Is It Possible to Forget Your First Language?
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2024
- Let's talk about whether it's possible or not to forget your first language.
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Credit and Link to the music used on this video.
"Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"
• 2.5 Hour John Carpente...
In aphasia (sometimes called dysphasia),[a] a person may be unable to comprehend or unable to formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions.[2] The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1-0.4% in the Global North.[3] Aphasia can also be the result of brain tumors, epilepsy, brain damage and brain infections, or neurodegenerative diseases (such as dementias).[4][5]
To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's language must be significantly impaired in one (or more) of the four aspects of communication. Alternatively, in the case of progressive aphasia, it must have significantly declined over a short period of time. The four aspects of communication are spoken language production and comprehension, and written language production and comprehension, impairments in any of these aspects can impact on functional communication.
The difficulties of people with aphasia can range from occasional trouble finding words, to losing the ability to speak, read, or write; intelligence, however, is unaffected.[5] Expressive language and receptive language can both be affected as well. Aphasia also affects visual language such as sign language.[2] In contrast, the use of formulaic expressions in everyday communication is often preserved.[6] For example, while a person with aphasia, particularly expressive aphasia (Broca's aphasia), may not be able to ask a loved one when their birthday is, they may still be able to sing "Happy Birthday". One prevalent deficit in all aphasias is anomia, which is a difficulty in finding the correct word.[7]: 72
With aphasia, one or more modes of communication in the brain have been damaged and are therefore functioning incorrectly. Aphasia is not caused by damage to the brain that results in motor or sensory deficits, which produces abnormal speech; that is, aphasia is not related to the mechanics of speech but rather the individual's language cognition (although a person can have both problems, as an example, if they have a haemorrhage that damaged a large area of the brain). An individual's language is the socially shared set of rules, as well as the thought processes that go behind communication (as it affects both verbal and nonverbal language). It is not a result of a more peripheral motor or sensory difficulty, such as paralysis affecting the speech muscles or a general hearing impairment.
#languagelearning #metatron #memoryloss
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Would be interesting to see you do a video on the norman dialect in france yes it still exists heres the wikipedia page for it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language
I don't mean to burst your bubble but your hands are still talking Italian 🤣
@@KenFullman Really.
Metatron, it actually DOES happen and I will give you a good example. I am a Polish language native speaker where the last consonant in a word is always pronounced soft/voiceless. For example “dąb” is pronounced more like “dąp”, “brzeg” is pronounced so it sounds like “brzek” and so on. This is something Polish speakers struggle a lot with English language, because in English “cold” and “Colt” are two different words. And so is “a million” other English words who differ only by the fact they use the same consonant at the end in either the voiced or the voiceless mode (mood-moot, God-got, bad-bat, bed-bet, boob-boop, toad-tote, and-ant, and so on). It takes a very long time for native Polish speaker to learn how to pronounce the last consonant hard/voiced, because it NEVER happens in Polish. However once I did learn it, everybody is telling me that my last consonant pronunciation is hard or “unnatural” in Polish. This is so embedded into my speech patterns now, I cannot change it, other than with a conscious effort, on a per word basis. I also remember, back when I was a college student one of my professors spent a year in the USA and when he came back he sounded really weird. Back then I wasn’t much into how it is to be a multi-lingual person, so I did not analyze why his speech sounded weird, I just remember it did. It went away after several weeks, and he again spoke Polish like any Polish person. But in my case, after 25 years in the USA, I think I will always sound a little off in Polish… 😢
The evelution of a languore is another story.
My grandma's native language was Spanish then learned English. When she got older she said she couldn't speak Spanish that well cause over time she just stopped speaking it altogether
Similar with me. Stopped speaking spanish at 5. Vary rarely spoke it and stopped altogether because I had a 5 year-olds vocabulary. 40 now and relearning it practically from scratch and its nice that things are sticking easier relearning than with learning other languages completely from scratch
@@geobot9k but i think it depends on the age. If you stopped speaking a language at 5 you will forget more then if you stop speaking it with 20 for example. If you are older at the time you stopped you will forget less i think. The uncle of my mum for example emigratet to the US with the age of 18 and he is not really speaking german since, he is called my grandmother a few times a year or she called him but other then that he was not talking german and the one time he visited us he could still speak German, German with a heavy accent and he didn't no every word anymore so he mixed English and German but he is still able to speak it.
