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Secondary Native Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 1 of 6 24 October 2010 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
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English is without a doubt my native language, but since I was very young I had large amounts of exposure to other languages as well, mostly to Greek and Spanish. Lately I have been wondering about the classification on this website of ‘secondary native languages.’ I have had my Greek and Spanish listed as these for several months, but I’ve begun wonder whether this assessment is accurate.
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ My family is Greek and from the time I was little there were lots of relatives (especially older ones who did not speak English well) who spoke in Greek around me, so I became accustomed to the sounds of the language, which enabled me to have a native accent in the language and to understand it to an extent. I also traveled to Greece quite often and was immersed while I was there. I always spoke a little, but I officially started learning the language when I was seven, when my older cousin taught me the alphabet and some words one summer when I was in Greece. I didn’t end up remembering much after that besides the alphabet, which I still read nearly as effortlessly as the Latin alphabet. When I was 12 my grandparents moved to the town where I live, so I took up weekly lessons with my native-speaking grandmother. Although I didn’t really speak the language, it always ‘clicked’ and just made sense. Vocabulary was so easy for me to pick up and grammar simply seemed natural (although at first I didn’t quite understand because I didn’t know what terms like ‘conjugation’ or ‘declension’ meant). In particular, I remember noticing how frustrated I was reading that there were no definitive rules for some verb forms, yet I when I tried to produce them I would get them right most of the time simply “because it sounded right.” In addition to giving me an advantage in learning Greek, the language has left marks on my English. I have had lots of people in my hometown ask me where I’m from (even my friends’ parents!) because of the supposedly slight foreign accent that I have, and some of the peculiar constructions or phrasings that I apparently use. Now I think I’d consider Greek somewhat of a part-learned-part-native language, although I’d only claim basic fluency in it right now. In any case, Greek remains one of my favorite languages, one which I often use for talking to myself and with family. ESPAÑOL While my Greek represents what I would think of as a more traditional story of a secondary native language, the story for my Spanish might also be valid. In fact, I speak Spanish much better than Greek. Anyways, when I was of school age I was enrolled in a local bilingual elementary school which aimed at having all students fully bilingual in English and Spanish by the time they graduate. Before kindergarten, I spoke only one word of Spanish: ‘no,’ which my father had taught me on a trip to Mexico the previous year. In my first year, the teachers relentlessly spoke only Spanish to us native English-speakers and only English to the native Spanish-speakers. By the end of the year I could understand a lot and communicate well enough. Our native languages were reintroduced in first grade so that we could learn to read in them but the main focus was still our second language—we were reprimanded if we spoke in English (in my case) besides asking how to say something in Spanish (¿Cómo se dice…en español?). By second and third grade we were switching back and forth between English-only and Spanish-only classrooms every few weeks, but I think it’s fair so say that my Spanish was very nearly as good as my English at that point. Unfortunately after my third grade year the school closed and the next year my only real exposure to the language was a once weekly lesson with three of my former classmates and a two week-long trip to Costa Rica where I served as the interpreter. By my sixth grade year I had had so little contact with Spanish that I could barely speak it anymore (I could still understand though), not even basic words like ‘tú’ (you). In seventh grade I was given the opportunity to take Spanish at school and took level “1B,” the highest level they offered at the time. Although I was a bit lost in the first few days, just hearing Spanish again worked wonders on my knowledge of the language and soon I was speaking confidently again. I distinctly remember using words and structures to talk with the teacher which we hadn’t learned in the class because they, like with my Greek, just seemed right. The next year I took a new class, which was supposedly a Spanish language arts class for native Spanish speakers. I really didn’t learn much, but the immersive environment which it was conducted in really helped in reactivating my forgotten Spanish that much more. Next was high school, where because of a placement test based on knowing verb forms (the names of which I didn’t know—imperfect subjunctive, what’s that?) I was put in a much lower level than I should have been. Formally learning topics like preterite vs. imperfect and the usage of the subjunctive didn’t faze me at all, unlike my classmates, because I was already using them in my daily discourse. Last year I was in the AP Spanish Language class at my school, which was a breeze, and I got a 5 on the AP exam. Now I would consider myself as having a near-native level in Spanish for my standards and needs, understanding almost everything that I encounter (perhaps a couple stray words here and there escape me, but I usually get those from context without realizing it) and being able to fully communicate with virtually no effort on my part. (The employees at the local tortillería always are startled when they see this obviously not Latino boy speaking native-like Spanish with them!) Spanish is a very dear language to me, even though I went through a period of resenting it a year or two ago, and some things I only know how to say in Spanish (as with Greek), and my favorite and actually only TV show which I watch regularly is in Spanish. Finally I get the point of this post: What is a secondary native language, exactly, in your opinion? Would my scenario qualify me to count one or both of these languages as ‘secondary native?’ Do you have an experience with a secondary native language yourself? Thank you, ευχαριστώ, and gracias. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5345 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 6 24 October 2010 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, in my not so humble opinion a native language is a language you have both been exposed to since you were little and a language that you master thoroughly by the time you've reached adulthood. So I'd say that Spanish would qualify in your case, with Greek coming as a close third (non-native) language.
