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Sense/feeling of style | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5588 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 17 of 21 08 November 2011 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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As hjordis said (odd, I've always assumed you were female due to the name) I interpreted the topic to be about the emotive quality of a second language rather than Sprachgefühl, an aptness for picking up new language-related concepts and using them correctly with that doesn't rely on declarative learning.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6525 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 18 of 21 09 November 2011 at 3:40am | IP Logged | ||
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As Hjordis points out you could interpret the original question in a direction that stresses 'Sprachgefühl' and sense for what is correct and idiomatical speech or writing, or inversely you can speak about purely emotive reactions. I have answered the question from the 'Sprachgefühl' angle before so here is my contribution to the emotive analysis.
I have definitely strong opinions and emotions tied to lots of things, places and persons in my past and present history, and their names are of course part of the game. For instance I feel a deep disgust for the sick marketingese spelling "Aarhus" introduced by former mayor Vammel for my hometown Århus. But after many travels those reactions are also tied to a lot of places abroad, i.e. to place and person names in other languages. I also have strong sym- and antipathies concerning more general objects or entities, but then these feelings are tied to the thing in question, not specifically to the words, so I feel exactly the same degree of nausea by reading about party politics in Greek or Esperanto or English as I do in Danish. This may not be the distribution the OP was expecting to see, but that's how I feel about languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5286 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 19 of 21 09 November 2011 at 4:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I've lived in Japan long enough both to understand and "feel" the subtle differences in politeness levels used to show varying degrees of respect and rudeness. I feel insulted when I believe that a shop assistant is not using suitably respectful language with me and depressed when a child calls me "ojisan" rather than "oniisan" (although I think my "oniisan" days are now pretty much at an end!) I have also developed an innate sense of when I should be using "desu/-masu" and when the plain form is OK.
On the other hand, I still make many blunders by saying things which I believe to be perfectly innocent but which turn out to be terribly insulting. Just the other day I was talking in Japanese about the Georgian teacher I am hoping to take lessons with in Tbilisi at the end of this year. I said いくらほしいのかな as an (overly literal) translation of "I wonder how much she wants", and was greeted with shock and horror! Thus I discovered that in Japan, it is necessary to be polite about people who deserve one's respect even when that person is not present. Apparently I should have said something more neutral such as いくらかかるのかな ("I wonder how much it will cost"). I think it must be pretty much impossible for anyone brought up in a casual, friendly, jokey, sarcastic European culture to live in Japan without unintentionally insulting anyone. Fortunately, as has often been noted, the Japanese are very forgiving when it comes to faux-pas by foreigners. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5407 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 20 of 21 13 November 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is this like the "you don't know WHY the word works, but you know it does by feeling?" because I do that all the time with Spanish, my teacher will ask me "how did you know that?" When...I honestly have NO idea. It just felt/sounded right. Granted, I make some mistakes here and there but for the most part my feelings are right :) I think you can pick up from emotion/tone of voice, something I never understood until I studied Spanish and had a look at English.
I'm in college, where curses fly and sarcasm is more common than truth, so someone will say "hey wanna go eat?" and you say you just had dinner.....then you get a "WELL FK YOU THEN!" and we all laugh...but how would you recognize that if it WASN'T English/a joke? If I didn't know the language well I'd probably assume they were serious... :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 5947 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 21 of 21 13 November 2011 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
Japanese just seems loaded up with grammatical constructions that are all about emotional non-tangible ideas. It's not just the idea, it seems to be about the words. You look these things up in the dictionary and you get an explanation like "Used to express a strong sense of judgement by the speaker." I often have this strange experience of trying memorizing how I'm supposed to feel. Maybe it's analogous to the du/Sie thing in German, except there's just hundreds of these things to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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