But what language does she think in? I grew up speaking both Spanish and English. But I have found that when I think, my thoughts have always been in English, unless there is a very specific phrase in Spanish that has no equivalent in English. When I speak Spanish, I feel a bit rusty, and have trouble expressing some things quickly. But I don't think I could ever forget either language.
That’s interesting that relearning is easier this is like the phenomenon in exercise where if you stop for a while when you com back the muscle will build back much quicker to maintenance as if the muscle remembers very interesting
People dying revert to their first language. You certainly will acquire a different pronunciation if you speak Portuguese or Spanish for several years not to mention confusing words
I began life speaking Japanese and came to the US at the age of 18. There was a time that my English was winning over my Japanese but I refused to become monolingual and fought back to become about 50-50 bilingual.
Can't loose to all the weebs. My brother is a weeb and he speaks Japanese fluently and is currently there right now.
Why did you move out of Japan?!? It's the best country in the entire world! ;~;
@@Laffey99 what an incredibly naive thing to say
@@Laffey99Life is an adventure filled with many experiences, if you want it to be.
@@messiglazer Probably just some weeb.
I’m Turkish, but as a “zoomer” I learned English through constant exposure online. I’ve noticed that I trip up and forget words more when I speak in Turkish compared to English. Since I could be considered “chronically online” and seldom communicate with my peers in Turkish, this may’ve contributed to me getting worse at native language. I hope that I don’t lose it outright.
Just keep up your application friend try searching some things in turkish instead of English sometimes:D
Practice it, read literature and learn vocabulary.
Helped me regain my Bangla.
Your English is impressive
I get how you feel kanka :) I often wonder whether I am contributing to the deterioration of our culture with this, not the most pleasant thought to have. I believe the best way to restore our rusty native tongue is to consume great amounts of Turkish literature, especially classics in that regard, as they contain a vast variety of archaic words. I always assumed Turkish was rather crude compared to other languages, but I came to the realization that this was actually a result of our language's degradation.
God I actually know that feeling (except with Filipino) but thankfully I get to talk to my friends with that language
7:55 I am French, but stopped speaking French around 13. Two years ago, I returned to France and people would keep telling me I had a slight accent but nobody could quite agree on where my accent was from. At the time, I often stuttered, and my vocabulary had become very basic.
However, unlike the case of a foreigner, after a year of daily practice in French, I’ve recovered almost all my vocabulary, and the accent I had picked up is gone. I still stutter a little bit at times, but it tends to go away after a few minutes speaking.
Same haha 😂
Also same! It’s quite frustrating but indeed it’s easy to go back to a good standard after a few months of being in the country
Exactly my experience with my own native language! That's very insightful, thank you!
Same as u but I left at 5, And now am 20, it's been 4 months aince I got back to france but I haven't started re-learning it yet. I don't have people here so I'll be blastin those podcasts day n night ig.
The most extreme example of [3] was Australian convict William Buckley. He escaped from the convict colony and lived with Aborigines for about 20 years. He had forgotten English by then. This is where the Australian saying "Buckley's or none" comes from; people had almost zero chance of escaping a convict colony and surviving. To be Buckey's or none means that you have no chance of success or William Buckley''s chance: to be the one person in a gazillion.
William Buckley went full Avatar.
Note as an Australian, which I don’t blame you for not knowing because not enough people outside here know this but it made me wince to read: the plural “Aborigines” is considered kinda offensive because it was used in a lot of old very racist contexts to dehumanise Aboriginal people. It’s on maybe a similar level of outdatedness/offensiveness to “negroes” among Americans. The accepted terminology is Aboriginal people or Indigenous people- or better, when it makes sense to do so, name the specific group you’re talking about since the first people of an entire continent are not a monolith (from a quick Wikipedia search, Buckley lived among the Wathaurong people)
@@voidify3Thank you! I hadn’t ever heard that before. I’m glad I know now. /g
@@voidify3 nobody cares yall are so sensitive
I once met a woman who lost her native language and could only speak English after a major operation (I forget what this phenomenon is called). Cases like this are sometimes represented in the media as extraordinary acquisition of language skills, and in her community in rural Central Finland it was seen as such, but as a native Brit I can say her competence in English was no higher than intermediate. Her confidence, however, was absolute - she was entirely convinced her English was perfect and that she was expressing herself with fluent ease. It was hard work listening to her, but she was so happy to have a 'peer' to talk to...
I met her again a couple of years later and her Finnish had returned, to my relief.
I remember readìng about a similar case but they reported the person never learned the language. I didn't believe it.
