LJ Idol Week 1 - "Resolution"

[wild_muskrat]

I consider myself very privileged to have had the good fortune of being born to English-speaking parents in an English-speaking neighbourhood in a (partially) English-speaking country. Yes, Canada also has a French component to it, but for my purposes today, that is irrelevant

Comments

[kittenboo]

Good point about non English speakers. The English language can certainly be very tricky!

[kehlen]

*groan*
As one of the at least two non-born English speakers who play this season, I disagree completely. Why are you so disparaging that which makes your language unique, rich and beautiful?

Yes, it sucks to be forced to learn a language if you have no affinity or love for them. But it is no better or worse than being made to do any other thing that you don't need or want.

Ask the women who were forced to marry instead of getting educated and working in science.
Or the boys forbidden to become "sissy" ballet dancers.
Or modern-day Russian scientists whose "worth" is counted in the number of articles they publish and not the quality of the research they conduct.

And if you it bothers you so much that you were raised to speak the language others are forced to learn, maybe you yourself could learn a language like Spanish or Chinese, which is also spoken by a lot of people in the world, and meet them halfway on their home turf? :)

P.S. I have been sore about this topic for a long time, so I hope the above does not read as a "

[wild_muskrat]

I don’t take it as a flame, but am curious what part of “this topic” makes you sore?

My point, which has evidently been lost in translation, is that the learning process must be quite challenging and we native speakers are not necessarily very good at appreciating that.

I know some French and continue to pick up some bits of Italian, but I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten half way to mastering either. :)

[kehlen]

I am sorry it took me a few days to answer, but you asked a difficult question, and I had to think through what I wanted to say.

What you describe as "sucky" is, in my opinion, one of the more interesting aspects of learning a language: to know that a lot of words have many different meanings, and to try to decipher, assimilate and use them correctly. And yes, there is always the risk of being misunderstood, or worse, offending someone, especially by using a phrase that is meant as a joke in your mother tongue but does not have this meaning in another language (it has happened to me), but the upside of "getting it" is all the sweeter because of this risk.

What makes me sore about it, is that many people use this difficulty as an excuse not to try at all. (This is not what you meant to say, but because it frustrates me so, I automatically read it in what you have written. It's like when you have a sore toe and you fear that everyone who walks nearby would step on it.)

Now that I know what you really meant to say, I agree that it's

[wild_muskrat]

But here is another sore point: some of those people who have never tried to communicate in another language assume that speaking badly equates to being slow or stupid or undereducated

Growing up in Canada has meant that I have been surrounded by both French and English speakers. There are some who are truly and fluently bilingual in every sense of the word, but there are many more that I encounter in my day-to-day who are either unilingual or possess varying degrees of proficiency in one language or the other. I guess becuase of that, I've never really held linguistic ability against people, knowing from experience that it's not necessarily indicative of anything. But I'm sure that's not the case everywhere.

At the same time, it's usually very obvious when someone is struggling in a second language. Anyone who uses that to judge intelligence is just demonstrating their own lack of the same. lol

[i_love_freddie]

I have heard it said that the English Language is probably the hardest language to learn. Whether that is actually true, I don't know... but it's definitely very complicated.

I have a lot of respect for people who can speak English as a second language fluently.

[adoptedwriter]

Yes, there were many good ways to take this prompt.

[nikkiii_brown]

Thanks for including the statistics. I didn't realize there is such a low percentage of the worlds population who do not speak English. Pretty eye-opening when you really think about it. I liked your take on this topic!