I have been looking at the thread on languages spoken and have been fascinated by the number of folks who speak multiple languages, often from childhood.
So, if you speak five languages, from a young age, do you feel you “know” the languages, or are you constantly hearing weird references and idioms that are new to you?
I ask this because of my own experiences with the Portuguese language: I have been speaking it for twenty years, and it is easy to spend weeks in Brazil speaking nothing but.
Nevertheless, I constantly am reminded of how little I know:
[ul][li]I am mostly around Brazilian women and not Brazilian men, so I struggle when trying to explain some detail of a gizmo inside an automobile engine without sllipping in some English (tappets, journal bearings, differential, etc.).[/li][li]I stumble over apparent huge gaps in the language that clearly aren’t there. For example, I do not know how to say “to cheat”, as in “I cheated on the crossword puzzle by looking at the answers”, and my Brazilian wife can’t figure out the Brazilian way to say that.[/li][li]Weird stuff that only a Brazilian would know. Example: I find that somehow part of an unpleasant task was done mysteriously, and my sister-in-law says Tupã está te ajudando! meaning “(some mythical being) is helping you” – no way I would know what that meant.[/ul][/li]
Is your multi-language-from-childhood experience riddled with these kinds of problems, or are they relatively interchangeable?
I think what you describes happens to most - if not all - people who speak multiple languages. I speak Slovene well enough when it’s family stuff or things that come up often in conversation, but things become a lot harder when it discussion focuses on politics, let alone ttchnical matters like car engines. I would say this is true for pretty much all languages I speak and I always find it funny that when people speak a foreign language in the movies it is 100% fluent, there is never any of the working around words you don’t know or stumeling to make the right sentence*. In movies people either speak a language like a native or don’t speak it at all.
I also find that languages you are quite fluent in can be a bit rusty if you haven’t spoken it for a whilein a while; it always takes me a few days to get the fluency going. The only language I have thusfar been able to always speak switch to without problems is my mother tongue. And thata is probably because I never go too long without speaking it, you often see that dutch people that live in the US - Famke Jansen, Paul Verhoeven and Jan de Bont are the best examples - have quite a hard time constructing sentences or finding words when they do an interview in dutch.
*One example of this that I always remember is when in Buffy Giles is turned into a demon (and thus speaks this demon language) and can only talk to Spike (who also speaks this language. At one point Spike laughs and says that it is funny to hear a Fyoral demon say such and such words because they usually don’t have that complicated a vocabulary. The first thing I thought was: how the hell do you know these words then!!! Were there special language centers for demon languages they failed to mention?!
[ul][li]I stumble over apparent huge gaps in the language that clearly aren’t there. For example, I do not know how to say “to cheat”, as in “I cheated on the crossword puzzle by looking at the answers”, and my Brazilian wife can’t figure out the Brazilian way to say that.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Why not trapacear? No, I’m not suggesting, but actually asking. I speak Spanish, but learned as an adult, and so you got me wondering how I’d say this same thing in Spanish (“hacer trampa en la crucigrama”). I know nothing of Portuguese other than I can read and understand about 50% of it when it’s written (but not spoken! I have a visitor from one of our Brazil plants here now, and I can’t make out a word he says). So, I’m curious.
I’ll check with the wife later on about trapacear. It certainly looks good in Michaelis. It might have an odd feel to it (like “do the needful” sounds odd to American ears).
The thing that worries me about a word like this is that “cheating in a game” is so common in English that I can’t imagine why I haven’t heard the equivalent expression in 20 years of speaking with Brazilians.
Sadly, gaps like this abound in my “fluent” vocabulary.
Funny you should mention Portuguese. I just got back from three weeks in Brazil. My Portuguese is pretty fluent and I have very little accent. I find I have trouble when I am referring to something that I learned in English. I was having a conversation with an attorney cousin, and found that I had to use English to refer to concepts since I was completely unfamiliar with them in Portuguese. One area that always gives me a headache is trying to translate certain food names. How do you translate jaca, acerola, graviola, and other such fruits that I never see here in the states?