@napoleonfeanor4122 There are some rare cases where a person suddenly starts speaking in a foreign language, forgetting their own. It usually happens after some trauma to the brain. Although in most cases the person has studied the language but are suddenly more or less fluent, but there are cases where the person has no formal tuition. However, it usually turns out that they have been exposed to the language in some capacity and have picked it up in subconscious level. For example, I could be watching manga in Japanese and read subtitles, and then wake up from an accident speaking Japanese... Usually the original language returns but the person retains the second language.
I wonder if that’s the same phenomenon as people who suddenly start speaking their native language with a different accent. For instance an American might suddenly begin to speak with a British or an Australian accent, or even a very thick foreign accent, even though they don’t speak the language for which they seem to have the accent; as in an American speaking with a French accent even though they don’t speak French. Sometimes they recover, sometimes not
@@oakstrong1 I know a case when a man didn't forget his native language, but got fluent in French after getting a concussion and medical intervention, he only knew the basics that he learned 10 years earlier beforehand
@@oakstrong1 nah no way that subconscious language learning works. Preposterous. Just think about it for a while. Language is about communication and application but you’re suggesting just listening to someone speak without any understanding of the language and possibly without any visual context is enough to somehow let your mind identify verb cases etc? No way. OP’s story is about as far as we should suspend disbelief on this without actual studies.
My mother near the end of her life told me she had to translate a lot of words from English back to Korean as she'd not spoken it much after her friends had all died 20 years before. when she spoke, it was predominately a version of Korean not spoken since the 50s and 60s and even I (who does not speak a lot of Korean) could tell the difference between her version of it and her much younger nephews and nieces when they spoke. She had left Korea age 23 and I know she'd never have forgotten it completely but that pause for the right words happened a lot when she did speak it.
What is the difference between 50s Korean and Korean spoken now ?
@@louish2037 Exactly. What's the difference ?
@@ROForeverMan I’m guessing 50’s Korean is more traditional and sounds more “rough”, because that was when the war had just ended and the Korean spoken in South Korea was still the same throughout. But South Korea after the war gradually developed its own accent and ways of speaking that are different from North Korea or traditional ways of speaking, that’s why when a North Korean goes to South Korea they can get singled out for their accent. I have relatives who are ethnic Koreans but have never lived in SK and they definitely speak Korean differently than South Koreans. I bet the old Korean sounds much more Chinese and uses much older words and etiquettes than “modernized” Korean
I actually lost my main language as a kid. I learned Arabic as a kid, but when I entered preschool in America I lost my Arabic (so I guess when I was 4 yrs old I lost my Arabic). The funny thing is that apparently my English has an Arabic accent and my Arabic has an English accent. People just keep saying “I like your accent” when I speak both of those languages. 8:11
I lost dutch around age 4 or 5. But in Spanish I still have a bit of a dutch accent. I learned Spanish and forgot dutch. Completely.
@@acasualviewer5861 That sucks. Hopefully you can relearn the language! I wonder if there is a scientific explanation for our anomaly. Forgetting a foreign language but keeping the accent.
@@abdullahtabanjah well it's not really a problem. I've learned new languages since. It's just curious how it happens.
Age matters. Young kids learn quickly and forget quickly. Older people learn slowly and forget slowly.
9:11 💀
I hope that wasn't intentional lol
@@PokeCastleIt wasn’t intentional, but I fixed it to a better time marker
I'm Russian, when I engage with English language for a prolonged period of time (a month and more) my Russian does become a bit weird, I'm more readily remember word in English and I structure my sentences in Russian as if I was speaking English, I can even have a very slight accent :-) It doesn't last though, takes only few days to fully recover :-)
Yes. Same. It even once happened to me with bad English. Spent some time in Ukraine and I started using articles properly. That didn't affect my first language though.
I can kinda feel this. That is, I’ve been aggressively learning Japanese since returning to the language(having taken classes for three years prior and not totally forgetting it) for awhile now and sometimes I’ll spend a weekend or longer, as immersed as I can in an English-speaking country, and when I go to talk to someone or even respond to a text/comment in English I’ll stumble over the order of words as my brain wants me to put things in a more Japanese order. /the sheer amount of editing to rework this comment being an unseen testament
У меня то же самое. Живу в Англии 24 года. И иногда даже очень волнуюсь, когда надо говорить с русскоговорящими в России (кроме семьи), боюсь что что-то не так скажу по-русски или что-то забуду.
