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Languages of your family | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5012 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 27 14 October 2013 at 10:38am | IP Logged |
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My father is Greek but I never learnt the language when I was young, and even after I developed an interest in languages it's never been a high priority to me. Having never lived in the country, it's never really felt like a big part of my life. It's a bit of a shame though as my grandparents aren't great at English so we aren't able to have very deep conversations. I actually started learning some Greek a couple of days ago because I'm going there to visit family very soon and I'd like to at least be able to understand a little, but for the moment at least I still don't have any intentions to learn it to a high level. But I might pick it up again once I get to a satisfactory level in the main languages that interest me.
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| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4512 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 27 14 October 2013 at 12:03pm | IP Logged |
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I don't have any languages besides Dutch, however, I've had a shot at the languages of
former ex-girlfriends (or their parents' languages), and while we lived abroad my parents also improved their English. English is not used for conversation at home often but many appliances only ever are used in English, particularly TVs and computers, and this has led to a situation where I am in a virtual double-immersion between Dutch and English daily, so I have to know English even though I do not necessarily need to produce it to speak with family. I have cousins in Spain and Canada, but they speak Dutch except for maybe one or two cousins who only speak and don't write Dutch anymore. It has been a long time since I have seen them because my cousin only came here at the point in time where I myself had gone to Belgium. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3949 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 11 of 27 14 October 2013 at 12:17pm | IP Logged |
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I grew up in English and French, and am grateful for that every single day.
My husband's first language is Tagalog. He speaks perfect English - better than many monolinguals I know! But I'd like to learn Tagalog, if only so that his family doesn't have to switch to English to include me in conversations - which they always do, because they're lovely people. I'd like to surprise them by learning their language. I plan on starting in May. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4039 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 12 of 27 14 October 2013 at 12:34pm | IP Logged |
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My grandfather's Ukrainian, but the situation with Russian and Ukrainian lead to the fact the he's actually bilingual. He has Ukrainian accent, but I don't think that he use language much.
I thought Ukrainian words and their similarity to be extremely weird, and I never seriously intended to study it. Of course, grandfather would be glad to hear me speaking Ukrainian, but he never asked neither me, nor my dad and my aunt to do it. Once he decided to check if I knew some words (or it was me who was trying to show off?), that ended with laughter and a little bit of regret from us both. Honestly, I don't like Ukrainian language, I see it as Russian with load of mistakes and outdated words, so I have no wish to learn it now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Oheao Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 3973 days ago 31 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Mandarin, Greek | Message 13 of 27 14 October 2013 at 5:38pm | IP Logged |
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I have Belgian, Hungarian, and Romanian background, but I don't really plan on learning
Dutch, Romanian, or Hungarian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4508 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 14 of 27 14 October 2013 at 9:09pm | IP Logged |
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For me, yes: I do feel attracted to languages I've "inherited".
The last two generations of my family speak Dutch, Indonesian, and Mandarin. I have spent some time learning Dutch and Indonesian, and have entertained the idea of learning Mandarin. I guess I do this because language is a particularly rich way to understand culture, and I feel caught at the juncture of a few. I am ethnically Dutch, Indonesian, and Chinese and was raised Mormon in Washington, D.C. Sometimes I have experienced feelings of enormous cognitive dissonance between what I look like (Asian) and what I feel like (regular American). Learning the languages of my "heritage" is a handy vehicle to just understand the cultures better. I can start to talk directly to family members and hear their stories, unfiltered by a translator. I can access native-language media and find out what makes people of a certain cultural background laugh. I learn their expressions and get to try on a different way of thinking. Then I don't feel like I'm on the outside looking in so much. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, here's a Hesse quote that I think sums it up nicely: "One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time." 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4249 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 15 of 27 15 October 2013 at 3:48am | IP Logged |
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Being ethnically Chinese and raised in the West, there is a lot of both cultures our family tries to accommodate.
Re-learning the mother-tongue later in life has more to do with benefits of being able to connect with customers from E. Asia at work who may not be comfortable with English as a first language. There is also the benefit of listening to news and info from the other side of the world not filtered by Western media. Never thought of myself as a translator. Recently, I was asked to translate some Internet content from English to Chinese. Did a convincing enough job with the help of Google Translate that the Chinese lady in the company who are not into posting web-pages only made several minor corrections. In my younger days, there was an urge to move away from the old culture & traditions because of the parents being very strict and had the final word on everything. Otherwise picking up the language has never been easier. In my parents generation they learn their Mandarin by memorization. Now practically everybody learn it by phonetics. The most difficult part of learning the characters you have a computer dictionary on-hand (by typing in the English meaning or the phonetics). You look up the same words and phrases often enough you would recognize it without too much effort. On the other hand, there are many people in the local Chinese community who are married to or have partners of other nationalities that you'd expect their kids to lose their Chinese heritage. There seemed to be a growing number of Westerners who are into learning Mandarin or Cantonese than the local Chinese to re-engage with their mother-tongue. Edited by shk00design on 15 October 2013 at 3:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 3978 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 16 of 27 15 October 2013 at 9:37am | IP Logged |
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My grandfather was Polish, but he refused to speak it in the UK, so none of his children learned it. Shame, because it'd be quite useful nowadays. But I've heard mixed reports about the idea of children simply picking up languages from their parents. I know a couple of Vietnamese Americans who had it as something of a home language, and yet in reality, they're a high elementary or low intermediate at best. You only have to listen to children's accents to see what influences their language use the most, and it seems to be their peers. I read something a while ago that said that children are very good at discarding something that's not useful to them, so unless there's a genuine reason they need the language, they might struggle to learn a lot simply by their parents choosing to speak to them in another language sometimes. Having a monolingual grandparent they have to use the language with might be more effective, however. Or the much derided foreign nanny.
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