Additionally, some concepts and things just don’t translate directly into English, an example being the cartorio or the word saudade.
If it’s any consolation, I grew up speaking Portuguese at home and spent summers in Brazil, and I’m not sure how you would say it either. I also never knew how to say crossword in Portuguese.
I just looked it up and found this thread which talks about it. It seems that trapaceou is correct. I
Graviola is soursop. Although I remember in my childhood, seeing English translations of it as “whitefruit”. Obligatory wiki article.
According to wiki, too, apparently you can use acerola in English. It doesn’t seem to have a good translation.Article. I went to Spanish wiki, got the species, and put it back in English wiki. I’m glad there was an entry about it.
Brazilians may kill me, but saudade can be translated as “wistful longing”. Not the same word, not one word, but passable.
Spanish is my main one, and the one I’m more comfortable. English I use more since I moved to the States. Portuguese is lucky it is similar to Spanish, although my writing is a bit rusty.
I only speak German as a second language - but in college I knew a girl who, at last count, knew at least 6 or 7 languages fluently.
She also learned them by herself!
Originally from Taiwan, she started off learning Japanese from a Chinese/Japanese textbook. Then she learned English using a Japanese/English textbook, then I believe she learned French using an English/French textbook, and so on - she felt that learning a “new” language in the newest language she learned (not using her mother tongue) was the best way to better her understanding of the newest language at the same time she was learning a new language. She seemed to be quite fluent, as she could speak to almost all of the foreign students on our campus with little difficulty.
Regarding words that are difficult, if impossible, to translate - I think that is common. Even in German there are words we use in English (Zeitgeist, Angst, Shadenfreude, Kindergarten are a few examples) either because they just don’t seem to have an exact English equivalent or the German word simply “fits” better. Lots of examples in French and Spanish as well.
Also, if something is totally foreign and found only in one location on earth (certain fruits, for instance) , it is kind of silly to even try to translate the word. It is not like you have something back home in Indiana to compare it to.
I always envy people who speak 4, 5 and more languages. I tried Chinese (woefully unsuccessful) and even gave a shot at Japanese (equally poor success). That girl from Taiwan was my instructor - and she smiled and said, “I think it would take you several years…” which was an even newer language called, “read-between-the lines” and meant, “you will never learn this!”
This happens to me frequently in my profession. More often then not, the industry term here in Mexico is the English word, or worst case, the English word Mexicanized in spelling and pronunciation. What’s interesting is talking to my Brazilian colleague (who speaks what he calls Portugañol because he’s never actually learned Spanish but can get by), and realizing they do the same thing. The Germans may have invented the automobile, but we invented the automobile industry!
Linguists are always getting asked, “You’re a linguist? So how many languages do you speak?”
Not as many as I can read and write. My literacy skills in the various languages I know far outweigh my conversational skills. I marvel at how universally the knowledge of a language is equated to “speaking” it, while literacy is on the whole ignored. Which is funny because since many of us became internet addicts over the past 15 years, our written communication output has grown immensely and may even dwarf our spoken output, which has probably remained constant. Anyway, written languages are where my real depth is to be sought.
Even though I’m near-fluent in spoken Italian, I do not know a single Italian speaker around here I can actually talk with. I have tons of internet friends in Italy, though, and we write to each other a lot.
But… some of the things described in the OP happen to monolinguals as well (not knowing the right jargon, for example). People make do.
I find it funny/curious/interesting that in Spanish we see “knowing a language” as a lower level than “speaking a language”, whereas the OP seems to use “knowing a language” as “knowing it to a level that language’s own highest experts don’t”. As Johanna said, for many people their comprehension skills or their written skills in a language are lower than their ability speaking the language. I have very little problem communicating with Italians thanks to mutual comprehensibility, not because either of us can speak the other one’s language.