When I was about to go to military for a year, one of my concerns was me forgetting english, because all my hobbies basically rely on me knowing it. So I decided to narrate my own thoughts in my head in english as much as I could while I was there. Imagine my surprise, when, upon returning home, I discovered that not only did my english not get worse, but actually improved very noticeably instead. Not a single word of english was read, heard or spoken by me the whole year, and yet I could understand words and phrases, that I clearly struggled with before. All because of this neverending mental exercise.
So, four years later the habit is still going strong, and one time I tried to tell my little brother "keep going", but then stopped myself, thinking "hold on, I need to say it in russian". So what did I say? "Continue идти". Followed by me laughing and thinking to myself "Заебись, nice translation, dumbass!" :D
I can sometimes spontaneously switch to english inner monologue, even as I'm exposed to russian media. It's a bit scary
My Grandmother was of French Canadian stock. French was her first language. By the time my sister took French in high school my grandmother had nearly forgotten her language. She regained a lot of it while working with my sister.
My grandmother, RIP, was French Canadian. She got excited when I told her I was learning French so we could speak it. When I tried to engage her in conversation, got a blank stare...
@@stevedavenport1202If you're learning European French, the vocabulary will be a lot different than Canadian French. It would be like someone speaking to you in all British slang
@@RockBandPlayer84BO’OH’OH’WA’UH
Yea I think France French is more formal?
birb
As a Québécoise, french from Canada has the same language variety as french from any other country. It is more comparable to American english vs Brits or any other country for that matter. Like everywhere else, some speaks in a more familiar way and others in a more formal way and most just jump from one way to another depending on who they are talking to.
My first language is German but I moved to the Netherlands when I was 2. Dutch quickly overtook my German. I can still speak German fluently, but it's been deteriorating. I speak German pretty much exclusively with my parents, who have lived in the Netherlands just as long as I have, so when I don't know how to say something in German I use Dutch. Even when my parents recognise that, they often don't immediately know the correct German word or grammar either, so it's easier to just move on with the conversation than trying to figure out the correct way of saying something. This way, my German has deteriorated over the years. At this point, I think my German is worse than my English, and I only started learning that when I was 12.
Dutch and German are particularly insidious because a bunch of words are very similar, but then other words exist in both languages but mean something completely different. It works if the person you're speaking to knows both languages too, but when I talk to someone who just knows German, they'd be very confused by some of the things I'm saying.
As a learner of languages, I like both German and Dutch
I was actually surprised when I met a German who could speak Dutch without an accent in Hanoi (the guy was a hippie and had a Dutch hippie female partner), the interesting part was that his German was also without an accent.
Hallo hoe gaat het?
Welke woorden verwar je? Of welke Nederlandse woorden gebruik je in het Duits?
The "struggling to find the correct word" is so relatable! Sometimes I'll remember a word in english, but I can't remember it in finnish, and vice versa. Currently learning Indonesian, so I can't wait to see how bad taht can get over time.
I knew someone from India who said he forgot his native Gujarati. I can't imagine forgetting how to speak English. Then again I suppose the exposure to English is so much higher almost everywhere in the world.
A friend of mine from Kerala, India, forgot his native language too - he can still understand a bit of it, but he told me that he is super weird for him that he finds more comfortable to speak with his mum in English.
Same here. I have completely forgotten how to speak Tamil. Even have trouble understading it, these days
@@bobon123 My ancestry is from Kerala. I was born in Canada, but the first language I spoke was Malayalam. But then, since I started attending kindergarten, my entire knowledge on Malayalam was pretty much wiped into a clean slate, and now I can only understand like 45% of a Malayalam paragraph while I am perfectly fluent in English. In fact, I also am comfortable responding to my mom in English, even when she speaks to me in Malayalam.
I used to work with a german man and he said he really struggled now to speak german. He moved to France for highschool, where French became his primary language, and in his 20s to the US, where English became his primary language. And when I worked with him he was in his 50s.
I think that if he were immersed among German speakers that he would get it back quickly. It wouldn’t be like learning it the first time.
No. He moved to Canada.
Edit your comment to say “Canada” and NOT “US” since we have discovered you’re talking about Canada.
Mi hai strappato un sorriso! I'm italian, but I've spent over half of my life between english and german speaking countries and just few months ago I came across the mulberry dilemma myself - crystal clear association to the fruit in english, no idea how call it in Italian. When I looked it up it was like. "Gelso! Ecco che diavolo erano i gelsi!" Up to that point the Italian word was somehow some sort of mythical fruit - pretty much same level of abstraction of words like "ambrosia" or "manna". It was very entertaining to find that exact same word taken for your example.
