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Sense/feeling of style | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 5937 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 9 of 21 07 November 2011 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||
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With my Finnish grandmother, I swear about every 10th word was paska. My memory of her talking, is something like "blah blah blah paska blah blah paska" (At the time I heard it as baska, though this isn't far off.) To me, my sense of this is that it's just kind of goofy sounding and not that offensive, but I'm not sure what Finnish people make of this.
I understand the original poster. I feel like right now, English is like fresh food, and Japanese is a little like frozen food. The emotional impact is blurred and not as vivid. This is why I like anime, because the artwork can be emotionally evocative, even if the words still leaves me a little empty. There seems to be a lot of Japanese grammar that is supposed to evoke feelings, and I'm kind of just memorizing this stuff like a robot. I presume this gets better? 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 10 of 21 07 November 2011 at 6:54am | IP Logged | ||
That's how I am in my native language! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4671 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 11 of 21 07 November 2011 at 9:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to add that I find listening vulgar music much less disgusting than swearing people in the street. The reason is I treat the first thing as some artistic way of expressing oneself and the second one reminds me people I wouldn't like to stay in touch with them. Edited by prz_ on 07 November 2011 at 9:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 21 07 November 2011 at 11:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't quite understand how any language can be "entirely intellectual with no emotional/gut reaction". Even if I can't speak it yet I may have some sense of its 'sound' and some knowledge about its history. For instance I have definitely got gut feelings about Finnish, even though my vocabulary is limited to maybe ten words plus some place names. But the feeling of what is right and wrong must of course presuppose some knowledge about the language.
I think that the gut feelings which constitute the thing call 'Sprachgefühl' develop from an early phase, and if it seems otherwise it is mostly because we confuse the slow acquisition of those gut feelings with the point where we decide to trust them instead of looking things up (sometimes with disastrous consequences!). But actually you need a certain amount of automatisms to be active in a language - even when you write you don't construct every single sentence like a rebus or sudoku. You know some words beforehand and you combine them more or less automatically. And that shows that you have got a rudimentary Sprachgefühl even at an early stage. Edited by Iversen on 07 November 2011 at 12:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5578 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 13 of 21 07 November 2011 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | ||
Oddly enough, the English word has more of an impact on me. That's because I only ever heard people speaking youth slang using F. (my German teacher was very strict), whereas I also heard quite educated people use c. when they are heavily emotional, for example shocked. The German word simply makes me think somebody wants to come across as badass and isn't very eloquent about it. The English word has also that possible interpretation, but besides that it has a stronger link to emotional responses, even evokes the ghost feeling 'shocked'. I also experience a weird mix of stronger and weaker reactions - for example, I find poems and song lyrics in Japanese and Spanish much more emotive than in German or English because I have to use more of my concentration on trying to understand the meaning and can't just downregulate my emotional reaction as soon as I encounter a few key words. (I have naturally strong emotional reactions that are easily triggered and my mood is naturally all over the place, to I try to keep it steady by not letting certain things get to me.) On the other hand, there are certain things I reject out of personal choice rather than real raw emotion. I can't stand listening to boy bands in German or English because that clashes too much of my image of who I am. In Japanese - no problem. In Spanish I already started to feel very uncomfortable and it's just a matter of time until I will completely reject them. I'm much more open-minded when using my weaker languages. =) I just wanted to state that I need to understand something before I start feeling an emotional reaction, but that may not even be the case. It can be just the other way around, that from the contextual information I gather that something is very sad or funny before I actually know what it really means. Oh, I'm the kind of person who can watch a TV show in a foreign language and laugh at all the right times while not understanding any of the jokes. Their body language shows it's funny; they laugh, I laugh. I can't help it; when other people run in front of my eyes I feel the urge to run, when they yawn I can't suppress a yawn, when they cry I have a hard time keeping my own composure. That's one of the reasons I learn a lot better from TV shows (especially with overacting) than from anime. ETA; Of course, interaction with native speakers in on an entirely different level. That of course doesn't mean that I can easily express myself in a way that evokes the intended emotional reaction. I consciously avoid swearwords because I want to be seen as nice and cute by speakers of my target languages. I make jokes from the very start, but most of them are very easy (today's discussion in French class: 'what things change from day to day?' - Bao: 'the date.'), but I can't consciously employ archaisms or other interesting registers to get a certain effect. I actually try to avoid that even when I'm pretty sure about a certain expression because the effect is often ruined by the other person knowing that I'm non-native. Edited by Bao on 13 November 2011 at 2:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4905 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 14 of 21 08 November 2011 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Funny thread! If you can appropriatly use mild expletives in your TL it shows a good command of the language, but this is a two edged sword. I am sure nearly everyone on this forum has experienced the practical joker who likes to teach the bad words to a foreigner (often times out of context). Typically this involves setting the victim up for an embarassing situation by using innapropriate language involving another unaware victim. This gets alot of laughs and well you end up learning the swear words first. The above victim usually isn't a serious language learner though and a serious learner will researve that language for the appropriate time otherwise risk looking like a very low person, or perhaps even deliver a grave insult resulting in a punch in the nose.
