Keeping in touch with one's native tongue

[guitarplayer]

This thread is predominantly for people who in their daily life operate in a language different from their native tongue.

Do you put directed effort to stay in touch with your native tongue?

I started monthly newsletters for my family which I write in my native tongue, also try to call some of them a few times a month. I occasionally dabble with the idea of creating a sort of online platform that I would maintain in the language, too. I think @seppia you are maybe doing something like this? I remember reading about it around the time when you interviewed @jacob in the past.

In general, I notice being a bit less fluent (slower), but I like the fact that I put my mind into what I want to say. In consequence I use my words more accurately rather than speaking in platitudes which I notice others doing.

[DutchGirl]

My uncle in the US has a subscription to the local newspaper in the south of the Netherlands. My parents still live in the area and sometimes my uncle knows more about what's happening than my parents do.

Maybe for you subscribing to a newspaper or a newsletter or one or more blogs in your native tongue might be useful, too?

[jacob]

I mainly operate in graphs and mental models (Ni), which I usually have to translate into English (Te), so that's what I speak best.

My effort to maintaining Danish is undirected. I read a Danish newspaper daily but that's mostly to get a non-US lens on the world. I also talk on zoom with my parents once per month, but we always talk about the same things.

My Danish accent is frozen in anno 1999 or so, which my sister finds hilarious. If I speak Danish for a while, it affects my progress towards the "Standard American"-accent I'm trying to achieve.

My main problem with Danish is that I don't know the Danish equivalent for many technical terms when it comes to personal finance. This was also a problem with physics. Many Danes speak English with each other when it comes to professional/technical matters for that reason---it's better than inventing random words.

I also notice my Danish grammar/word-structure is not exactly kosher.

My German (third language) has fallen much by the wayside though. I don't maintain that at all.

[chenda]

My Danish accent is frozen in anno 1999 or so, which my sister finds hilarious. If I speak Danish for a while, it affects my progress towards the "Standard American"-accent I'm trying to achieve.

Has Danish changed a lot in 20 years ?

[guitarplayer]

I occasionally find myself translating back from English to Polish when talking to my folks, and since I have improved my English most at social science departments of various universities, the Polish turns out quite well rounded actually. My brother had told me once that I forget my words, and when I replied ‘well yes, but once I recall them, at least they are pretty’ he laughed in agreement (which is very rare for my brother!)

It’s a good position to be in to direct one’s use of language. Akin to when Bobby McFerrin went on a music fast to hone his own style. In this sense, I would not necessarily be keen on reading some contemporary news outlets. Rather some good translations of thoughts into Polish (but original and not from another language!), or myself develop some thoughts in the language, that’s why I have been thinking about maybe creating a sort of medium.

I have no doubt that I value aesthetics in Polish much more than in English where I do appreciate using the language well, but can put up with its poor use without much issue.

In Turkey in one of my PolSci classes I gave a presentation on Ethnic Sentiment; I suspect it will hit me at some point, maybe when I am old. And then it will be handy to have a good relationship with the language.

[jacob]

Has Danish changed a lot in 20 years ?

Local dialects are dying. It used to be possible to tell which city someone lived in with a resolution of 25km. However, everybody is converging on "standard Danish". Copenhagenish as spoken on TV.

[chenda]

Local dialects are dying. It used to be possible to tell which city someone lived in with a resolution of 25km. However, everybody is converging on "standard Danish". Copenhagenish as spoken on TV.

That's a shame, that doesn't seem to have happened here.

[Slevin]

I have no doubt that I value aesthetics in Polish much more than in English where I do appreciate using the language well, but can put up with its poor use without much issue.

Reminds me of a 30 minute lecture I got from a 95 year old Parisian at his local park in Paris about how as English becomes the common language of the world, it is devolving in usage to the lowest common denominator that can be understood by those who use it as a second or third language instead of the beautiful complex language usage back in the early 1900s. I just took it as a “back in my day” sort of speech, but he did mean it in good faith and it holds pretty true.

[guitarplayer]

Yeah I can see where this old man is coming from, but this is perhaps just homogenization of society and mass media bringing communication to the common denominator. In this sense Polish (and probably most other languages) degrades perhaps in a similar way.

Then in my view speaking with in broken language i.e. grammatically imperfect does not have to necessarily be what I consider poor. Many intellectually inclined people whose first language is not English have imperfect grammar but use English in a complex way that is sometimes quite beautiful on the level of metaphors for example. Or I don't mind people translating their idioms literally into the language of communication (as in 'you know, where I come from we say this and that'), it is nice to know that people operate on the level of metaphors.

So if you inverted what I have written up there above, it would be that hearing poor use of my native tongue, irrespective (within limit) of grammar but with focus on relatively few words, platitudes, lack of its multi dimensional character, bothers me much more than the same in a foreign language. To give an example, I worked with somebody who would spend evenings watching youtube videos of people eating 1m (or whatever large it was) pizzas in one sitting and commenting while doing so. The person was showing it to me and others at work; I was rather indifferent and just wondered, you know, the direction the world is going, whereas I think had this been in my native tongue I would probably have had a stronger repulsion from watching it.

I hope this does not come across elitist, just that language is such a versatile tool, would be a shame to use an electric sander to file one's nails (I know that carpenters do it anyway heh, but you see the point).

[gettingfired]

It's a struggle for me. I speak 2 languages on a daily basis but none of those is my mother tongue (Portuguese). I speak on the phone about twice a week with friends or family, listen to a Portuguese podcast, and visit them three times a year which helps conversation in Portuguese but when I need to write something it's really not good enough.

Everyone thinks it's so cool to speak three languages but the reality is that I just make a lot of mistakes in all three of them. I regularly struggle to keep a conversation in just one language. I just add foreign words or expressions everywhere.

Anyway, I'm planning to read more in Portuguese but I'm happy to take on any advice.

[jacob]

https://www.cia.gov/careers/language-op ... ncy-scale/ contains a good overview of grading different levels of English using the so-called Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale. I consider myself a level 4 out of 5 on a good day. The scale is interesting because the higher levels include eloquence as well as cultural understanding. Even native speakers would need some level of oratory training to push past 4. I'm also 4 in Danish, also only on a good day.

Note that insofar foreign accent wasn't an issue the average native speaker would be a 3.5 or so on this scale. The apparent dumbing down of English likely reflects that we now all get to see just how much the average person has forgotten since the 5th grade. Thanks, social media!

[Seppia]

I don’t run into this issue as my wife is Italian, like me, so we keep the language fresh within the family.
Additionally, it’s impossible not to meet Italians in any of the large cities of the planet, so even when I was single I was never confronted with the situation of not speaking my language for months.

Italians are also very social by DNA (stereotypical, I know, but on average it’s true), so we always keep in touch with friends, family etc.
for example, we speak with our families a minimum of once per week, and we are considered “not telephone people”: if I ever waited one month before calling them, as Jacob does, my parents would think I’ve been abducted or something

So I’d guess, if you care, maybe try keeping in touch more? That’s a start.

@jacob interesting that you’re trying to sound “standard American”. I remember when in France, when I got to the level where people would think I was “of Italian origin” instead of “Italian”, I unconsciously started going back to my Italian accent.
I realized that while I really wanted to continuously improve my language skills, I didn’t want to “lose my roots”.