I began to study Japanese at 22, moved to Japan at 27 and am now 60. I began to notice having trouble remembering words a little over 10 years ago. These are words I use a lot in Japanese but rarely or almost never in English.
Same, study at 22, moved at 27, but I'm only 33 and I'm already having trouble recalling English words... I end up having to look up the Japanese in a dictionary to find the English equivalent, and even then I don't always find exactly the right word I wanted.
@@adamhyde5378Damn, that’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard lol, so he has a “Canadian” accent when speaking Japanese but no Canadian accent when speaking actual English?
4:04 This happens to me all the time. I am a native Danish speaker but I use English far more on a daily basis and as such my English language ability has long since exceeded my Danish language ability and my Danish language ability has actually also somewhat regressed due to disuse. I even had to bring an English to Danish dictionary to my Danish exam because my vocabulary is far broader in English, leading to me more easily expressing my thoughts in English.
Same 😅
Same but my native language is finnish lol.
This is interesting. How did you acquire such an impressive command of English? Do you think that your English level is native (since you say that it's better than your Danish)? Do you live in Denmark? I know that Nordic and Dutch people are very anglophile, but this still sounds a bit extreme.
@@Ayazidas Pretty simple really. I live in Denmark but, a basic education in English at a young age followed by 20 years of nonstop daily immersion via the internet. When I grew up the Danish side of the internet was pretty barebones so I went to the largest side which was the English one.
I would say my English is native for all intents and purposes, maybe with the exception of my accent since I've never checked what my accent actually is. I've been told I sound American but I don't know myself.
@@ratoh1710 But the same could be said about other Nordic and Dutch people too and most don't have a native or near native command of English. What about your life outside of the internet? How much English do you use?
I often make myself embarrassed when I know a word in English, German, French or even Russian, but I don't know how to say it in Portuguese (my mother language). In a lesser degree it happens also the opposite: knowing that both languages have the same word but forgetting the fact that only the pronunciation may vary. Very common between Russian and Ukrainian or Portuguese and Spanish, in my case.
honestly Portuguese does feel like it has some words missing sometimes
@@lememzposso confirmar
Literalmente eu
Me too, like, I know very specific japanese words but portuguese words? Nah, and people say that my portuguese vocabulary is very good, I guess I should read some classic brazilian literature to make those words STICK.
@@cybercatkaitosupremacy read European Portuguese literature not fake Portuguese literature
I live in Brazil, surrounded by people who speak portuguese all the time, but I consume so much content in english, I am so much exposed to the english language on a daily basis that I oftentimes feel more comfortable when my mind is in it’s “english mode”, so to say, and when I forced by my surroundings to return to “portuguese mode”… I struggle to find the right words in portuguese quite often, actually. I’m even developing the bad habit of using english (more specifically american) idiomatic expressions in portuguese, which makes sense in my head, but confuses the hell out of my brazilian friends who aren’t so exposed to the english language as I am.
Fantastic video. Thorough but never wasting time.
I've met individuals who lost proficiency in their native language although they never managed to learn the second language properly, be it grammatically or phonetically after 3 to 5 decades of living abroad! A case in point, famous Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, who left Spain as a young adult for France never to return and is now about 90 years old, speaks both Spanish and French with an heavy accent (he speaks Spanish with a heavy French accent and French with an obvious Spanish accent) and doesn't speak fluently either language!
How in the heck is that all even possible? How can a person be a playwright without being good at at least one language? And why did French influence his accent in his native language?
@@michaelcherokee8906 Writing and speaking are different skills. They say he wrote his pieces in Spanish and then translated them to French with the help of his French wife.
I cannot explain why he speaks with accent both languages but that is my assessment. I am fluent in both languages and I've listened to old interviews of Arrabal and those are the facts.
It's definitely possible. I speak all of the languages with a slight accent. When I speak Portuguese, I speak with an accent which sounds almost native, but people think I am just from another part of Brazil, or that I am a Spanish speaker but lived in Brazil for a long time, and when I speak English, I can either sound "American", but it's impossible to guess which state I'm from, or British but it sounds "too formal, only a Queen would speak like this". When I speak Ukrainian, people think I am a Ukrainian dude from a village somewhere on the border with Belarus, and when I speak Russian, people assume I am a foreigner (European or American, but definitely not Russian), even though the only language I spoke in my childhood is Russian.
i do this with my mother tongues english and spanish, and my acquired language portuguese. i tend to speak spanish with a brazilian portuguese accent, english with a spanish latino accent, and spanish with a very distinctly "american" accent. sometimes i have a hard time understanding all of them and have to listen again or ask for the person to repeat what they said
@@KaentukiTheFukiI take it you moved to Brazil as an adult.