I think you can employ some of these to good effect though; bad accent aside, uttering something like the following sentence will assert some authority with your speaking abilty. For example: Are you F'ing kidding me? I just spent three weeks on that proposal and now the client has backed out! I would love to see some learning materials using expressions like that! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5193 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 21 08 November 2011 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Though I think I understood the question, I'm not sure what you mean by "sense", exactly. At least, I don't know how good a sense you are aiming for.
One of the previous posters said that they have that "sense" in Japanese, even though the language is not in the list of languages he speaks (though this might be a mistake) and at the other end of the spectrum, I know of several professional translators who have perfect command of their L2 and who, yet, are not as comfortable translating into that L2 because they feel their "sense" of the language is not equal to that of a native speaker. I'm not a native speaker of English, but I do have near-native command of the language and I earn a living because of it. I also teach ESL and I'm sometimes unsure about some of the questions my students ask me, but basically, when I ask a native speaker, they always confirm what I said. So as far as having a sense of an L2, I suppose I have it. To be even more precise, I should say that I started studying English seriously around the age of 14 or 15, but I lived in an entirely French-speaking environment until I was 19. I don't know if that fits your criteria for "adulthood". I have no confirmation whether my impression of how I got this sense is accurate or not, and it's not really something I've thought about much before, but I feel that I've developed this in part through extensive, critical exposure over time, from reading but mostly from listening, and in part through extensive, critical production, both in writing and orally. In other words, I don't think exposure alone would have been sufficient, and I don't think listening and speaking alone would have been sufficient either if I hadn't constantly been listening to the way natives speak with the express intent of copying them and if I hadn't always been on the look out for the most natural way to express things myself in order to sound like a native speaker. Now that I think of, I suppose the desire to sound like a native is what made me pay attention to what I heard and be careful about what I said to the degree needed to acquire this "sense". Edited by Arekkusu on 08 November 2011 at 5:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 4998 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 16 of 21 08 November 2011 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think we need a little bit of clarification from the OP about what they mean.
I was under the impression that the OP was talking about being able to use a language on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one, which I don't think had to do with fluency but more how comfortable you are with a language(which might to some degree come with fluency, but not always). Using their example, the difference would be between KNOWING that a character in literature or a movie was speaking with, say ,a southern US accent and feeling the implications of that. Or the difference between knowing someone was using language inappropriate for their relationship with you and feeling insulted by that. Of course, my ability to use Japanese on an emotional level isn't as good as it is in my native language, but it's there which is something I can't say about French even though I've been studying them about the same time. Heck, I think it's even better in the Spanish that I know(barely any) than in French, though this hasn't really been tested. I think this because I learned the Spanish that I do know because I was surrounded by people who spoke it from a early age, much like my native language, rather than learning it in a classroom. On the other hand, some people seem to be speaking about a different kind of "sense." Like maybe a sense of the way that the language works or what sounds natural in a language. I think this is definitely tied in to fluency. Perhaps, like Iversen said, it is present to some extent from the very beginning, but it definitely grows stronger over time spent with a language. Since I don't have any languages where this sense even approaches that in my native language I can't really say anything else about this one. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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