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Do you spill the beans or hide the nut? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4761 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 22 29 October 2011 at 8:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Or in other words... And this is a question for those who can speak with some degree of ease more than three languages (tetraglots and up):
When you meet new people that you will be interacting with for some time to come, or people that become new friends, do you officiously volunteer the fact you can speak so many languages, or do you "hide" your talent/ability for as long as possible? I'm simply curious because I'm slowly gaining some fluency in German (not just basic speech), and I've studying French real hard and after four months of three plus hours a day (since July) I can already read without major problems. My speech is still somewhat poorer than German but I know I'll catch it up since it's just due to the fact my French is ovewhelmingly passive due to not practicing it as much as my German. So, I would say perhaps towards the end of next year if I keep up the way I have, I will have some decent fluency in both of those and Portuguese, which for a Spanish speaker would be relatively easy to do. Now, I know which category I fall in: hide the nut. Wherever I go, I always speak English (I'm in an English environment at the moment), and don't even hint that I can speak Spanish. While I'm not a blond blue-eyed type, I don't look what people would consider "Spanish" (as in Latin American, usually stereotyped as mestizo), I look like a white-skinned Italian or French. Thus, people don't expect me to know Spanish and talk freely around me UNAWARE I can understand the vaguest of details if I decide to eavesdrop. When somehow they find out, usually because I am forced to talk to someone in Spanish for convenience of understanding due to their poor English, it is the news of the week wherever I may find myself in! And people look amazed... I can't imagine what will happen when I have to ''add'' that I can also speak German, French and Portuguese, and that I am studying Mandarin! So do you polyglots let on easy or keep it to yourselves? Follow up question: when you do reveal or are forced to reveal you speak another language, do you stop there or do you reveal all your other languages too? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6394 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 22 29 October 2011 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't purposefully hide it, but if it doesn't come up in a conversation, I probably won't mention it. And it rarely
comes up in conversation. It might come up that I lived in China for a year, and then the subject of speaking Mandarin will probably come up. It's not like I hear French spoken in the streets, so that very rarely comes up. I also find it hard to actively seek out opportunities to practice. There are a lot of Chinese restaurants where I live, but I haven't been to them since I got back from China, and if I did go there, It'd feel stupid to address the waiter in Mandarin or Cantonese rather than Swedish. However, my workmates know I speak Mandarin and we have a Chinese guy coming to the office to work for a year, so they'll likely make me speak Mandarin with him (which is good, because I can always use the practice). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5481 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 22 29 October 2011 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I would never hide the fact that I speak several languages (why would I?), but I probably wouldn't mention it either unless the question comes up. And in my case, the question always comes up, as speaking several languages is just a big part of who I am. Two of the most basic questions you get asked when meeting new people are "where are you from?" and "what do you do for a living?". When I say that I'm from Luxembourg, apart from "where?" the usual question is "what language do you speak there?". And when I say that I am a translator, 99% of the time I get asked what languages I translate/speak.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5578 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 4 of 22 29 October 2011 at 10:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I tend to keep to myself. Annoyingly enough though, if I'm around friends or family
when meeting this new person, the friend or member of my family usually spills the beans on my behalf - which then makes me feel quite awkward. Then all the inevitable questions get asked and I usually want to drop the entire conversation and go and hide in a corner. There have been occasions where I've met natives of my target languages though, and then I've been quite quick to mention the language in question - but only because I want to practise. I was watching the France-Wales Rugby World Cup Semi-Final with a group of my Welsh relatives and some French family friends whom I'd never met before - and I spoke to them and their children in French only. But that's the exception; usually I want to keep as quiet about it as possible. I get embarrassed otherwise as the people who mention it on my behalf usually dwell on it far too much. Jack 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6084 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 5 of 22 29 October 2011 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't overstate it but I am often in situations where I do not use my L1 but rather one or more of my acquired languages. That I am something of a linguist is also a large part of who I am, and also something that circumstances tend to reveal even if I were inclined to hide it.
I was recently in a situation where I had to speak Italian, which I can, to a basic level. One of the people I was with regarded this as a major intellectual achievement, which it certainly was not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5068 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 6 of 22 29 October 2011 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I dont think I'll mention Finnish even if Im asked which languages I study, because it's not a popular, or even half popular language to learn. It's like 1 in 30 000 people that learn it.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5185 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 7 of 22 29 October 2011 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't see why that should matter. People'll be interested to know why. From this forum it seems like it's quite a popular language to learn, especially compared to the population of the country; a lot seem to learn Finnish with no intention of going to Finland. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5954 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 8 of 22 29 October 2011 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
This is literally exactly how it is for me, too. It's extremely annoying and it has gotten to the point where I get angry at people for asking me what/how many languages I speak, or even lie and say that I don't study languages anymore. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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