Ceci n'est pas une endive - Tag - bilingual

How Speaking Too Many Languages Is Limiting

notafish — Sun, 05 May 2013 09:08:00 +0200

I know, by saying this - that speaking too many languages is limiting- I probably go against years and hours and sweat tears of very dubious as well as very serious research that say the contrary. As a matter of fact, if you go about googling the advantages of speaking many languages, the number of results is around 123 million results (yes, millions). So who the heck do I think I am to say the contrary?

Well, here goes. I've always liked writing. I've written as long as I can remember, which probably dates back to my absolutely quiet and boring adolescence. We're talking a few decades here. However, ever since I've moved to Germany, I've stopped writing. Not completely, I will take the occasional napkin or more fashionable Facebook status to spit out a few well thought-out words that are spinning round in my mind. But on average, I have not written in the past eight years nearly a quarter as much as I have in the 20 odd years before that. Why? Not sure. But today I came to the realisation that this whole "I speak so many languages it's so cool" thing might be the core of the problem.

My thing about writing is that I usually write for someone. Not always someone in particular, but as I jot words down on a piece of paper, a name will pop out, and then maybe another, people past or present, who I'm thinking might find my words funny, moving, stupid or great, whatever. These people usually never get to read those words, but they are still the targets of my words. The problem starts when these people don't speak the language I'm writing in. Mind you, I write in English or French most of the time, and German comes a far third, so it's not that many languages. But still. That's three languages, and not all of my friends or acquaintances, or people I want to talk to actually speak all of those three languages. Some might speak one, others two, a few do speak the three, some even speak only very little of those to start with (that would be some of my Italian and Spanish speaking friends). So of course every time I write, I feel limited in who I can talk to.

Take this blog. Lately I've written in German, because it makes sense to write about Germany in German, and because frankly, it's often easier than to have to translate what I'm living on a day to day basis. But it's frustrating. Because as much as Germans might be interested in what I have to say about them, I'm also quite sure that my French speaking friends are interested in what I have to say about Germany. And I've caught myself numerous times citing my blogposts to someone as an example of what I think/do/feel and realizing that the blogpost i'm talking about is written in a language they do not speak.

Truth is, I am one person. No matter what language I speak. So if you know me in one language, you know me, and not just some part of me. And while I find that speaking three languages somewhat correctly and understanding two more quite well has sharpened my thinking process (the more languages you speak, the more accurate words you find to say exactly what you want to say), it also has limited my will and freedom of expression. I want to say things, but I'd like to say them in all the languages I speak AT ONCE. Not have to translate, but just write things as they come and they'd be automagically translated (and make sense, as opposed to simple machine translation) in all the languages I'd like to see them translated to. Unfortunately, we're not there yet, so I'm frustrated and I don't write.

But I have made a decision. I don't care any more. I am just going to write. If it's in a language you understand, good for you. If it's not, I am sorry, you'll either have to pass, or use bad machine translation. I need to write more, it's all cluttered in my many language head these days, I need to sort things out and writing is my way out.

Wenn du schimpfst, dann auf Deutsch, bitte

notafish — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:21:00 +0200

Je me baladais en Autriche avec ma voiture, lorsqu'un Autrichien m'a fait une queue de poisson. Ma réaction a été de klaxonner, ce qui l'a énervé. Il a arrêté sa voiture, en est sorti et a commencé à m'insulter en allemand. De rage, je l'ai insulté en français. Après une minute de ce petit manège, je me suis rendue compte que notre conversation ne menait nulle part et ai commencé à l'invectiver en allemand. Lorsque tout à coup il a compris que non seulement j'avais compris chacun de ses mots, mais que j'étais capable en plus de lui répondre dans sa langue, il s'est arrêté net, est remonté dans sa voiture et est reparti, ébahi et honteux. Morale de l'histoire : apprenez des langues et lorsque vous les apprenez, pensez bien à apprendre les insultes en premier. Pas tant pour les utiliser que pour être certain que personne ne vous insulte sans que vous le sachiez.

Ich habe gerade das Blogpost Bilingualism Brings Out the Devil gelesen, und es hat mir an eine meiner Erfahrungen errinert. Ich habe Deutsch in Österreich gelernt. Ja, ich weiß, man spricht kaum Deutsch in Österreich, aber das wusste ich damals nicht. Egal. Ich war in Salzburg, und hatte dort mein Auto. Es war 1994 oder so, Österreich war noch nicht in der EU und wir hätten das Buchstaben unseres Landes am Auto geklebt haben sollen. Ich hatte ein F gekauft, aber nicht geklebt, meine kleine Rebellion gegen blöden Regelungen. Trotzdem hatte mein Auto ein französisches Kennzeichen.