This was such a good video! I grew up speaking Italian as a kid in the US, then stopped, then studied it in college, then moved to a place where I don’t talk to anyone anymore - now while I still understand everything, I struggle with finding words when I speak and I’ve even noticed that my accent is a bit off (like my mouth sometimes won’t make the sound fast enough anymore?). It’s so wild! Hoping that with more speaking it comes back, but I was surprised at how much I “lost”
I remember a time when I for a period of 14 days the only language I spoke, wrote, read, and heard was English, due to a assignment, and then I read an article in my native language Danish and it was mostly gibberish to me. I actually had to use google to translate some of the words into English before the text made sense to me. The next day it was all back to normal, but it was a weird experience.
My Grandpa was the son of a Portuguese immigrant (1920s). She spoke no English and they only spoke Portuguese in the house until he started going to school at about 4 or 5. From then on, she'd have him teach her what he learned and they'd stop speaking Portuguese altogether. Fast forward like 50 years, he finally goes to Portugal with my family, and they're all like "hey won't it be cool for you finally speak it again" and he says yeah right, he doesn't remember anything at all. Inside of a day or two, he's at the bar chatting with people in Portuguese like he spoke it all his life.
I have no clue how common this kind of thing is, but I always thought it was really fascinating l
thank you man. i have been wonering this question for ages
My wife was born in Romania, but came into France at age 3. She has spoken her native language solely with her parents since. Being now an adult, she speaks Romanian with a distinctive French accent, and has absolutely no accent in French. I am sure the age at which you start learning an eventual 2nd language plays a very significant role.
@metatronacademy I find this a fascinating subject and while I will try to guard myself, I do anticipate that I may start to lose or have to think harder of some of my English words once I am living in Italy for a number of years and over time speak more Italian and less English. It is fun to notice though that although you have mastered English and you have lived abroad for a while, you still maintain that core Italian way of gesticulating! I have no doubt you will never forget that!
That was fascinating, seeing all these different factors. I did sometimes occur to me, where I knew the word in English first, and had some difficulties to find it in French. Really weird experience, and sometimes funny. Thank your for the video, as it was really interesting. May you and everybody have a good day. Cheers. P.S: Also thank you for all the videos on your other channels.
The example you used with the fruits in English vs your native language is so accurate. My mom & grandma had the same issue immigrating from Bolivia to the US. They’d just say “cranberry” or “zucchini” with a Spanish pronunciation for instance, since those are rarely/never used nor known of in Bolivia & in the US
No. Your mom and grandma went to Canada. Not the US.
Since we have discovered you’re talking about Canada, edit your comment to say “Canada” and NOT “US”.
My son is polyglot. After 4 years living abroad his accent is very “gringo”. He’s almost 7 now. I actually suspect his first language is English, not Portuguese. His way of thinking is being deeply affected by Dutch language as well. It’s really interesting to see his development.
How many langauges does he speak?
A variant of point 6 - Experience overlap : there are different subjects that I got interested on by watching videos or reading articles in English (my second language) almost exclusively. So when I try to talk about those subjects in my first language (French), I am generally unable to find the right vocabulary because I never learnt it in French.
Also, I have a sister living in Canada who for certain things will always use the Canadian French word or expression rather than the equivalent in Metropolitan French. And sometimes she can struggle to understand common French expressions, because it’s never used in Quebec. She for example often instinctively say « dollar » instead of « euro », which can be confusing because she’s still talking about euro prices, not the exchange rate value of those prices in Canadian dollars.
I have two mother tongues, Russian (spoken at home) and Estonian (spoken at school and with most friends). When I was 13 we moved to Finland, I picked up Finnish rather quick but because I had lost (regular) contact with Estonian friends, my Estonian level dropped drastically. For a long time I had a Finnish accent when speaking Estonian, and vice versa Estonian accent in Finnish, which at the time was confusing for me. After 7 years of living in Finland I decided to move back to Estonia, and even though my Estonian has improved, most people wouldn’t even be able to tell that I struggle, I feel extremely uncomfortable and anxious when speaking Estonian so I prefer to use English with friends whenever possible (which isn’t good, I know, but I’m anxious about not being able to express my thoughts correctly). So yes, I would say it is possible for your accent to change after living abroad for a while, although it doesn’t necessarily have to be drastic and permanent, and of course it changes from person to person, but definitely not entirely impossible. 7:55
I love this video.
