bilingual reading and writing
pendrecarc asked my how my experience reading and writing is different in Swedish and English, and it turns out I had kind of a lot to say about that. :)
Swedish is my first language, and English my second, that I started learning with rhymes when I was maybe five or so ("I buy pink sheets for a kiss" which is hilarious in Swedish kiddie ears because it sounds like a string of words for pee and poo). Learning English after that was a lot of lessons in school, film and tv (always subtitled here, never dubbed) and books. Lots of reading and writing.
These days, my English has two primary purposes: academia, and fandom. (Also useful to travelling and talking to people.)
I've done about half of my university studies in English, and honestly the main difference language makes there is that reading and writing takes more time. People are often more unsure and vague when talking in their second (or third, etc) language in seminars, which can be a problem, and Swedish is losing out on words for some areas/topics, which I think is a bigger problem. I switch language while thinking about certain things.
But the experience reading and writing in different languages is more interesting when it comes to the fiction/fannish side of things. Availability and audience plays a huge role, obviously - if the thing I want to read or the people I want to tell a story to are English speaking, then English is the language of choice. (Or vice-versa, with Swedish.) But the experience of reading/writing itself is also language-dependent, and different.
Because English is not my first language, it's somehow always at a bit of a remove - a little distant, a little strange. I don't have all of the associations or nuances of words. When reading, it makes me a lot more forgiving of less than brilliant prose, less bored of cliches or uncomfortable. This makes it the ideal language for id-fic and porn. ;) It can also make literary prose heavy going, or leave me at a loss with cultural references sometimes.
When writing, the upside to English not being entirely mine is that I feel less self-critical. I have more latitude to experiment, things don't ring so immediately false to me. Sometimes it's frustrating because it makes the process too slow, because I can't find any way to express that one specific word that my dictionary doesn't have, either. Sometimes it's fun to bring in rhythms or ways of putting words together that don't really belong in proper English. (In a jingle-jangle morning is the one where I think that worked best.)
The flip side to this then, reading/writing in Swedish, means that I'm more critical, more choosy, but also able to both read and write faster with less effort (though that difference is smaller and smaller). What hasn't changed is that Swedish still has a more vivid, physical connection - the exact tone of voice of someone from a particular town, the smell of a certain brand of chewing gum when I was five - things like that. More precise, particular references, all of life's nitty-gritty in my time and place. I tried reading the Aubrey-Maturin books in English, and had a horrible time - all my sailing words are Swedish, and I love them that way. Old songs and poetry and childhood rhymes, too.
I think of it as language-worlds, and I wouldn't want to be stuck in only one.
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