So, ich fahre durch Salzburg, und ein Österreicher überholt mich und schneidet mich. Ich wurde erschrocken, und als ich bremste, habe ich gehuppt, um ihm klar zu machen, dass man sowas nicht macht. Der Typ hat sich genervt, hat gestoppt, ist aus sein Auto gestiegen und hat angefangen mich auf Deutsch zu schimpfen. Und zwar richtig (das Ars... Wort ist benutzt worden, unter anderen). Ich war so genervt, dass ich auch aus mein Auto gestiegen bin, und habe zurück geschimpft, auf französisch. Viel schneller (es gibt viel mehr Schimpfwörter auf französisch als auf Deutsch), und viel einfacher, in der Hitze des Moments. Das ganze hat vielleicht 1 Minute gedauert, wo wie uns gegenüber geschrien haben, und bevor ich fest stellte, dass wir da nirgendwohin gingen. Keine Kommunikation, er war taub zu meinem (sehr reichen) französischen Schimpfwortschatz . Das ist wo ich angefangen habe, auf Deutsch zurück zu schimpfen. Das Ars... Wort ist wieder benutzt worden, dieses Mal aber von mir. Was da passiert ist werde ich mich mein ganzes Leben errinern. Als dem Raser plötzlich klar war, dass ich alles, was er gesagt hatte, nicht ein Mal verstanden hatte, aber auch, dass ich die Wörte zurück schicken konnte, hat er mich angeguckt, als ob plötzlich Horne auf meinem Kopf gewachsen wären. Seine Augen sind groß von Unglaube geworden, er hat sofort aufgehört zu schreien, ist in sein Auto wieder gestiegen und ist schnell weg gefahren.

Ich muss es zugeben, den Moment, wo er zurück in sein Auto gestiegen ist, habe ich genossen. Es hat mir auch noch weiter in der überzeugung verstärkt, dass man Sprachen lernen sollte, und das die erste Wörte, die man in einer Sprache lernen sollte, sind Schimpfwörter. Nicht so um sie zu ausprechen, sondern eher um sicher zu stellen, dass niemand sich die Freiheit nihmt, über dich zu schimpfen, glaubend, dass du nicht verstehst.

Foto wurde irgendwo auf dem Netz gefunden, Alle Rechte an wen auch immer. Sorry, habe kein freies Foto gefunden

Of intended puns and other language barriers

notafish — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:27:00 +0100

L'humour est la chose la plus difficile à traduire dans un contexte interculturel. Souvent celui-ci s'inscrit dans un contexte hautement culturel et fait référence à des choses qu'une personne ayant grandi/vécu dans un autre pays ne peut comprendre. Le plus difficile à faire dans une langue qui n'est pas la sienne sont les jeux de mots, qui souvent sont pris comme des fautes de grammaire plutôt que de l'humour.

I've just read a very true blogpost about how humour just does not cross borders very well. Borders of language, but mostly, intercultural boders. I guess we're all shaped by whatever environment we evolve in, and humour usually resides in that environment. Humour appeals to things we have experienced, TV shows, books, movies, pop culture in its greater acceptance, family history, you name it. As such, it takes quite a bit of knowing the other to make sure that the joke you're about to make will come across as such. Humour is difficult to translate and difficult to understand when you're living in another country or speaking another language.

What I find hardest however, is how difficult it is to make puns in a language that is not your native language. Not so much because you cannot (as in "you're not able to"), but because the pun presupposes a mastery of the language that people aren't ready to grant you. After all, I'm a French speaking English, or German, so people know that English or German aren't my first language, and they'll be somewhat hermetic to my trying to play with the language that is theirs.

Of course, there are unintended puns. One of the most embarassing moment of my learning-languages life was while trying to make a quiche in the USA (yes, quiche is the one thing I export everywhere I live ;)). I was at the very beginning of my living there, and was looking for grated cheese (Gruyère, to be exact). Which, for the record, simply did not exist in New Mexico. So here I am, talking with my English teacher, and telling her I need eggs, bacon bits and... raped cheese. Yeah. Raped. The thing is, the word for grated in French is "rapé". And since so many English words come from French, I took a stab at it. Wrong stab, it seems. Raped has somewhat of a different meaning than the one I was expecting. That's how you learn, mind you, I'll never forget my English teacher's look, and never ever forget how to say "grated" in English.