It reminds me of how much of a complex and rich tapestry language is. It is such a personal experience.
I am of course by no means an expert, I just enjoy language studies.
You have described every phenomenon I have experienced with language since learning Japanese and moving to Japan. These are excellent observations and articulated very well.
I was taught Serbian as my first language but then my family moved abroad and I went to an international school where I became extremely fluent at English to the point of a native speaker. I've tried to get better at Serbian before with my parents enrolling me in online classes for it so I don't forget it. I can still talk in Serbian but worse than I can in English and I think in English too. I really want to keep my roots but it's really hard as the only time I ever have to speak it is at home when I'm talking to my parents. My sister has a bigger problem with it because she was little when we left Serbia so she can speak it but she has an American accent which always pains me
Nemoj da zaboravis svoj maternji jezik!! 😁
I am an English teacher and I can tell you that although your English is good, it is still obvious that you are not a native speaker. Native English speakers might make spelling or punctuation errors, but they will not use incorrect prepositions as you sometimes do. Your English is still very good, though.
@@mariahillerWritten and spoken English are very different though, as you probably know. Spoken English is extremely easy to acquire. Their writing might not be perfect but if they spend their whole day at school speaking it, i’d bet that upon meeting them irl, even you wouldn’t know that they’re not native. They likely have no accent and speak fluidly. Besides, when you see the way some native English speakers write online, you realize that you can indeed be orally fluent and communicate every day in English while writing and mastering grammar like an oyster lmao
No. She has a British accent. Nice try Chetnik.
You said that an accent can't be affected but actually it did happen to me personally. After living abroad for many years and then coming back, people started telling me that I sound a bit weird like I have a little accent. I was very surprised to hear that. But I think the accent disappeared after I stayed in my native country for a while. Also, children who learn their native language only from their parents very often have an accent, sometimes a very strong one (even though their parents don't have one).
TBH I use English so much that ppl started asking me if I'm from abroad even though I've never left the country 💀💀💀 the most tragic part is that my English is nowhere near perfect, but it still messes with my native lang and vice versa 😭
It definitely can be affected because after reaching fluency in Spanish now whenever I speak my native language, English, I tend to speak it with Argentinan rhythmic inflections, speed and tonality
My "native mother tongue" is English... but people still ask me if I have an accent... well, in my toddler years, my family visited Hispanic countries.
As well... people do shift to other accents of the same language when they move to say, Australia from North America (or vice versa).
Great video Raf, I'm also Italian and I'm very interested in the subject since I struggle to keep up with both languages on an 'advanced' level. E.g. I'll spend a lot of time speaking English and then forget some words in Italian, or viceversa. But what affects me the most is the fact that I became 'out of touch' with Italian, that is I don't really know what expressions people my age use amongst them, or what would be considered as sounding weird instead of normal. I hope that makes sense, not really sure what to do about it other than spending more time with people speaking Italian.
I had a series of strokes last year and had aphasia. Since this spring I’ve recommenced learning Italian which I was previously at b2 level. I’ve found it incredibly calming and it has aided some of my other cognitive problems somewhat.
Indeed. I can say something in English but can't find this word on my native language. And the berry example is spot on. 🎉🎉
I hadn't been living in the UK for that long, but when I moved back to my own country I was complemented how well I speak my native tongue, because I spoke it with English accent! Of course, that sisappeared very quickly.
Not having lived in my birth country for a long time and speaking it rarely, I do struggle finding the right words, some vocabulary I'm not familiar at all, and my friend says I use old fashioned expressions.
Out of my 3 kids only the youngest can speak my language as he was only a baby when we moved there so spent more of the formative years (in terms of language development) in the country. But moving to UK all the children forgot it as they rejected it for social reasons. But as adults, my two youngest ones wanted to relearn it, however, only my youngest one is able to speak at conversation level: I'm sure spending a few months as an intern in the country helped.
It's so interesting, you said a lot of facts
I can relate very much to your experience of missing Japanese expressions, when you come to an other country. I have been living in Japan for almost 15 years now, and when I come back to my home country Germany there are so many situations in which I would know exactly what to say in Japanese, but there is no equivalent expression in German, and so it feels a bit 寂しい.
I think we should sometimes introduce useful expressions that don't yet exist in our native languages. The flood of denglish replacement for normal German words is really annoying though. Remember the bodybag thing?
