Re: Let's talk Languages

In reply to Lil's "Let's talk languages"

The minor inconveniences of being a polyglot. :)

I never really count my indian languages, although I should. I note, therefore, that you’re ahead of me. Your 7 to my 5. Although since my two indian languages are completely distinct, they help me understand bits of several other, related ones. Tamil -> (Malayali, Kannada), Hindi -> (Gujrati, marathi, bengali). Although I still aim for an individual study of the languages. I love reading the language-origin articles on wiki. :)

I always tell people my English is of “native fluency”, Tamil is my mother tongue, I speak french as fluent as tamil (maybe more so, but I’m ashamed to say it), followed by hindi (excellent accent, but child-level vocab), and then german at a basic conversation level. I never count Italian, of which I know only a few verbs and words. And not yet Spanish, which I’ve started learning now, and can only do kindergarten-level talks about cats, bats, and rats.

I never mention the fact that my proficiency at written tamil is quite low. I can read at a decent clip, but writing is very hard. The problem is that spoken and written tamil are quite different. Written tamil is always in the formal or “pure” language (“Sen-tamizh”), and since I’ve never learned Tamil formally, I have almost no knowledge of it.

Wish-list? Wow, that would be too long. Indian – Bengali, to start with. Japanese and spanish first. Then one day arabic and russian. Not to mention improving my french, and my german. I’m just so impatient. :)

And you know I feel the same way. That mental shifting of gears, after having spent considerable time speaking in one language, is always a little slow. Even worse when juggling more than two. The worst was during the 5-hour German classes. Words of french slipping out, and my english coming out horribly for several hours afterwards.

But the european languages never seem to affect my indian speech. Does it affect your chinese? I think the dissimilarity is too much even for an unconscious mélange-ing. See what I did there? That’s how we speak at home, albeit with a mélange of English, hindi and tamil. So there’s “Tanglish” and “Hinglish”, but I still haven’t come up with a name for what we speak at home.

I have waaaay too much to say on this subject!

I love speaking to people in their own language. Makes them friendlier (and instantly impressed).

Tips? I practice. By writing to friends, often switching to a different language while I think. And I’m always on the lookout for sites that make learning fun, or make a game out of it.

And, after reading 1984, I like to think that knowing multiple languages makes me a better thinker.

Fortunately, I don’t think my “comment” is longer than your post. :)