But here is another story. There is a phrase in English that goes "I don't give a flying fu*k". Pardon my French. I've always found it funny. And one day I "punned" it, and said "I don't give a fu**ing fly". The first time I said it, I can't remember who it was, but the English speaker that was there said, just a bit embarassed to be correcting me: "Hmm, the proper way to say this is actually "I don't give a flying fu**". Crap. I was trying to be funny here, but because I am not a native speaker, they thought I had not gotten that right and was making a mistake. That episode taught me two things:

- No matter how well you master a language, people do remember that you're not a native speaker. This would probably have been considered funny if uttered by a native speaker.
- A language that you learn is hard to use in a way that isn't conventional.

A bit sad actually, I probably could be quite funny in English, if they'd let me ;). And I realize that my confidence in how well I speak a language can be measured with how funny I try to be. I'm even starting to make jokes in German now! (and they don't come across :P).

Of Language and Thought: Gender Awareness

notafish — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:08:00 +0200

Partant d'un article du New York Times sur la question essentielle de savoir si la langue que nous parlons décide de nos pensées, quelques considérations sur la langue en général et en particulier l'utilisation de différents genres pour les mêmes choses, notamment en français et allemand.

In an article titled "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", Guy Deutscher tackles how our mother tongue may or may not shape our thoughts. The state of research as he presents it shows how language affect our relation to the world. Deutscher speaks about gender, space, color and even reality and how those are affected by the language we speak. The article is highly interesting, you should read it. As I have already written about in other posts on this blog, the subject is one that I am constantly thinking about.

In my experience, the most mysterious thing about how language affects the way we think still resides in the use of gender. Deutscher gives extensive examples of how languages differ in how they affect a gender to things. I speak at least three languages which have a completely different approach to gender.

French has two genders for things: masculine and feminine. German has three: masculine, feminine and neutral. English has one: neutral. How do you reconcile all of this in the way you look a the world? As far as I am concerned, learning English wasn't too much of a problem. Neutral does not exist in French, so having to say "it" for everything didn't really bother me. I kept thinking the differences in gender while speaking the "it". The moon is feminine, the sun is masculine, both ofthem can be referred as "it", and basta. But German introduced a whole new way of looking at things. What happens is that many words are of the opposite gender. The sun is a she and the moon a he, which is extremely confusing. And then comes neutral, which in the end, does not really make sense to me. I could understand it in English because it is used across the spectrum, but in German, the neutral seems to be totally random. I mean, a "young girl" (Mädchen) is neutral, go figure.

My way of dealing with this is interesting. There are words for which I don't care. A table is feminine in French, masculine in German, but frankly, that does not keep me awake at night. However, there are some other words I really have trouble with. Sun and moon are of those. But things like the world (feminine in German, masculine in French), or even worse, a letter (feminine in French, masculine in German) I just can't grasp. Or rather, I can't imagine them having another gender than the French one (mother tongue). I realize that with time that I simply put gender aside in German when it clashes too much with my conceptual world in French. This means that when I talk about a letter (der Brief) in German, I do use the masculine, but in my head, it's still a "she".

What I find fascinating today is looking at my daughter growing up learning both French and German at the same time. Her use of gender for things is still a bit off, but I suppose her grasp of the feminity or masculinity of things will be radically different from mine or that of her father, since she'll have learned both at the same time and without one or the other taking prevalence (or will they?). I am curious whether for her, gender for things, in the end, will have the same meaning. Will it be a she-moon? a he-sun? Both or neither? I can't wait for her to be old enough to actually answer this question.

Animals Too Speak Foreign Languages

notafish — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:17:00 +0200

Les onomatopées utilisées pour les cris d'animaux sont très différentes d'une langue à l'autre. Entre le "cocorico" français, le "cocka doodle doo" anglais et le kikiriki français, je me demande comment notre fille va apprendre à faire parler les animaux.

Seriously. They do. There is something fantastic about bringing up a child in two languages, it is that you discover things about your own languages that you never really thought about.

