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Not speaking your mother tongue for long | ||
Tags: Native Language | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| winters Trilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6833 days ago 199 posts - 218 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, French, Hungarian | Message 9 of 42 21 October 2007 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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Oh yes. All the time indeed.
Recently I was in Croatia, and whilst I was talking to some friends on the very day of my arrival, I noticed one of them was staring at me weirdly. Upon my asking what was wrong, he shaked his head, and said, "Nothing. It's just that I became aware of how much living in Italy affected your native language. You've actually got an accent, which you probably don't hear, but I do." I could not believe it, but the irony wanted that an anglophone friend joined our company, so we all switched to English, and when speaking English (which is not my native language) I also noticed that my pronunciation of English had changed over the course of time. I had slight Italian accent in it as well. Nothing was changed in the structure of the language used. Except for a couple of misused prepositions, all the languages I spoke were practically intact from grammatical and lexical point of view, but my accent was different. A couple of days later, the same friend told me that my accent had "disappeared", and that I spoke normal Croatian as if I still lived there. And he was right - it was very hard for me to hear those differences, but they disappeared quickly. I never experienced difficulties at using the language I haven't spoken for long with people who speak it. The only 'weird' experiences I had was, for example, talking on the phone in Italy in Russian, amongst Italians, where it just felt uncongenial and I actually had to think about what I say. Still, for me it is mostly the question of the accent, not the language itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ilanbg Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6199 days ago 166 posts - 189 votes Speaks: French, English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (classical), Persian | Message 10 of 42 21 October 2007 at 12:28pm | IP Logged |
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An affected accent makes sense; the mouth becomes accustomed to making certain sounds. Probably the same
reason people have trouble adapting a native accent during the first few weeks. Sounds awful to lose one's language, though; almost defeats the purpose of learning a second one at all, unless the first is obscure and less useful. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aritaurus Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6363 days ago 197 posts - 204 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English*, Japanese, Mandarin Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 42 21 October 2007 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
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I know a Hong Kong girl who has lived in Taiwan for 7 years and when I met her , she spoke fluent Mandarin with a perfect Taiwanese accent where all locals would consider her Taiwanese.
When I talked to her in Cantonese, she had an accent that resembled a Taiwanese person and it did not sound like a native Hong Konger's Cantonese which was a surprise to me. She told me she moved to Taiwan when she was 19 years old so I guess as a result of not speaking Cantonese much for that period of time , she shifted native languages. Edited by Aritaurus on 21 October 2007 at 7:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6148 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 42 21 October 2007 at 5:29pm | IP Logged |
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Here's an interesting article on the topic.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arashjoon Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6121 days ago 31 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Persian* Studies: French | Message 13 of 42 21 October 2007 at 6:10pm | IP Logged |
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Up until the age of 13 I didn't speak Farsi at an acceptable level. Knowing how hard this was on my parents, I chose to start relearning and am now at a native level. During the age of 8-13 I was still very much passive-fluent, but at a loss when it came to constructing my own sentences which is really all I had to work on. 6 months of intensive drilling and vocabulary acquisition was all it really took, along with learning the alphabet. Edited by Arashjoon on 21 October 2007 at 6:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6448 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 14 of 42 22 October 2007 at 11:41am | IP Logged |
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After I had been studying French for a while, I noticed that if I had been using French to the exclusion of English for a while I would start to inadvertently use French words in the middle of speaking or writing English. For example, I would say "bleu" instead of "blue."
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| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6161 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 42 23 October 2007 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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It's my strong opinion that you'd benefit from language immersion more if you made a small effort to use your native language once a day, say, read a book(outloud maybe), listen to some native language radio for 10 minutes, just a minimum. But i also believe it depends on the age of the person. Someone who is say 12 could totally forget their native language whereas a 44 year old person may not use it at all for years and still be just as good. I remember speaking to a German woman who spoke Lithuanian to her husband whose English was poor, but she was still able to converse with me in German and correct me on any mistakes I made with all the ease she had in english, which was 99% perfect.. as it should be being about 88 years old and having lived here longer than me:P she lived alone in that house, and I don't believe she had any other people to speak with, probably why she wanted me over so badly to talk and she'd give me a beer XDand we'd talk about whateva a 17 year old and a 88 year old can talk about hha
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| ymapazagain Senior Member Australia myspace.com/amywiles Joined 6748 days ago 504 posts - 538 votes Speaks: English* Studies: SpanishB2 | Message 16 of 42 24 October 2007 at 6:02pm | IP Logged |
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I was very amused when this happened to me when I was living in spain. I tried to speak in Spanish most of the time and when I did speak in English I had to speak quite slowly using simple words and phrases so that my friends could understand me (they had very limited English). My mum was the first to notice it. My emails started to read as if they had been written by an 8 year old, full of terrible grammar and sentence structure. When I was speaking in English I found that I would suddenly forget a word and that I would stumble a lot, struggling to get a full sentence out. Instead of saying yes I would automatically say si. I found it hillarious but extremely frustrating! It only took a day in England to get back to normal so it's nothing to worry about...just a funny side effect of language learning!
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