What IS the dirty little secret of multilingual people??

KitchenPete! Good to see you here - i'm sure you've been welcomed elsewhere on the site, but this is my turn to say HEY!

I'm rereading this question from the beginning, and so I interject here about halfway through lest I forget..

Sozobe, I read the gladwell article on reading faces too, fascinating.

And I alway have liked short guy basketball. They have it at Venice Beach in California, the court reserved for the under six-foot game. A different game to me, involving great canniness, planning...well, more so than usual. Lot of visible agility, well, maybe it was just those games that I saw. I liked then better than the dunkathons.

On poets/per thousand, I come by my forebears (four bears) from a poetic isle, and do wax prolific with words, with varying avail; some of those words are poetic. But my adult brain balks at not knowing grammar. Is there a genetic love of rules? (Uh, oh, never mind...)

Back after I read the last few pages...

OK, I'm back. I agree on youth and if not youth, immersion.

How da heck do you become a Content Secialist so early?

hey don't call my secret dirty, im trilingual!

necessity is the mother of invention:
from my experience, I studied English in school, but when I came to US 12 years ago, it was a different matter. Where we moved in, there were no Russian speaking community or ethnic stores and no help with daily things. So my family HAD to pick up English or buy food in glass containers only, where we knew what we were getting.

The other point is:
"speaking" the language is not exactly knowing it to it's fullest. Basic conversational language does not take long to learn if you use it often. But even 10 years of study may not guarantee you comprehension of the language or literary works in their fullness. When I was younger and more "cruel" I loved to toy with some of the Russian university professors who spoke perfect Russian, but could not grasp simple sentences with words taken out of order, which would be perfectly understood by a native Russian speaker. As far as my Russian vocabulary goes it became much smaller, but then again, the vocab of an average person everywhere is pretty dismal nowadays.

Culture:
Language is inseparable from culture and words should go along with experience. From my personal perspective, it took me more than a few years in US to start understanding the redneck humor.

In conclusion, it seems to me that a great deal of people claim "speaking" many languages for the sake of making an impression, but when asked in one of the tongues, they babble back something about being "rusty ... and all" I would rather own a couple of Porsches, than a parking lot full of rusty beaters.

Boris

PS. My mom still thinks that Hot Dogs, are Korean franks that are made from dogs. Good thing that she never reads that "No Preservatives" label, because in Russian "preservatives" are "condoms" ; )

Hee hee!

I just learned recently that "Hot Dogs" were the original "Freedom Fries", by the way -- they were called Franks or frankfurters until WWII when the alternative ("non-German") terminology came up.

Don't remember now where I saw that, so won't vouch as to it's veracity.

I've heard that too, sozobe. And as I recall, they called sauerkraut something like Victory Cabbage.

I'll see if I can find a source besides you and me...

Have a look here:

http://www.sitehouse.net/jamesbow/000717.shtml

<double post>

hmmm...most references say that the Victory Cabbage and Hot Dog renaming happened during World War I...and I found one reference to hamburgers being called Patriot Patties, too!

Welcome XepBam!

Drug, my Russki used to be real horocho, but now it's gotten a little bit rusty <just kiddin'>.

You're darn right about the "professor's attitude". Languages are live beings. To try to tackle them by grammar, mostly, is quite useless. You may end up speaking the words and constructing the sentences, but nevertheless the result will have a stale flavor.

In the UK, German Shepherd dogs were officially referred to as "Alsacian" (i.e. from Alsace, a region of France which has changed hands many times between France and Germany). Only within the last 5 years has the original name been formally re-adopted.

Multilingual people are not normal. So, there! c.i.

gringos pendejos

That's the secret all multilingual people share.

If you find out what it is let me know. I grew up with a half dozen different cultures, nationalities and languages and to this day I can't make it thru a paragraph in the spoken word without someone asking me, "what"? I always find myself using a work or expression from a context unknown to the person I am speaking to. I throw in bits of German, Yiddish, Hawaiian, Latin, Spanish, French, French and Spanish patois, English and it's many dialects and the language that is spoken in England (whatever they call it). The terrible truth is that sometimes English does not always have the perfect word for something. This is especially truth, oddly, of Yiddish and Hawaiian, which was spoken, along with English, by my grandparents.

Still an interesting conversation.

Interesting. My mom can speak quite well in 6 languages, and though she doesn't ever seem to mix them up while speaking (unless she's really angry --I've been cussed out in freaky combinations of French/Russian/Indonesian and such ), she's a hopelessly bad speller of them all (this is influenced by the spelling differences between English & French, I think).

Then there's my dad. When they met each other they were both 18 years & spoke 1 language each--he: English, she: French. They got married hardly being able to speak a word to each other, then went on a travelling binge together as weirdo hippies for years.. My dad now speaks a bit of French, but that's it. If you asked me which one has a higher IQ I'd say it's likely him.

There you've got no exposure difference and no starting age difference. It's not like there was an enormous variation in interest either. I think my mom is an unusual case though. As may be Djibouti where a large percentage of the people speak 5, 6 or 7 languages. Hehe .. I do actually agree with all the points made about it being a language-rich environment.

Being a multi person (lived in multiple countries, learned a bunch of languages to one extent or another), I've wound up over the decades having significant others who've had the same kind of life, and we've always found that one naturally draws on all the languages you have in common -- it's not an affectation, it comes naturally. Sound pretentious? Believe me, it's not. It has to do with being able to talk about one's experiences using the most descriptive word, drawn from the language in which one had the experience. Living in Spain, for example, and having British, Aussie, and American friends who also lived there, we found we would lapse into a language called Spanglish. One also talks with Spaniards or French or whatever who have incorporated American phrases and slang into their conversation.

This topic was picked up by fbaezer over here: Is the Ability To Learn Other Language Genetic?