When a child learns to speak, one of the first thing you do, is teach them the noises that animals make. I guess all parents have gone through this ordeal of making themselves ridiculous while imitating a dog, a cow or God knows what animal, instead of plainly saying "this is a dog", you'll go "this is a dog, wow wow".

Well, here comes the problem. As stated in this blogpost, German animals make different noises than English speaking ones. And to top it all, French ones say things differently as well. So how does a child make the difference? I mean, which are the true animal languages? Take the rooster for example. It goes Cocka doodle doo in English, Kikiriki in German, and Cocorico in French. Mind you, seeing that the rooster is one of the French national symbols (granted, due to a funny etymology history), I'm tempted to say that we (the French) know better what it really says^[1] Same for the frog (we are the ones eating frog legs, after all), which goes ribbit in English, kwock in German and coââ - coââ in French. Frankly, the English speaking frogs are strange, and I am pretty sure they can't understand the French or German ones, which seem to speak neighbour languages.

All in all, I find it interesting that such things as onomatopea are so different from one language to another. You'd think that with a few quirks, due to existing sounds in one or the other languages, animal talk would be transcribed in approaching ways. After all, it is just a matter of listening and reproducing. But no, that's not the way it works. I'm wondering how our daughter will handle those differences. Maybe her rooster will say something like Cocoriki?

Notes

[1] Image to prove my point: Coq gaulois from the statue of the Girondins, Place des Quinconces in Bordeaux © Jean-Marie DAVID Dinkley, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Pourquoi les français ne parlent pas de langues étrangères

notafish — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:54:00 +0200

A few months after writing my blog post Why The French Don't Speak Any Other Language, I read Jean-Benoît's Nadeau Les Français aussi ont un accent. Jean-Benoît Nadeau is French Canadian and lived two years in France to study the French. And he seemed to come to a conclusion similar to mine concerning why the French don't speak any other language, ie. that the mastery of the language is a very important thing for the French and unless they speak a foreign language perfectly, they just won't speak.

Il y a de cela quelques mois, j'ai commis un billet tentant d'expliquer pourquoi les français ne parlent pas de langues étrangères. Ma théorie est que le français est une langue qui supporte difficilement d'être mal parlée, parce qu'elle en devient difficile à comprendre.

Les français ont une réputation qui les précède de gens ne sachant pas parler les langues étrangères et surtout pas l'anglais. Et ce malgré un système scolaire qui met l'accent sur les langues étrangères dès la sixième (que l'on atteint à environ 11-12 ans) et pendant au moins cinq années si l'on passe son bac. Il y a quelques semaines, j'ai lu l'ouvrage de Jean-Benoît Nadeau Les Français aussi ont un accent, qui relate ses deux années en France. Il y aborde rapidement la question du blinguisme et le fait en ces termes :

J'ai ma petite théorie pour expliquer pourquoi on dit que les Français sont moins bilingues que les autres Européens. D'abord, je crois que c'est faux : je suis même convaincu que les Français ont toujours été aussi bilingues que les autres. Problème : le niveau de bilinguisme d'un peuple ne se mesure pas, objectivement. Toutes les études ne peuvent mesurer que ce que les gens pensent d'eux-mêmes. À la question : "Parlez-vous une autre langue ?" un Français aura tendance à répondre non, sauf s'il la parle bien, tout simplement parce que la maîtrise parfaite de la langue est fondamentale pour lui.^[1]

Je suis évidemment d'accord avec cette analyse. Je pense que les Français ont tout simplement un complexe d'infériorité lorsqu'il s'agit de parler une langue étrangère, notamment parce que dans la société française, la maîtrise de la langue (française) est un signe de distinction sociale et d'éucation. Du coup, le Français parlant mal une langue étrangère (ou pensant qu'il la parle mal), aura tendance à ne pas s'aventurer hors de la langue qu'il maîtrise.

En tant que Française parlant tous les jours une langue étrangère, c'est un état d'esprit que je connais bien. Bien que ma maîtrise de l'allemand soit bonne, elle est loin d'être parfaite et cela donne lieu à de nombreuses frustrations, probablement exacerbées par le fait que je suis française.

Notes

[1] Les Français aussi ont un accent, Jean-Benoît Nadeau, Petite Bibliothèque Payot, p. 243

Peau neuve

notafish — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:08:00 +0200

This post exists also in English :)

Bon, voilà enfin un billet en français, qui est le jumeau, ou presque, du précédent en anglais. Aujourd'hui est à marquer d'une pierre blanche, puisque c'est le jour où d'une part, ce blog fait peau neuve, grâce à ma copine Kozlika qui a développé le beau thème qui habille maintenant ce blog.

