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Your earliest foreign language memory | ||
Tags: Children | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 17 of 98 03 November 2009 at 9:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have a pretty clear memory as a child of being made to say a few words in Finnish by older relatives -- with hind site, likely because they thought it 'looked cute' -- while at the time being utterly confused about the whole idea of a foreign language. I know 10 words of Finnish, I know Finnish! Unfortunately, though, I never developed any passive understanding of this language.
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| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5553 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 18 of 98 03 November 2009 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My dad speaks Spanish as his mother tongue, and I apparently spoke it fluently when I was younger thanks to a babysitter from South America I had. Unfortunately I do not remember this time period in the slightest and to this day I don't speak a lick of Spanish.
My first real memory of a foreign language comes from when my dad took me to visit some friends of his. They had a daughter and I knew she spoke Spanish, so I said "hola" to her and she responded back the same way. The rest of the day was conducted entirely in English. Even after having Spanish classes all throughout school, I never became interested in foreign languages seriously until about a year ago when I was 17. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6783 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 98 03 November 2009 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't remember what the first words were. I was 5 years old in a car being briefed on basic conversational Norwegian for my first day of kindergarten. It sorta went from there. Edited by numerodix on 03 November 2009 at 3:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 20 of 98 03 November 2009 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is very interesting. I had never considered that two closely related languages may be seen by natively bilingual children as being variants of a single language. But it makes sense, when you consider for example the situation with Arabic, where the dialects spoken in the street are at least as different from Modern Standard Arabic as Catalan is from Spanish, yet native speakers would call both languages "Arabic". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6942 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 21 of 98 03 November 2009 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
One of my friends mentioned to me once that as a child he believed dogs and cats were the male and female genders respectively of the one species. Sounds similar. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6493 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 22 of 98 03 November 2009 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I believed that birches were earlier stages of pine-trees. I didn't see their leaves (too high), but saw that white crust of birches breaks and shows dark pieces, like those of pine-trees. :D
On topic: I remember my mother watching Latinamerican TV series, and of some of them I recall the tunes and the sounds, and can reconstruct a few phrases. In '90s they were in abundance on our TV. I guess our viewers could watch all the same series the Venezuelians saw. My friend, a girl, took that more seriously: started learning Spanish _because_ of passion to those series, and downloaded a bunch of them via torrents. Edited by Siberiano on 03 November 2009 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| XGargoyle Bilingual Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 5956 days ago 42 posts - 93 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, EnglishB2 Studies: GermanA2, Japanese, Russian | Message 23 of 98 03 November 2009 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Levi:
In the particular case of Catalan Vs Spanish, you must keep in mind that there was a historical and political background behind. After Spain's Civil War, the country was ruled by a dictator who forbid the use of Catalan (and the other languages spoken in Spain such as Galician & Basque). The only official language was Spanish, and Catalan was only used in a home environment. Speaking Catalan in public could have resulted in fines or jail time during that period. After the dictator's death in year 1975 and with the "Transición" (transition, the transformation from a dictatorship to a democracy), Catalan regained official status in Catalonia. However, almost 2 generations still used Spanish as the main language or official one, and Catalan to be used only on a family environment, as a low-level language (or even "a dialect of Spanish" as some linguists claimed then). That being said, it was not strange for a small kid to believe that those 2 languages were the same one, but one being the correct/polite version, and the other one the colloquial/informal version. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 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 24 of 98 12 November 2009 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not quite sure when my first experience with foreign languages was... I suspect that it was hearing my grandparents and other older relatives speaking in Greek since I was little. Until I was about five, I used to go to my great-grandmother's house for lunch once a week and much of the conversation was in Greek. I couldn't really speak or understand much of it (if at all), but it gave me the exposure to it so that I now have a native-like accent and can follow stuff easily in spoken Greek. I'm not sure if I really registered it as a separate language, though. When I was directly involved with Greek words, they were always words that we never used in English, so I must have thought that it was just a familiar form of speaking...
I also remember sitting near a pool on a trip to Mexico when I was four, and my dad telling me that in Spanish "no" is "no," just like in English. I thought that was interesting, but didn't really care, as I thought that it had no practical use. The next year I was enrolled in a Spanish-English bilingual elementary school (I distinctly remember ignoring the teachers in kindergarten until they would speak to me in English, even though I was beginning to sort-of passively understand the Spanish). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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