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Do You Appreciate Your Native Tongue? | ||
Tags: Native Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| thephantomgoat Groupie United States Joined 5476 days ago 52 posts - 103 votes  | Message 9 of 27 01 January 2011 at 8:41am | IP Logged | ||
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The poll's answer choices aren't mutually exclusive, you know. ;)
I appreciate my native tongue, I adore my native tongue, I love my native tongue. The vast vocabulary, the literature, the regional variation, its rhythm, its reach all over the world (this last, incidentally, also one of the things I dislike about English). But I only began to appreciate my native language after starting to study other languages in earnest. Before that, I viewed English as common, plain, boring (this despite loving to read and write in it). But seeing what else is out there has broadened my horizons and reinforced English as an inextricable part of my life. It is, for now and until I improve in my other languages, my only linguistic home. As much as I love English, I do wish I had a different native tongue: an additional one. I'd be thrilled if my family suddenly regained Polish, though I'd be content with Mandarin or Arabic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5313 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 10 of 27 02 January 2011 at 12:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad my native tongue was Chinese because it'd be hard to learn it as an L2. But I'd be happier if it were Mandarin-Chinese instead of Cantonese-Chinese. Cantonese isn't too useful outside of Canton, and it's too different from proper written Chinese.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6377 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 27 02 January 2011 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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How could anyone be any luckier than to speak English as their first language? Other than
being bilingual in English and another language. That'd be best. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5278 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 12 of 27 02 January 2011 at 10:01am | IP Logged | ||
Indeed, we are very lucky. The luckiest trifecta I know of is a guy born in the US to a Chilean father and a Belarussian mother. Natively fluent (I don't know about his accent though) in English, Spanish, and Russian. I'm sure there are other combos like that but not many. In the past you hired a series of governesses who would speak the target language to your children... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5349 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 27 02 January 2011 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, today I do appreciate Finnish, but there was a time in my childhood when I wished I'd grown up speaking English (and only English) instead. Since then I've gotten exposed to so many different languages that I've acquired a totally different view: Finnish is a remarkably beautiful language* with a rich history and an abundance of pretty kooky dialects, and I'm proud to be a native speaker of it.
*Yes, I'm saying that even if oma kehu haisee... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lingalang Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5081 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Mandarin | Message 14 of 27 02 January 2011 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah I apreciate English as my native tongue. I like English for several reasons,
obviously it is very useful to know, and being fluent in it makes it even more useful. In addition to that, I think English is a great language. It sounds nice, and its so great to explore deeper. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5086 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 15 of 27 02 January 2011 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I like my mother tongue Portuguese, but I would like to be born in China as well, to know the Hanzi as my native written language, then learn fluent English later. I like the sounds of Mandarin, and English is really important nowadays.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| math82 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5432 days ago 17 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 27 03 January 2011 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Sorry to add to the glut of English speakers contributing here already, but this is something I think about a lot. On the positive side, I get to be native in the current Lingua Franca, with all the science and literature that comes with it.
However, this to me is out weighed by a lot of negative points: 1. Most educated* people will learn English anyway (so I get no exclusive culture or literature or identity out of it) 2. It doesn't have a particularly exciting set of phonemes 3. Barely any morphology 4. Simple verb structure 5. + I don't know if this is culturally bias, but it seems to miss many of the "word level" subtleties that other languages have. (the difference in German between "ob" and"wenn", or in Russian between "но" and "а", for very simple examples) In short, it just doesn't seem to have many of elements I find cool about other languages. So no, I guess I'm maybe not too keen on my mother tongue. I'd love to be persuaded otherwise. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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