L'un des changements majeurs qu'apporte ce thème est la possibilité qu'il me donne, un peu comme le fait Stephanie sur son blog , de mettre pour chaque billet un résumé en anglais (ou en français, selon la langue d'origine du billet). Du coup, je vais pouvoir écrire en français et en anglais et essayer non pas de traduire (je ne sais pas faire) mais au moins de partager le contenu de mes billets dans les deux langues. Bien que la façon dont nous faisions ça ici ne soit pas encore la meilleure, elle a le mérite d'exister.

Mais le plus important est que je trouve ce thème fabuleux, il est beau et va bien à mon blog. J'espère qu'il vous plaira aussi.

Truly multilingual

notafish — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:35:00 +0200

Our neighbours are what one would call a really truly multilingual family. The mother is Swedish, the father is Italian. Together they speak English. The kids speak Swedish with their mother, Italian with their father. They lived the first years of their life in Switzerland, which means the children speak "Swiss German" (believe me, it's as far from German as Chinese from English) , They now live in Germany, so everyone is learning "High German" (Hochdeutsch, the "clean" German), and the kids are in an international school where English is the primary language, practicing the English they've picked up from their parents. In short, you have 3 kids aged 8, 6 and 3 who understand and speak 4 languages, 4 languages that their parents don't even all master.

Apart from the amazing-ness of it, I found it to be truly encouraging, to see that kids that young could simply pick up all those languages and feel at ease in any of them. We had coffee one afternoon and the kids indifferently spoke German or English with us, while conversing with their parents in Italian and Swedish.

I can't wait to ask my daughter questions about what it is like to learn more than one language at once. Although I now speak and understand four foreign languages myself, albeit at different levels, I learned them once my French was already there, meaning that gender, concepts and thought structure were already shaped in my mother tongue. I am especially interested in trying to understand what it feels like having different words for a same "thing" especially when those words convey different impressions or feelings, such as different genders for example. It'll be interesting, for sure.

The bilingual challenge

notafish — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:24:00 +0100

I have written about the interesting differences in cultural perception of the same objects, or rather of the same words. I have always been fascinated by the easiness with which I navigate from one language to another, namely French and English. And I am equally fascinated by the difficulty I have to do the same thing with German, which could probably be tagged as my third language.

Here I am for example, sitting in the waiting room of a German doctor, writing in English, while understanding the radio in the background in German, and recalling to write this note the words I have just read in French. I am reading a book about bilingualism "Le défi des enfants bilingues", to try and understand what Tuinkel will have to go through with a French mother and a German father. I am just at the beginning, but there is one image the author recalled which really lit my understanding of what bilingualism could be all about.

The first part of the book tries and defines bilingualism, to come to the conclusion that there are probably as many bilingiulisms as there are bilingual people. In short, it is very difficult to pinpoint when exactly someone can be considered "bilingual". It is also very difficult to actually compare the degrees to which one person masters two languages. Mainly because this measure can only realistically be taken against that of monolingualism, ie. a state where the person who learns a language uses it at every single opportunity; whereas a bilingual person probably makes use of their two languages in different circumstances (at home for one, at school for the other, on holidays for one, at work for the other etc.).

Abdelilah-Bauer recalls an example given by François Grosjean in his book Bilinguisme et biculturalisme, essai de définition. I am paraphrasing:

It would probably never come to the athlete's mind to compare the performances of a hurdles runner to those of a 100m sprinter or those of a high jump athlete. In short, although the hurdles performance actually takes from both sprinter and high jumper, noone would say that a hurdle runner is a bad sprinter, or a bad high jumper. Bilingualism can thus be measured as a different set of skills which, if it fishes in different pools, constitutes a discipline of its own, independant of monolingualism.

I found the image very interesting, because it somehow broke one of the ideas I've always had at the back of my mind, while finding it really weird, ie. that languages coexist as separate pools from which I fish from. In short, thinking that my brain has some kind of switch that goes from one language to the other and that switching on one language, I switch off the other(s). At the same time, the situation I described above and the difficulty I have had to translate the illustration of the hurdle guy definitely proves that all the languages I speak are always there for the taking.

I'll share more of my thoughts about this book which I find extremely interesting as I get along.