I actually have similar experiences to yours, namely with English and Swedish. My "native" native language is Finnish, which I still find to be much stronger and more expressive than all my other languages. That is, by "stronger" I mean that even though I'm able to say the same things in English as in Finnish, Finnish still offers that final sense of truly understanding something. It's difficult to explain, but hopefully you got the idea. With Finnish as my first, I consider English to be my second native language. I was exposed to English at a very early age, I would say around four or five. I had a friend whose father was from Britain, and while we conversed mostly in Finnish, we sometimes also spoke in English and I picked up a lot from my friend (I remember being surprised to learn later when I was in school that "can't" is a contraction of "cannot". Before that "can't" had been a mere "cant" to me, a single word that expressed prohibition/impossibility). I only started learning English formally when I was in the fifth grade. Before that, in the second grade, we had been given the option to either study German or English, and I chose German (which I dropped after finishing middle school and promptly forgot. I started relearning the language this fall and it's coming back to me really fast). I was always the best at English in my class, using more advanced vocabulary and constructions than my peers (the language just sounded natural to me and I didn't need to study any grammar rules to know what was correct and what wasn't). I think my English has left me with a minor foreign accent and a more lively intonation when speaking Finnish, so I've also been asked many times where I'm from because of the way I speak (by the way, I don't exactly look like your average Finn with my dark hair and hazel eyes, so my looks have probably reinforced the foreign impression my accent has given people). This year people have thought that I'm Finland Swedish and Russian, for example. :D As for Swedish, I grew up hearing the language and learning some of it before beginning my formal studies in the seventh grade. Living in and around Helsinki, it was pretty difficult not to get exposed to Swedish. So I have similar feelings towards Swedish as you have towards Greek (I also have some family roots going to Sverige), as something that is part of my heritage and as something that I know naturally, although I'm not pursuing my studies actively anymore apart from reading some articles online every now and again. Sorry that this got so long, but I just found a lot of what you wrote in your post to be very familiar. ;) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 6 24 October 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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As regards to the Spanish, I'd say that definitely qualifies as a native language. You were using it in your formative years. It lost ground to your English, so it would classify as secondary. Sounds like a secondary native language to me.
Wouldn't want to comment on the Greek though. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 4 of 6 24 October 2010 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you very much to Kounotori and Cainntear. Especially your own connection was very interesting and helpful, Kounotori. I'm still a little hung up on the issue of my Greek though...
Technically this would not apply to me as I am not an adult yet (I'm 16), but I can see where you're getting at. I doubt that I will have fully mastered the language by the time I am officially an adult unless I spend a significant amount of time in Greece, but that level of native fluency is indeed my goal for Greek, as in my opinion it's the language that I should have spoken as my native language under slightly different circumstances. The dilemma is that I feel like I should only count one if I can count the other. If I count Spanish because I used it when I was little and have achieved an advanced proficiency, then I feel like I should include Greek too because I used it when I was even younger and it was a more of a native (ie, home) language situation than with Spanish. And then the other way, if I count Greek for these reasons, then I should count Spanish because there were similar circumstances for Spanish and I can actually speak it better than Greek. What do you think? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5694 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 5 of 6 24 October 2010 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think you can count both as "secondary native languages." An example I'm thinking of is this: while studying German in Germany, I was placed into a high-level class with a young woman who called herself "German." When I got to know her better, I learned that she'd spent much of her youth living with family in Mannheim, Germany, and also a good amount of time living in Florida, USA. Her casual conversational German sounded completely fluent to me, and she spoke fluidly and naturally with her German peers, but in class there were several advanced concepts that I understood even better than her, thanks to my "classroom training." Her writing was also quite bad, because German had always been a spoken language for her and she simply hadn't had the practice in writing it.
As you can see, her situation is very much "on the edge" of native-tongue definitions, but in this case I would give it to her, as well as in your case. If a language has played that big a role in one's childhood, I think it counts as a native language, even if one isn't necessarily at the level of a highly-educated native in the language. After all, there's a reason for having two separate terms: "native" and "fluent" – they don't necessarily mean the same thing. I've met native English speakers who, if they were foreigners, I'd think "weren't trying very hard." ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5345 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 6 25 October 2010 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||
To be honest, I wouldn't get hung up on any definitions. If you feel that both Spanish and Greek are equal, then why not consider them as secondary native languages? If you can handle any kind of situation in Spanish, and if you can handle any kind of situation in Greek, then isn't that enough proof? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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