ETA: I found an online dictionary which translated “hacer trampa” (“to cheat” in Spanish) as “fazer batota”.
As I understand your response, to you this phrase means more of “I am familiar with” than an in-depth fluency.
For me, the American English usage of “to know” something implies a much deeper understanding (deeper still if you know a person in the Biblical sense :)).
If a programmer says to me “I know C++”, I consider that a fairly strong statement. I would expect them to be able to jump on a C++ project immediately, without making rookie mistakes. I would never say “I know Perl” though I can bang my way through a Perl script if I have to.
Nevertheless, in the programming world it is quite common for folks to say “I know X, Y, and Z” when they heard the name once in college. Drives me nuts.
Back to human language…
I’m not necessarily talking about obscure gaps or jargon (though the car example might be seen as jargon, I think it is fairly common language). I’m talking about either huge concepts that everyone should know (“to cheat” is extremely common) or things that any school child in the other country would know (the “Tupã” phrase probably fits this).
Agreed. Reading/writing and speaking are amazingly different.
My Portuguese writing would probably include many basic children’s mistakes. More humbling still is when I read literature that any kid would read in high school (e.g. Machado de Assis). I have to look up a dozen words per page.
Some years back I was reading Cidade de Deus (City of God) about a particular slum in the Seventies in Rio. The drug/gang related slang was so opaque that I maintained a thread in GQ where I posted daily questions and native speakers helped out.
I’m just about as fluent in French as an anglophone can be, I like to think – I’ve lived in Quebec for more than half my life, I use French in my job, my politics, my volunteering, and my social and everyday life, I regularly read French papers and literature, and although I still have an accent, people regularly ask me if I’m Acadian.
However, I still make occasional mistakes with gender (my standard line is, “You know I have gender issues!”) and idioms – actually, one of my problems is using expressions that are not the right level of language for the circumstances – usually too obscure or high-flown, although come to that I sometimes have the same problem in English, too. For example, for a while I was using the expression je vous en saurais gré in conversation – sort of like “I would be much obliged,” except more formal, and really only written bureaucratic language – when it would have been more appropriate to say something like je vous en serais reconnaissant or je l’apprécierais.
Interestingly, there are two different words in Spanish for these two concepts.
Speaking of Spanish, I can read and write fairly fluently but I still have trouble with speaking. Not because I don’t know the words but because I haven’t had a great deal of immersion experience other than one month in Spain, and so I’ve found myself being unsure of how to phrase things when spoken (for instance, I can’t figure out how to say “May I have x?” - I always float around somewhere between “I would like x” and “I want (conditional) x”)
I asked my wife about the suggestions for “to cheat” and they were all not quite right. Either the word means “to swindle” or it is simply a word that does not sound natural. I’m certain the proper phrase exists, but I don’t know what it is.
“Family Stuff” pretty much describes my fluency. I can slip right into Brazilian culture as long as the discussions are all family stuff :-).
No clue about the movies, though. Are you referring to proper idiomatic language spoken by an actor? Do you know their depth because of the story line (in other words, how do we know they aren’t saying “you know that little doohickey” in Greek?)
Agreed.
One simple example, from your context… I was at my wife’s friend’s house and I saw her daughter’s text books labeled direito and other flavors thereof. It finally dawned on me that they don’t say “Law” for the “study of law”; they say “Right[s]”. Someone who studies law is studying right[s].
I’m with you on those fruits. There are so many fruits I have only seen and eaten in Brazil, which probably have English names, but I don’t know them.
I struggle with learning the proper mispronounced English for technical things.
PT: notchy-booky (sort of) = EN: “Notebook” = laptop computer
PT: HD (spelled out) = EN: Hard Drive
And my favorite:
PT: outdoor = EN: “outdoor” = billboard
I’m not sure if I feel encouraged or discouraged by this. A professional translator has the same problem? I guess it’s like learning an instrument. I will never “know” how to play guitar, but I keep trying!
