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Do you spill the beans or hide the nut? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5670 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes  1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 22 31 October 2011 at 7:57pm | IP Logged |
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It can be very embarrassing when you are presented to a group of unknown people and another person gives wrong information about your language abilities. Once it happend that a friend of mine presented me to her Spanish course members and said: This is "Fasulye" and among several other languages she speaks fluent Turkish. I have some passive knowledge of Turkish but completely no speaking ability and it feels very awkward when a third person makes false claims about your language abilites. I experienced this only once and I hope it will never happen again.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 31 October 2011 at 8:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4996 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 22 31 October 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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I don't learn languages for the sake of learning languages. I learn languages to...
COMMUNICATE. That's why I'm interested in languages in which there's a high chance a native speaker of the language does not speak English. To this end, any time I get an opportunity to use a target language, I seize it. To me, there's no point in learning a language and then shying away from using it in real-life situations. It's not the same as playing the piano or having a stamp collection, which are much more private matters. Of course, I wouldn't march up to a person and go: "Hi, my name is ABC. I speak XYZ languages." However, if during a conversation, I find out that the person speaks a language that I happen to speak as well, I would have no qualms about engaging the person in that language. And it doesn't matter if I make mistakes. How else am I supposed to improve? Edited by strikingstar on 01 November 2011 at 12:29am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4997 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 19 of 22 31 October 2011 at 10:30pm | IP Logged |
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I didn't tell anyone I spoke French (or German or Spanish) until we were on the plane
over the Atlantic. I'm not as reserved anymore. I only bring it up when it's pertinent to the conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4682 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 20 of 22 31 October 2011 at 10:37pm | IP Logged |
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I hide the nut for several reasons. First of all, people make big eyes when I say about languages such Macedonian. And especially when I say about the number of these languages. The second one is that they can consider it as absolutely useless. It's better in big cities (luckily I live in one of them currently), but in my borntown (not really "hometown")I had a situation, when people from my class in high school saw my "Slovene for travellers" book, they have asked "why do you learn such language instead of Spanish, French?". The third thing - questions like "will it be useful in your future work?" that I ABSOLUTELY hate.
And the most irritating and demotivating thing - their doubts and question "how many of them do you ACTUALLY speak?". And it's especially demotivating for a person like me who's just starting his linguistic journey. So, even my friends don't know about ALL of my languages. Maybe that's better... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6838 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 22 04 November 2011 at 8:49pm | IP Logged |
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I hide the nut. For me it's great to be able to know what's going on around you and be able to eavesdrop on a number of conversations without other people knowing you understand, but maybe I'm just strange that way.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Leipzig Hexaglot Newbie Wales Joined 4626 days ago 22 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchC2, Lowland Scots, SpanishC2, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Welsh, Tok Pisin, German, Italian | Message 22 of 22 05 November 2011 at 10:39am | IP Logged |
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It's unusual for me. I don't really boast about my language learning, but everyone who
knows me is aware of my linguistic studies, since teaching languages is my vocation. I tend to be self-effacing about it, but I do leap at any opportunity to use my languages where appropriate, even my least developed ones. After all, what is the point of learning a language if one does not use it? I do share the concerns of some other people here though. I have been mortified by being introduced to native speakers as fluent in languages where I'm a beginner. On the plus side, I've been able to help many friends take the plunge into learning languages, who would never have approached me for advice, information and solidarity had they somehow not known about my languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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