I’ve said it. My friends have said it. I’ve seen it posted here.
I learned more about English while studying French then I did studying English.
In a way it makes sense. Learning your native language is a very haphazard thing. You learn in from your family, you learn it from TV and radio and what you read. Then you learn it in school. I don’t remember ever officially sitting down and learning: I am, you are, he is, we are, they are.
Or the names of different tenses, other then past, present and future. Even that was not complete. What about “I will be” vs “I am going to be”.
I’ve always just assumed that this is true for other languages and countries? Maybe I’m wrong, and it has more to do with the way we teach English in the US. Or maybe it’s something inherant to English.
So, if your native language isn’t English, did you find yourself feeling the same way? How about anyone that grew up with 2 or more languages?
It seems to be true for a lot of other languages; learning a new one forces you to think about grammar, and formal study sets it out in rules in ways that most English speakers never learn now. Lots of people advocate studying Latin as an excellent way to learn English grammar and vocabulary.
I learned more about English in Latin class than I did in any English class all through high school. I’d genuinely get excited to learn things. For example: Via is street in latin. Aviator, someone who flies. Without a street in latin.
This was my experience as well. My mother is French Canadian for awhile when we were living in Canada, my sister and I went to a francophone school. As I got older, I started noticing “Hey, this is where some English words came from”! Eureka! I used to think it was really cool to recognize the origins of English words, and then I started being able to recognize the relationship of English words in different ways.
I took a German course once and was just as excited to see where a whole bunch more came from, like the connection of “schule” and “school.”
It’s like learning about your own history and why we do the things we do. It made English much more interesting to me.
Well, I don’t think it’s the way English is taught in the US that’s the problem, because I had German (native language) lessons in school, too, which not only dealt with essay writing, composition, proper discussion etc., but also with proper German grammar, spelling and punctuation - knowing why you put a comma there, not doing it simply by feel.
For me, I did terrible at Latin, and bad at English for a long time, because I’m not the type to learn a language by rules of grammar, I learn it (very slowly) by using it (the immersion method), just as I learned my first (native) language. (I also have a bad memory, which is a big handicap learning languages - it takes ago for the basic vocabulary, and is gone in a blink!)
But usually, you learn not only a language, but also the culture and the country(ies) where it’s spoken, and you start reading /singing /watching TV in that language, and all that broadens your horizon and POV.
And is one of several very good reasons why everybody should learn a foreign language, not say “everybody speaks english, I don’t travel, I don’t need it, why should I bother?” Because it will broaden you.
Before we were let loose on foreign languages at school (French, Latin, Greek), we were given a very comprehensive grounding in English grammar. So we covered all of those topics: number, gender and cases of nouns and pronouns; person, number, tense, voice and mood of verbs etc. It certainly helped when we got to foreign languages. It was very useful for English too.
Yes, this happened to me when I studied French, and even more when I started with Russian. There are a lot of things you never even realised you didn’t understand that suddenly start to make sense. Learning the declensions was a big one, since English doesn’t really have much of a case system anymore so you don’t really think about it. After realising there’s such a thing as nominative, genitive, etc, I started to see the parts of speech in a sentence as if they were highlighted in different colours. It was pretty neat until I got used to it.
I guess the other big thing is when you speak one language, your language and your thoughts are the same thing. After you learn a new one, you start to separate thought from your means of expressing them. That doesn’t have a whole lot of practical application (besides maybe making it easier to learn more languages) but you do kind of get a kick out of the feeling of enlightenment that comes with it.
My English grammar was never better than when I was studying ancient Greek in undergrad. It also made Gene Wolfe’s novels a bit more digestible.
On the other hand, my as-yet-limited study of Russian has had little effect on my English. Russian constructions have tended to be sufficiently alien from an English perspective that they just haven’t shone much light on my native tongue.
Perhaps so, but it’s a freakin’ brilliant folk etymology.
Here’s a bird word with a cool etymology that also happens to be true. The word auspicious refers to something that appears favorable – likely to have a positive outcome or result. Older usage of the word was more directly related to the supernatural. That which was auspicious was something that carried the approval of the gods.
A quick examination of Roman religious practices will show that one of the chief methods used to divine the will of the gods was to observe the behavior of birds.
Romulus slew Remus after they had each spotted a flight of eagles, but could not agree whether the number of birds or the priority of the sighting was the more critical signifier of divine approval.
Marcus Manlius (yes, that was his name) saved the Capitolium from being overrun by plundering Gauls when he heeded the cries of the Sacred Geese, and discovered a attack force trying to scale the cliffs at the back of the hill.
Publius Claudius Pulcher’s defeat at the Battle of Drepana was widely attributed to his impiety towards the will of the gods. Before the battle began, he scattered grain on the deck of his ship and opened the cage that held the Sacred Chickens. When they proved unwilling to eat the grain (an ill omen indeed), he threw them overboard, declaring “if you will not eat, then you shall drink!”
Now take a look at the word auspcious. It may easily be divided up into its original roots – avis (bird) and specere (to look at). So etymologically speaking, one would determine whether or not something was auspicious by watching the birds (a process also known as taking the auspices).
Definitely - when I was at School the old-fashioned parsing of sentances was right out of favour. Nothing more complex than a noun, verb or an adjective (thing, doing and describing) was defined. Taking French introduced everything else - past participles, clauses, prepositions etc etc.
I went to School in the 80s - AFAIK my parents generation recieved a much more rigorous education in grammer.
I took French for five years. Now I can’t speak it much but it really, really helped me understand English so that I’m now the Queen of The Root Word around here. But, also, it allowed me to be the only one in the family of my generation who can understand my Father-In-Law’s Italian (which, these days, is mostly confined to phrases) and also allowed me to understand a man and his five year old grandchild’s conversation in Spanish as I followed them at the NYC Aquarium.