Hablo-ish

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Today I kept getting interrupted from my book-shelvin’ duties by a stream of folks needing desk help. Normally I send folks off to the actual desk, since it drives me nuts when people try to circumvent the desk queue by approaching me when I’m doing something not-desky, on the far end of the counter, with my back to the computer, which has a sign that says CHECK IN ONLY, but today I was the only person who spoke even a modicum of Spanish.

So whenever anyone came up hesitantly with some variation of “… speak … Spanish?”, I’d cheerfully tell them, “I speak Bad Spanish!”, and we’d be off and running.

Sometimes I wish I could hear myself in Spanish the way a native speaker does, because I expect I sound hilarious. “IF YOU HAVE COMPUTER, YOU NO NEED BOOK. YOU NO HAVE COMPUTER? OKAY. YOU WAIT. I GET BOOK.”

After a while I get better, though I am pretty sure I’ve already got a few fossilized bits of Bad Spanish that it’d take a lot of work to get rid of.

It’s endlessly fascinating how language seems to work after that first cutoff point of small-childhood development. I have studied Spanish for years and can read it easily. But to understand spoken Spanish, and produce it, takes a definite shifting of brainmeats, and that’s not easy.

Fortunately, this job means I’m getting lots of practice! Language theory is great, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling that you’ve just managed to communicate in a second language.

Comments

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

The one time that happened to me - I speak VERY bad Japanese; I read it a lot better than I speak it - it was a pair of Japanese tourists, and the owner of the campground said "Oh! She speaks Japanese!" So I wound up standing there saying "Watashi wa nihon-go o hanashimasu. Sukoshi nihon-go." Which roughly means "I speak Japanese. Very little Japanese." And they were very polite, and because they were Japanese and very, very polite, they came back later with a fistful of Japanese candy for me, and that was awkward, because I felt so on the spot about my really crap Japanese.

But it was better than the time I thought I was asking someone, in French, whether this was the Gare du Nord. It took months before I realised I had asked if I was the Gare du Nord.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Wow, I understood your Japanese sentences there! That is exciting, because my Bad Japanese is vastly worse than my Bad Spanish. Three years of classes and I can read most of the kana and say things like "Watashi wa ringo o tabemasu" and that's about it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, and speaking of dumb language stories, I once told a friend, in Spanish, that my rocks do not tan very well.

Look, the words for "rock" and "leg" sound similar! It was an honest mistake!

[snarkingapple.livejournal.com]

This happens to me all the time because I read fluently, hear almost fluently, and speak enough to sound like a moron.

Sadly, it's usually my family asking me to translate because they can't understand the housekeepers when we're on vacation. THAT MAKES ME FEEL AWESOME.

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

I know how to say "I don't speak..." (Spanish, Korean, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, etc). There are a lot of Spanish speakers in my neighborhood, and I often communicate via signs in grocery stores, latin root words, doodles on post-its, and interpretive dance.

Interestingly enough, yesterday afternoon someone rang my doorbell and asked "Does anyone there speak Macedonian"? It's a rather diverse neighborhood...

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I've found that studying linguistics via conlanging has made it easier for me to learn grammar in my Japanese classes. We went through one section on expressing states-of-affairs with "~te iru", and it went into how using intransitive verbs in that construction expresses a state resulting from a past action, while using a transitive verb expresses the state of an ongoing process, and thought "oh, perfect and progressive aspect. Sweet. Got it." I already had the slots in my head and could just stick the constructions in.

I too have trouble speaking, and especially listening (it goes by so fast!). Vocab still gives me trouble (though I've been doing OK with kanji actually).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Agreed--although studying linguistics--and languages--in any way helps. "This here language adds a bunch of words together into one big word that may be a whole sentence!" "So it's agglutinative? Why didn't you say so?"

Plus, since most language-learning programs are set up for monolingual people with no technical knowledge, you get the bonus entertainment of watching the teacher struggle to explain it in simple terms to students who may still be in that dogmatic phase where anything that isn't like English is weird and wrong.

