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Languages You Missed Out On | ||
Tags: Choosing a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| lecorbeau Diglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 6026 days ago 113 posts - 149 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Turkish | Message 1 of 34 17 June 2009 at 10:57am | IP Logged |
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I was born and raised in the greater Los Angeles region, and it probably doesn't take rocket science to deduce that my native language is English. However, as a child I tragically missed out on two languages I could have spoken natively.
For most of my childhood I was raised by a monolingual Mexican nanny, and according to my Mom, my twin brother and I were fluent Spanish speakers (reportedly my brother and I spoke Spanish with each other) until we were too old to be looked after. As soon as she moved on to other duties in the house (i.e., no longer interacting with us) our Spanish was gradually squashed out of existence. My Father was born in Croatia. When he and his family moved to the United States and as he got older, he lost all interest in his heritage and native language: he renounced his Croatian citizenship, changed his (our) last name to a more American-sounding surname, and never spoke Croatian in the home, seeing it as "pointless". Of course, my argument is that pointless or not, it still would have been a free native language! There is a silver lining, however: these missed opportunities have greatly motivated me to learn foreign languages own my own (culminating in a 12 month exchange program in France several years ago) and this summer I became a Croatian citizen :) How about you all in the forums---anybody else miss out on an opportunity like this, be it as a child or an adult? Perhaps it was your own fault? Social stigma? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5807 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 2 of 34 17 June 2009 at 11:31am | IP Logged |
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My dad studied German a bit, so I remember when I was about 7 or 8 learning how to count
in German while waiting for the bus, I remember trying to say "zwölf" (12) as "zwelf". So I always knew a few (very) basic things, but other than that no one in my family has spoken more than one language since immigration. No missed opportunities yet! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6169 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 34 17 June 2009 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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Oof, that's a shame, ]b\lecorbeau, and I can sympathize... I grew up in Quebec, the son of Egyptian immigrants. They had little conception of how easy it is for kids to learn languages and never taught me Arabic because "He already is learning French at school, so a third language will probably be too much". They would speak Arabic to each other at home, but much too quickly and with no pedagogy, so I didn't pick up a word of it.
Oh well, I missed out on Arabic, but their choice to immigrate to Montreal gave me French "for free", so I don't complain about it. Much. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ivana_B Triglot Newbie Croatia ivanabencic.com Joined 5645 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian, English Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 34 17 June 2009 at 3:13pm | IP Logged |
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I missed out on German.
I was learning it in high school and payed no attention to it whatsoever. Ofcourse, now I regret not paying attention to languages before. I was only paying attention to English at a time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6040 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 5 of 34 17 June 2009 at 3:39pm | IP Logged |
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I missed out on Russian at school. It was my second foreign language but at the time I was not very interested in languages and just wanted to get by with minimum effort. My interest in languages started at university. Oh, well... better late than never. Edited by Sennin on 17 June 2009 at 4:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Caveben Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5671 days ago 40 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Romanian, Slovenian | Message 6 of 34 17 June 2009 at 7:41pm | IP Logged |
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My Mother is a native speaker of English and Italian and near native of French. I always wished I had been taught another language when I was young. Ah well. You can only change the future and all that.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Olympia Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5987 days ago 195 posts - 244 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Old English, French | Message 7 of 34 17 June 2009 at 8:15pm | IP Logged |
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In high school, my school offered two languages: Spanish and French. The French program was way better than
the Spanish, but since I'd taken Spanish before then, I decided to continue. The French teacher saw my enthusiasm and skill in Spanish, and she repeatedly tried to convince me to take French as well. I could have had three years of French in high school, but the first year my mom made me take Latin and the second and third years I was persuaded to think that I absolutely had to take two sciences per year. Argh... Oh, and I have a friend whose father was Ecuadorian, but became a U.S. citizen when he moved to the U.S. and joined the military. He had to renounce his Ecuadorian citizenship due to dual-citizenship being forbidden in Ecuador, but he intended to teach his daughter Spanish. However, growing up in the U.S. with an American mother who didn't speak Spanish, she refused to learn Spanish and her father just decided it would be easier just to speak English. Furthermore, most of her father's family now lives in Brazil, and she could be spending her summers there and learning Portuguese. It's not until now that she's in college that she's decided to major in Spanish and Portuguese even though her Spanish is atrocious and she knows not one word of Portuguese. She's in denial about her lack of skills and has enlisted me to help her pass the language proficiency exams. Edited by Olympia on 17 June 2009 at 9:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6131 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 8 of 34 17 June 2009 at 9:27pm | IP Logged |
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Ugh, you guys remind me. My father spoke Japanese with his parents, but I never learned any of it. My mother spoke Finnish with her parents, and I heard more of this as a child and also visited Finland, but again, I picked up absolutely nothing. I took 3 years of German in high school which I've mostly completely forgotten.
I'm currently working on Japanese, and I'm slowly making progress, though I'm still not very conversational. It's still a lot of work. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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