groupie Italy Joined 7187 days ago 88 posts - 78 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, Catalan Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Greek | Message 25 of 169 28 May 2005 at 2:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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administor are right.in italy is so. but i don't do it.i do the contrary:i speak italian with a foreigner.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raistlin Majere Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Spain uciprotour-cycling.c Joined 7152 days ago 455 posts - 424 votes 7 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Catalan*, FrenchA1, Italian, German Studies: Swedish | Message 26 of 169 28 May 2005 at 2:41am | IP Logged | |||||
maxb is right, this is a very rude behaviour. It shows that these people who speak in English instead of using their native language with foreigners are very selfish, because they don't care a bit that you've spent a lot of time and money to have the opportunity to immerse yourself in your target language, and their only purpose is to turn your inversion to their sole benefit. Edited by Raistlin Majere on 28 May 2005 at 2:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 7105 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 27 of 169 13 June 2005 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I recognise this problem very well. I don't travel very much but I in the seventies and the early eighties I often spent my holidays in Spain. Especially in touristic areas I often got answers in English. I usually pretended not to speak English very well. Sometimes I even "downgraded" my English a little bit, I remember how there was a receptionist in the hotel whose English was very weak and I started to say things to him like "Please could you give the.. eh.. the.. (how do you call that thing to open the door..?" :) After some years my Spanish actually was better then my English. The reason for this was quite simple: I had a lot of opportunities to practice Spanish with immigrants in my country (Holland) and I had learned English at "Gymnasium" a kind of grammar school where the whole examination was focused on translating English text into Dutch (not even the opposite). In Holland, of course there were Spaniards who were so anxious to learn Dutch that they always would speak (bad) Dutch to me, but others were very helpful, I remember how a Spanish friend of mine in Holland said: "Well okay I want to learn Dutch too but there are 15 millions of people in Holland so when I speak Spanish with you there are still enough Dutchmen left with whom I can practise my Dutch". I also learned Turkish and since I never went to Turkey I cannot tell you how they would react there to Turkish speaking foreigners. As I social worker for Turkish immigrants however, I often met people whose Dutch was weaker than my Turkish and normally conservations were done in Turkish. But when I meet Turkish people trying to speak Dutch with me I notice that I have to be a little bit carefull not to offend them, especially when they are accompanied by visitors from Turkey that don't speak Dutch at all. These visitors can expect from that person that he is fluent at Dutch and it can be a little bit humiliating when they find out it is not true. In such case I often propose to switch to Turkish because it will be easier for the visitor (although actually it will also be easier for the immigrant himself :) ) Edited by administrator on 14 June 2005 at 12:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 7117 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 28 of 169 14 June 2005 at 12:58am | IP Logged | |||||
This is a curse on the USA. Many, many Americans, if not most, have lived their lives without seeing another country or culture. To some it might seem brutal, but when you look at a map you will understand. In the USA, how far is it from coast to coast? 3000 miles, or 4800 kilometers. And no matter where one stops, it is the same language. What about Europe? How many different countries will one travel, and how many different languages? There is another aspect to English being dominant. Americans have little patiencs for others. America is very much a "go, go, go" country, a "hurry up and get out of my way" country. Europeans must live with so many neighbors, every contry different. In the USA, we have no real neighbors. Canada is a clone, and Mexico is considered a dump. Not nice, but that is the truth of how most feel. Look at the news reports of the Texans who decided to (while government told them not to), the texans who decided to stand gaurd against illegal immigrants. They did not do this to protect the USA against terrorism. They did this to protect their jobs! UAW is broken (the largest american Union, it is auto workers from General Motors and Ford). These factory non-educated jobs used to pay $25 an hour to americans, they now pay 1/10th that to mexicans. If you remember history, during WWII, the USA opened confinement camps where we detained Japanese american citizens, but not one German. Why? Americans go for the easy anwser 99% of the time. It is probably the same everywhere, I can't imagine human nature is that different. In Europe, you have nieghbors. You were in world wars, you know what it is like. In the USA we don't have neighbors, we have the people on the opposite side of the railroad tracks, and if they don't like what we tell them, we'll go over there and beat their asses. Edited by Magnum on 14 June 2005 at 1:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 7117 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 169 14 June 2005 at 1:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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One more note, many immigrants do not teach their children their mother tongues, they only want english spoken. I know when I was a child, I learned Serbian before English, and I paid hell for it. I heard every "Yugo" joke these low IQ idiots could think of. "Yu Go away from home". "Yugo No Go". Like I did not know english. I had a slight accent because english was my second language, but nobody cared that I loved the USA more than where my parents came from, they only saw what was different.
The USA has so many good qualities, but so many bad. One of the worst qualities is the narcissism. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 7105 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 30 of 169 19 June 2005 at 6:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Although I reacted already before, as an afterthought I would like to add a few more things. In a lot of countries, many people older then, let us say, forty years only speak their native language. Anyway this is true for Spain and I guess also for Italy. I am fifty years old myself so it is easy for me to meet people of this age but maybe I could suggest that younger language learners should try to contact older people. For example, when you have to ask for the way you could decide to ask it to an older person rather than to somebody of your own age. (I tried this in Pula, Croatia a couple of times and often got the opportunity for a short conversation because the person I had addressed was curious to hear where I came from). When you want to have your hair cut, look for an older hairdresser in a village or suburb rather than in the commercial or touristic center of the town (again in Pula, after having my hair cut I ended up drinking a cup of Turkish coffee with some older female customers who were waiting until their permanent wave would be ready :) ) Another advice would be that you maybe should look for places where no very strong dialect is spoken but where there is not too much tourism either. To give an example, the only visit I made to Italy was an one day's trip to Venice, and everybody switched immediately to (bad) German when I started to speak Italian. On the other hand for my work I often get phone calls from throughout Italy and they always keep on speaking Italian,if necessary they repeat what they say a little bit more slowly.
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| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 7145 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 31 of 169 19 June 2005 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One thing I've noticed about living in Poland is that whenever I try to speak Polish to the university studnents who invariably have lots of interesting things to say, they always answer me in English. They want to practice their Engish - I want to practice my Polish.
However, I can always speak Polish to the oldsters - they're happy to speak in Polish as it's their only language - the problem is the conversation is quite often dull - e.g. shopping, prices, the traffic, gossip etc. Hmmmmmm. Edited by administrator on 20 June 2005 at 4:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 7105 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 32 of 169 20 June 2005 at 1:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Nephilim, I think this is a good alternative especially if you have enough opportunities to meet older people. I sometimes had a problem in Spain, people who spoke English not only wanted to practice their English but even kept on speaking English to me in the presence of other Spaniards who didn't speak English at all and translating other people's words to show off their skills. This was really annoying! In such cases I told them friendly to stop that and said that their English was okay, but my Spanish too :)
But does that mean that you don't get any chance to speak Polish with English speaking Poles at all? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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