Vocab is my bane, too--probably you and I have the same linguistics problem going, where we learn structure well, but can't be assed to drill vocabulary. (At least, I can't.) But I have to admit, I wasn't very good at reading kanji, either. Although now I recognize some Chinese characters but only know the vague meaning of them.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've never been good at drilling myself on vocab. It was my bane way back in high school Latin, too.

I'm also terrible about creating lexicons for my conlangs. I think I may be allergic to vocabulary.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It depends on the conlang. Rredra and Luamavan are both getting pretty fleshed out, but the others may only have a few hundred words each. I need to work harder on them.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

All of mine are basically stuck at the "sketch" stage. I can come up with phonologies I like, and nifty grammatical structures, and sometimes neat orthographies, but when it comes time for me to start assigning sounds to stems & affixes, I hit a wall.

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

Bravo!! That is an awesome feeling, indeed. :D

I feel the same way about Italian. I've been studying it for years and I read it fairly well, but understanding someone speaking and then responding can really throw you for a loop. :-\

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing, creepy dolls

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Looks like somebody found Voltaire's homemaking book!

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Sounds like my Language learning patterns are more common than I might have thought. I can still sort of read Spanish, and can read German pretty well, but speaking either is much, much harder, essentially impossible for Spanish. I just can't come up with the words I need. My Japanese is pretty much all gone, reading and writing.

- Hehe, I just got back and found this sitting open, totally forgot to hit Post before I went to Work ;)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I remember very little Japanese, either.

That makes me wonder a bit about how languages get processed. Partly it's because it's much less familiar than Spanish or German (I can pick up some of the words in Romance and Germanic languages just because they're familiar), but I wonder if it's also the writing system itself that kind of throws off understanding. I was always a slow reader in Japanese, but I remember a lot more Swahili--arguably an equally unfamiliar language, but one written in the Roman alphabet.

I'm sure there are other factors, but I've always suspected the writing system of being part of my problem.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I did pretty well in Japanese the first year, when it was mostly Katakana and Hiragana, with just a few Kanji. My decline pretty much tracks perfectly with the increase in the use of Kanji.

German clicked for me really easily. It helps that like a third of it is basically just English with a German Accent, but still. I've got some of the Novels I picked up in Germany still, and I can read them with only a little more difficulty five years later than I could when I was there.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

My decline pretty much tracks perfectly with the increase in the use of Kanji.

Man, you and me. I did okay with the syllables, because they went with the way you pronounce words. But kanji skips the sound structure and goes straight to meaning--which can be useful in some respects, but which really doesn't help me keep words and meanings straight.

Spanish is the same for me as German was for you--English is Germanic, but thanks to some heavy assimilation of Romance languages the two languages have a lot of cognates--and if we don't use a Latin word in everyday speech, we probably use it in some of our many nuanced synonyms. So even in junior high I had an extensive English vocabulary, and I could recognize a lot of words in Spanish as coming from the same place. Plus, I had heard Spanish words around.

Isn't it fun to be able to read in another language? I swear it's a dopamine rush.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with Spanish, I just have much less total experience with it, since I only studied it for one year in High School, and never really got any reinforcement on it, while I had a couple of years of College German, and then lived in Germany for 6 Months.

I can actually often still get the gist of stuff in Spanish when I'm reading, between what I remember, the cognates, and figuring out other bits from context. And yes, reading in another language is awesome. I should pull out Zwergenzorn (A LotR clone I got in Germany. Literally translates as "Dwarven Rage") again, and read through it.

Random anecdote: A friend of mine grew up spending all his time either in Wisconsin or in Bolivia, never running into any language besides English or Spanish, both of which he's fluent in. He said that when he moved to Seattle in his early 20s, it was a huge shock when he first heard someone speaking a Language he didn't understand.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

Someday I definitely need to get around to solidifying my very bare remnants of two years of Spanish. I may never get to a point at which I can actually translate it, but dammit if I can't at least try.