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How Many Languages Do You Speak? (pg. 13)
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| Gauss |
| Croatian and English fluently, Serbian too because it's similar to Croatian, also some very basic German and I can understand a lot of Slovenian. |
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| verndogs |
just english :gsmile:
I took spanish in college and forgot almost all of it |
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| Abercrombie |
| English, French, French-Canadian, Czech |
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| Cpt.Cocaine |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ania_xox
Nothing can feel like your mother tongue, but your mother tongue.
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English feels more like my first language than french does, but maybe that's because I use it more. |
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| Frenchie |
| quote: | Originally posted by Cpt.Cocaine
English feels more like my first language than french does, but maybe that's because I use it more. |
I'm slowly walking down this path as well. I have no one to talk French with here aside from my Mom. I still think in French which can totally screw a conversation but it's all ok:gsmile: |
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| Cpt.Cocaine |
| I actually have to switch in and out of 'french mode'. If I say something in french, it triggers french mode, which makes me think all my thoughts in french. Saying something in english reverts it back. If I'm in french mode and I quickly try to switch to english, I sound like I have a heavy accent. :wtf: |
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| Frenchie |
| I have moments in the middle of a sentence in English where I just stop, stare at the person and say " welp, I forget what I was going to say so unless you want to continue this in French, let's move on." |
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| elFreak |
| quote: | Originally posted by Scottaculous
I'm confused about the "choy hi" part but you got the rest very close.
your mom (something) westerner |
Give me at least 2 more months of studying and i will promise to do better:p |
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| Ania_xox |
| quote: | Originally posted by Noisician
it does not at all matter how fluent you or your parents appear to be in french when you speak the language - your intuition regarding grammaticality of certain specially constructed sentences will still be different from that of a native speaker. there are many subtleties in french semantics that make it, at times, radically dissimilar to english. the important point is, there is no way that non-native speakers could be receptive to these differences on a subconscious level unless they were already aware of them beforehand (i.e. through conscious learning). and while the natives are not consciously alert to them either, their assessment of certain semantically abstruse or/and scopally ambiguous sentences will differ from yours exactly because they are native speakers while you are not.
e.g.,
--french does not allow raising across an experiencer, so that while in english you can say things like
john seems to mary to have talent
its french counterpart would sound weird to most native speakers
(* means ungrammatical)
*jean semble à marie avoir du talent
and yet the moment you replace the experiencer with a pronoun, the above sentence suddenly becomes grammatical just like in english
jean lui semble avoir du talent
--also, in contrast to their english counterparts, french croire-class verbs allow a non-habitual interpretation for their infinitival complements even in the absence of an overt aspect or adverbs of quantification. e.g.,
je crois rêver
can mean both "i believe that i dream" and "i believe that i am dreaming"
--the splitting of wh-phrases is possible in french but not in english
combien de livres a-t-il consultés?
combien a-t-il consultés de livres?
--in french, finite main verbs must precede adverbial expressions, whereas their corresponding non-finite forms may precede OR follow them. this is different from english. e.g.,
jean parle à peine l'italien
*jean à peine parle l'italien
and yet these are both grammatical
parler à peine l'italien...
à peine parler l'italien...
--the distribution of in situ wh-constructions in french is also radically different from that in english.
there are other, much more subtle differences involving scope and quantifiers, which i'm not going to go into.
the bottomline is, the notion of 'fluency' does not simply involve the ability to produce sentences, it also involves the ability to judge sentences. and this second ability diminishes as early as 7y in people. |
Interesting analysis. Funny how you came at it from that angle when speaking to the linguistic differences between the two languages.
I only feel bad that your insights went to waste because I wasn't clear in my previous post that I came from Poland with my family to Canada in 1990 - so my parents' language transition was from Polish to English. French is my third language - but my first attempt at learning a language (english and polish are both native to me).
I'm past the stage of understanding the language. I intensely study the theory of translation. I find that only when I translate, do I recognize and appreciate the intrinsic details of French and how it shapes my understanding of a text.
What I find fascinating are the unintentional changes that occur when translating due to morphology or syntax.
ex. Je suis allée au cinéma.
Here we have information about the subject (feminine) but lack specific information about the means of travel.
take the same sentence in German:
Ich bin zum Kino gegangen.
(no information about the subject, but we have information about the means of travel because the verb "gehen" (to go) strongly connotes the idea of "walking" as opposed to just "going")
Now compare both of those to the English:
I went to the movies.
No information about the subject nor about the means of travel.
Translators often have to "make up for" this lack of information elsewhere in the text.
What I find most difficult (and what Roman Jakobson has called impossible) is the translation of poetry. You have to make choices, make sacrifices. Preserve content or preserve the artistic organization of the information? Aim for functional equivalence of meaning or of form? It's really difficult. I believe that the translation of any artisically organized information allows someone to explore the details and instrinsic qualities of a language to their fullest - it's actually a bit of a high for me.
/nerd |
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| Noisician |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ania_xox
I only feel bad that your insights went to waste because I wasn't clear in my previous post that I came from Poland with my family to Canada in 1990 - so my parents' language transition was from Polish to English. French is my third language - but my first attempt at learning a language (english and polish are both native to me)...
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my post wasn't as much aimed at your situation specifically as it was at your scepticism towards the critical period hypothesis mentioned by someone else. the point is, there are nuances to a language that are not directly observable and that a non-native speaker would have to learn through trial and error, unlike a native speaker, who does so unconsciously as a child. and until a non-native speaker is faced with such subtleties directly, he/she will remain oblivious to their very existence regardless of their level of fluency in that particular language.
for a concrete example, consider the "discontinuous combien interrogative" paradigm that i brought up in my previous post. i guarantee that you will not find a discussion concerning such interrogatives in any pedagogical grammar you may want to consult. consequently, learners of french as a foreign language would be unlikely to even know of such a thing, let alone actually master its usage. now, this type of interrogative sentence is certainly learnable in itself, there is no doubt about that. all one would need is just a few examples to get the drift. however, here's where things get really interesting: it turns out that these two types of questions in french (i.e. continuous vs. discontinuous) are not interchangeable. there is a very (VERY!) subtle distinction between them. it is so subtle that not even the native speakers are aware of it. on the conscious level, that is. they certainly "know" there exists a difference in their usage (as any semantic test would reveal), except they don't know that they know it. one study conducted in the 90s that focused on this very issue showed that even advanced english-speaking learners of french were having major problems with picking up said subtlety. this is precisely the disadvantage of learning a non-native tongue after the critical period has come to a close. importantly, native french speakers do not learn any of these things in the classroom either. they acquire it (unconsciously) while still young. as a result, they are generally much more competent in dealing with such matters even though they may not be cognizant of this. |
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| Meat187 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ania_xox
wie sagt man "do me" auf deutsch?
mach mich? |
"Mach's mir", or more common "Besorg's mir". |
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| paulandrews |
| quote: | Originally posted by gehzumteufel
This stuff was all easy for me when I was in the thick of it. I really love the language a lot. |
How can possibly anyone love German? It sounds like a person vomiting on a plane. :conf: |
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