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Feelings about learners of your language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6777 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 31 21 February 2010 at 2:54pm | IP Logged |
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To all the non-native English speakers out there, I want to ask, "How do you feel when you meet someone who is learning your native language?"
I want to find out which languages' native-speakers are most welcoming and encouraging when they meet someone who has learned to speak their language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 2 of 31 21 February 2010 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
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Depends on who they are and why they want to learn.
Lots of people come to my country who don't particularly want to live there and who aren't really interested in learning the langugage, and this shows. Don't care much to help them. Some even have bad motives for being there. Other people are not actually in the country and instead have a sort of a"one-night-stand" type relationship with a language like mine. They hear a song that they like, they like a group or something similar. Perhaps they have a crush on someone of that nationality, so imagine that they want to learn the language. The enthusiasm soon wears off though. I have also met language enthusiasts who say they speak my language but it soon turns out that it isn't possible to have a conversation with them and that they have overestimated their skills. Such situations are hard to handle. And from a perspective that is (luckily) not my own: What if the person who said that they wanted your help with language studies was part of an army who was occupying your country, or they had a very negative view on your culture or traditions, or they were outright hostile when speaking about your country. This is actually common. How would you handle it? But when I meet someone who has a genuine interest and a positive view of my country and language, then that is a great thing and I am very happy to help them. I have met German, British, Baltic and Polish people who have fit this description and am very happy to help them. The situation is no doubt different for speakers of larger foreign languages and I think the view varies from country to country and depends on who the learner is and what his motivation is. My experience with Russian recently, and also with German and Spanish in the past has been very good. I think the interest is a bit lower in France. In Japan many years back, I was just a curiousity, a blonde kid who could speak a bit Japanese. People sometimes had strange reactions to that but were always nice albeit not necessarily helpful from a language perspective. I gave that up; not worth the effort unless you are going to live there. Edited by cordelia0507 on 21 February 2010 at 3:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 31 21 February 2010 at 4:25pm | IP Logged |
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I have had one experience with learners of Swedish. A bunch of exchange students from the US who came here
to study Swedish. My reaction was more or less "Why on earth would you want to study Swedish?". They never tried to speak Swedish wth me and I never did anything to encourage their efforts to learn my language. Since we were in the same exchange program (they were first in Sweden for six months and then we all went to the US with them for six months) I spent a lot of time with them, but almost never heard them speak Swedish, except when us Swedes tried to teach them tongue twisters and amused ourselves at their expense. I think I was genuinely helpful once or twice with getting some phonemes right. I hope the other Swedes were more supportive, but I honestly don't really think so. Of course, since then I've taken up an interest in learning foreign languages myself and I would never react that way again. I am quite ashamed of the way I treated these people. If I met learners of Swedish today, I'd be super excited, tell them anything they wanted to know about grammar and happily converse with them even in broken Swedish (although if their mother tongue is one that I want to practice myself, I might want tome reciprocity) to help them develop their skills. I say this to illustrate an important point. People on this forum are not representative. You'll get a very skewed result by asking that question here. There's a huge difference in the way I reacted back then and the way I'd react now, largely because of joining this forum and largely because of simply studying foreign languages (which all people on this forum do or have done). 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5553 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 4 of 31 21 February 2010 at 4:29pm | IP Logged |
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At times Finnish people would practically start kissing my feet when they discovered I was learning their language. One boy told me what I was doing was "admirable." Uh...
Sometimes this really was a bad thing, because I would try to hold a conversation and they would just stare with their jaw gaping and then either throw me a dog bone "WOW YOU SPEAK SO GOOD WOW YOUR PRONUNCIATION WOWWW" or run and go get their friends to tell them about me... instead of, y'know, talking to me. Other times people honestly didn't care and just spoke to me like a normal person. I had some wonderful conversations with both Finns and foreign immigrants in Finnish. They might have just assumed I was from Russia which I wouldn't be surprised, as most of the Russians I met spoke impeccable Finnish save for the accent. I think the former stems from the fact that Finnish isn't Spanish, German or French. It's not a language people learn to speak unless they are refugees in the country or something. So a lot of these kids just haven't met foreigners who speak Finnish, and the younger generation especially has been sort of trained to associate foreigners with English, so to break that mould and speak with one in Finnish for more than a few sentences may be difficult. 100% positive experience though. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Faraday Senior Member United States Joined 6118 days ago 129 posts - 256 votes Speaks: German* | Message 5 of 31 21 February 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged |
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My reaction toward learners of my language is very positive. I try to be helpful, and
answer questions and do things like tickling them to help their pronunciation. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Hello Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5420 days ago 40 posts - 45 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 31 21 February 2010 at 5:02pm | IP Logged |
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My first reaction towards people learning French would be '' Why are you learning French? '' of course. I have never experienced this, but I do not worry, it should come pretty soon enough :).
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Enki Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5833 days ago 54 posts - 133 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written), English*, French, Korean Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 31 21 February 2010 at 5:34pm | IP Logged |
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Though I'm an English speaker, I grew up in the Middle East so Arabic is close to a second native language for me. I have a lot of respect for people who want to learn Arabic, because 1) there aren't many 2) it isn't easy and 3) while everyone and their pet dog has an opinion about the situation in that area, very few actually bother to know about the place. Conversely, I lose all respect for any self-styled "pundit" who has no functional knowledge of Arabic but wants to talk my ear off about what's wrong with my country :P
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5403 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 8 of 31 21 February 2010 at 6:22pm | IP Logged |
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Serbs are usually very happy when someone tries to learn their language, excited even. It is a unique phenomenon I imagine. Serbs even forged a saying: "Speak Serbian so that the whole world could understand you", meaning that on one hand there are Serbs all over the world, and on the other everyone who doesn't speak Serbian should learn it. It is of course just their humour. Serbs many time try to teach foreigners their language even against their will, for example if you come to a green market and you don't know how to say what you want, just pointing to the thing won't cut it with the Serbs. The old lady selling apples will teach you how to say "I would like the apples" before selling them to you. :-D
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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