I learned enough japanese that I didn’t translate to english in my head apart from new words just to play games not likely to be translated or localized but for some reason I remember them in english like I played them in english. Language is just weird and brain is just weird. Then my japanese friends went home before covid lockdowns and now I can barely follow a conversation.
I’ve said this before but one of the worst days of my life is the day I realized I dream in English now :(
I’ve been having my inner monologue in English for since I was a teenager but I think deep down my mother tongue language is the language of my subconscious
I had a dream of my locally regeional folklore creatures once, all speaking English. Realizing that they’re out of character made me so annoyed that I actually woke up.
wait until your internal monologue in your native language suddenly gets interrupted by english
Wait until your inner monologue is in English
Multi-lingual inner monologue is awesome though.
So much of how we think is dictated by the language we speak. Many things can only be said in some but not other languages.
I used to code switch in my inner monologue. Now it’s mostly English. I pretty much only speak my native language with my parents.
The other day I ran into some distant relatives at a new years celebration and one of them remarked that my language was rusty and pronunciation is weird…idk about pronunciation. I don’t agree there. But my active vocab in native language is pretty diminished.
Language is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it fades faster than you think.
Yeah fr.
I just don’t see any need to improve my native language. I don’t need it irl, and I find it pretty boring. Unlike other foreign languages I might learn for fun.
How do you feel about this? My native language is English so there’s no real prospect of this happening to me, but I always thought the idea of ones maybe language getting rusty was terribly sad.
Why do you think it’s sad?
Language is a major part of a person’s identity, usually - it has ties to their ethnicity and culture and because it’s fundamental to expressing yourself it’s fundamental to being yourself. Few people can express themselves as well in a language they didn’t speak in their earliest years, too, though that’s a large exception, and of course it’s not all of the remainder.
So I see it as sad in the same way that anything that disconnects someone from their roots is sad - if you grow up eating certain foods and later don’t have access to them, for example, but more fundamental.
I was always disconnected with my country’s culture. Partly because I grew up somewhere else (with a similar culture) but mostly because I didn’t leave the house much and spent a lot of time on the English-speaking internet.
But I don’t really see it as a bad thing. I try not to tie my identity to where I was born or what piece of paper I was given. I don’t like nationalism. I am a human. That’s what matters most. Humans are the same everywhere. Of course it’s natural for humans to be tribal but I think we should overcome that.
Really my culture is a mix of cultures. I still cook my country’s meals. I kept a lot of habits I’m used to. The language is still there, it’s just weaker. If I ever feel like it I may revive it someday. But to me that’s more boring compared to learning a new and exciting foreign language I’ve had no contact with.
The negative aspect of nationalism and tribalism, as I see it, is when it’s turned negatively towards others, rather than positively towards oneself. Seeing “I’m from X so I’m better than you” is bad, but saying “I’m from X so I enjoy Y” is just culture. Keeping a connection with your culture can give you a valuable comfort - senses of belonging and community that are otherwise hard to replicate.
It does sound like you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t feel what I’m describing though. I don’t mean that negatively either, but just to say that I’m trying to explain what I mean not to say that you ought to feel bad.
Wait till you start making words up in your native language that you thought were of english origins but were in fact not and people start looking at you funny. :(
Actually started watching movies in my native dub to relearn it. Wish i would be kidding…
My head says stuff in other languages all the time because a word’s easier or funner to say.
First time?
I heard a story about someone who through a combination of moving country at a particular developmental point and not taking enough steps to learn, ended up not having native-level language skills in either their native language or the language where they ended up.
The prospect kind of terrified me
Lack of exposure would be my guess. People can pick up languages with adult brains too. English is my third language, but I use it every day to a degree that I find it hard not to think in english. Learned german for ten years, but as soon as I stopped using it english overtook it. Now I struggle to string a proper sentence together.
Pretty normal. Some words are used much more often in English and others don’t even exist in my language.
This is great. Since some concepts only exist in certain languages, this will open up the thoughts you can express.
English language superiority and global domination gang fuck yeah
Superiority is a big word, there are better languages tbh
I agree that superiority is a loaded term, and I don’t think I’d try to make the case that English is the best language, but I am curious to know more about which languages you think are better and why.
If you were to replace english in the current world, the best candidate, in my opinion, would be spanish.
If you look at list of the most spoken languages you end up with english, mandarin, hindi and spanish, out of those spanish does not require learning a new alphabet.
Spanish is mostly phonetic, there are exceptions here and there with how consonants are pronounced here and there, but vowels are phonetic, you can read text without wondering how something is pronounced.
English has taken so much from latin that it actually looks a bit like a romance language despite having germanic roots, but this does mean that there’s a lot of overlap in vocabulary where english words and spanish words are mostly the same.
Of course is spanish isn’t perfect, but creating a new language that covers everyone’s usecase would just lead to lower adoption so I think it’s the one that has the best shot while solving some glaring issues from english.
It’s a good shout, especially given how large the current speaker base is. Obvi, the alphabet thing cuts both ways — we’re still pushing our alphabet onto hindi, mandarin speakers &c — but that’s unavoidable.
Any language that has a coherent pronouns XD
Anyway, i prefer neo-latin (though, french is the last on my neo-latin languages tier list) languages and i find germanic langs to be cool (aside from english) but i don’t feel like to learn any of them so idk how they are.
English is not very coherent and is “simple” only if you look at the basics, if you look at the rest you notice that it has worse then French, for example.
But, again, it’s just personal taste and maybe bias tooIdk. I find the French verb tense system to be pretty difficult to navigate without a lot of gain in expressivity — I think simpler verb tense systems, like Danish, get the trade off better.
English is definitely not at all coherent or simple by any stretch of the imagination.
My number one language feature I miss in English is a case system. I know not all case languages are non-word order languages (I know Arabic requires both), but I think word order languages are constrictive and cases are the only alternative I’m aware of.
Languages that differ between singular you and multiple you.
Philadelphia English has this fixed with “youse”
I guess there’s also the Pittsburghese “yinz”
Or the southern “y’all”
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That is a lower bar than I expected tbh
No, that ain’t the way to be. I like when the world has a diversity of cultures. For my own selfish reasons I’m glad english is the global lingua franca as people’s second language, but i want other cultures to continue thriving.
