parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5758 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French
| Message 17 of 42 07 January 2009 at 2:05am | IP Logged |
Honestly I ... can't prove this, but I think a lot of people are lying to themselves (subconsciously) or to others just to pretend like "hey look at me I'm so cool, I'm *so* fluent that my native tongue is now messed up". I really can't see how anyone can mess up languages for more than a split second (half-a-word) and not notice it.
There are a few people that are honestly ditsy though, but I'm not sure how it's even possible. Once I was hanging out with a native Cantonese speaking friend in Southern China, he was using English with me and Mandarin with his girlfriend, and Cantonese with all other people in public (our waitress etc). Every 5 minutes he was making a huge blunder. We got on an elevator and he tried to tell the guy in English what floor, then at the restaurant the turns to his girlfriend and rattled off Cantonese ... so much of a blunder that even the waitress realized and started laughing at him.
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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6199 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 18 of 42 07 January 2009 at 7:50am | IP Logged |
parasitius wrote:
Honestly I ... can't prove this, but I think a lot of people are lying to themselves (subconsciously) or to others just to pretend like "hey look at me I'm so cool, I'm *so* fluent that my native tongue is now messed up". I really can't see how anyone can mess up languages for more than a split second (half-a-word) and not notice it.
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It can happen; it doesn't seem really related to fluency for me (it's more a matter of what languages you've been using most recently - including non-fluent ones).
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cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5598 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian
| Message 19 of 42 07 January 2009 at 3:59pm | IP Logged |
Yes,
1) My slang expressions in Swedish are getting a bit outdated and I don't know what the new ones are.
2) When I speak about business related matters I find that I don't always know how to say it in my own native tongue (because I learnt the expression while I was here in the UK)
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SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5637 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese
| Message 20 of 42 07 January 2009 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
parasitius wrote:
Honestly I ... can't prove this, but I think a lot of people are lying to themselves (subconsciously) or to others just to pretend like "hey look at me I'm so cool, I'm *so* fluent that my native tongue is now messed up". I really can't see how anyone can mess up languages for more than a split second (half-a-word) and not notice it. |
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I agree with this. I lived 7 years in Quebec, Canada. It was a French - English environment. In 7 years I did not loose one stitch of my Australian accent in English. I did not know a single other Australian there, and was surrounded by North America and their accents without a single Australian accent to be heard. For 7 years! Sure, I changed word usage for easier understanding ... cell-phone instead of mobile-phone, etc ... but since people could understand my Australian accent, and I was spending half my time speaking French anyway, I did not loose one beat of my accent. And upon coming home after all that time, there was not one forgotten word or one word of new slang that ANYONE said that I could not understand immediately from context. It had been 7 years and no-one could tell that I had even been away.
I have also lived in the Spanish world, complete with Spanish speaking job and Spanish-only girlfriend, and gone over a month without speaking English to anyone, even on the phone. I know that code-switching and coming back to English takes a few minutes when you are used to expressing yourself in Spanish all the time, and you really miss the words and concepts that you have in Spanish with no English equivelent ... but lets not confuse the difficulties in code-switching from one language to another with forgetting your language. It takes me by surprise to have to speak any of my languages I have not spoken in weeks when I have to speak it unexpectedly, and it takes me a few minutes to get my head around it. But the lag in switching codes is a different thing to forgetting a native language.
All that said, I agree that you fall behind in your slang in the absence, and any new concepts you learn in a foreign language will not automatically have a word in your mind for it in your native language which will leave you wanting to use the foriegn word in your native language. But that is how loan words come into a language anyway.
Edited by SlickAs on 07 January 2009 at 4:44pm
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SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5637 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese
| Message 21 of 42 07 January 2009 at 4:37pm | IP Logged |
FSI wrote:
Here's an interesting article on the topic. |
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Good article. Thank-you. Resonates with my experience also.
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Lindsay19 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5581 days ago 183 posts - 214 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC1 Studies: Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic
| Message 22 of 42 07 January 2009 at 5:00pm | IP Logged |
The only thing I've noticed is that my English spelling has been getting worse, and that sometimes I have to think for a while before I finally find the right word I'm looking for.
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bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6214 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin
| Message 23 of 42 07 January 2009 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
I haven't really encountered any major difficulties in speaking my native language (Finnish), even though I usually speak it quite rarely (a few times a month at maximum). Maybe that's because of my work; I translate into and from Finnish, so I have to keep my language skills alive with conscious efforts. With regards to my spoken proficiency, I've noticed one thing, though: when I suddenly start speaking in Finnish after having spoken only Italian and English for a long time, some words don't come to my mind very quickly and I speak with a slightly foreign accent. o_0 But then I do regain the Finnish one rather quickly.
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jstele Bilingual Senior Member United States Joined 6415 days ago 186 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean*
| Message 24 of 42 07 January 2009 at 7:07pm | IP Logged |
SlickAs wrote:
I agree with this. I lived 7 years in Quebec, Canada. It was a French - English environment. In 7 years I did not loose one stitch of my Australian accent in English. I did not know a single other Australian there, and was surrounded by North America and their accents without a single Australian accent to be heard. For 7 years!
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Well, it's easier to keep an accent when you are speaking the related language. You were able to practice speaking English with or without other Australians. But it would be a different story if you studied another language like Spanish and had little contact with native speakers. Unless you reinforced it through practice, you would lose it. You either use the language or lose it like any other skill.
SlickAs wrote:
I have also lived in the Spanish world, complete with Spanish speaking job and Spanish-only girlfriend, and gone over a month without speaking English to anyone, even on the phone.
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A month is not long enough. Try years.
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