I felt 馬鹿馬鹿しい when, after moving back to Hungary from Japan (I lived there for five years), I was dismantling a sandbox in our garden with my brother-in-law. Suddenly he shouted "Oh my god (Te jó isten)!" and I asked "どうしたの?". And stared at him for many seconds, waiting for the answer. Of course he didn't answer my question, because he didn't understand it. Then I repeated "ねえ、どうしたの?". Same silence and blank stare from him. And then I understood that I was speaking the wrong language!
In the early 1990s I met an elderly lady in the just-post-Soviet Baltic who had been raised to about age nine or ten in the UK. Then her parents took her back “home”. (This would be in the 1920s). She did still speak English, in a stilted, oddly short-syllable way, but also with some unmistakeable elements of my own grandmothers’ dialect (from the same county).
The district where she had lived had been “closed” to westerners during the Communist era, and was in fact the site of a load of broadcast-jamming masts almost up to independence.
So she went decades without speaking English to anyone, until a doctor in the 1970s noticed her little Book Of Common Prayer at her bedside was in English, and they spoke in English.
She put her retention of the language down to having this one little book (written in the formal English of the turn of the 19th/20th century) which she read aloud to herself from every night in bed. She asked me words that she had never heard in English: the words for radiator and television are two I remember.
Then, not long before I met her, a high school near her got three English teachers (only one of whom had ever spoken to native speakers until me (it was she who introduced us). The old lady said, “When I met them, all my words poured out!”
She was so homesick: I didn’t have the heart to tell her that where she once lived - a coal mining area dotted with villages - lived had altered literally out of all recognition. The giant slag heaps of my own childhood were gone, but so were the meadows and woods and horses and carts and little shops and unmade roads of my parents childhood, and hers the generation before that. Now it was commuter suburbs, electric trains and eight lanes of motorway. Where she lived now, a smallish country town, was far more like the place she had left than the place she had left.
@@bywonline What a strange comment. They’re not “examples”, SHE ASKED THIS. And you’re presuming that somehow she already knew they are nearly identical. She HAD NO CLUE what they would be in English. They had not been invented when she left the UK.
In fact, my father as a kid in the 1940s was a great Flash Gordon fan, and in those movies (talkies probably also arrived after she left!) the yet-to-be-invented visual technology was called “the televisor”.
She also wasn’t speaking Russian, although both words are pretty much identical in Lithunian: radiatorius, televisorius
My Belgian wife is an interesting language case. She was brought up in Antwerp by parents from Brussels whose school language had been French but who spoke a mainly Flemish based dialect at home. Therefore her mother tongue was that dialect. She went to school in Antwerp where the instruction was in standard Belgian Dutch but where communication with the other pupils was in the Antwerp Flemish dialect. As a young adult she returned to
Brussels and then mainly spoke French. Having met me, she became fluent in England, which she now talks most of the time in the family. She claims that she has a lot of difficulty nowadays in speaking the Brussels and Antwerp dialects which were her staple during childhood though she still understands them. Paradoxically she manages better in standard Belgian Dutch, though French and English are the languages in which she is most at ease.
MY BRAIN
Many years ago, before most of the old timers passed, they usually reserved talking in Italian / Abruzzese dialect to each other. One year my grandmother who was in her late 80's at the time had a conversation with someone from Italy. She was visiting Atlantic City, NJ (one of the casino's) and was looking for someone who could help her while speaking in Italian with some broken English mixed in. My grandmother heard her asking for help in Italian. Long story short she somehow got separated from her group and needed to find the place where they set if they became separated. I later asked my grandmother how the conversation went as I was listening (but not understanding) to them talk, and she said I remembered enough but admits she wasn't as fluent in her head or as easy compared to when she was younger. I always wanted to learn Italian but never had any real practical use in learning it. Finding someone to have a conversation with on a daily basis would be challenging.
It's interesting what you say about speaking your own language. I speak Italian rather fluently for not having studied it formally. So during an extended stay in Italy I would talk to people in their main language just as I do at home. It is natural for me to switch from English to Italian as needed, so when I met a particular group of American students I obviously spoke to them in English, albeit through an educated Australian accent. Mind you their Italian was rudimentary and to communicate in it, knowing that I didn't have to endure that ordeal, did my head in. Nevertheless, they refused to talk to me and even corrected my English pronunciation when we did communicate. On the contrary, on one occassion I was travelling with a Sicilian friend, Nino, on the train and we met a two American girls. One spoke English and Italian, the other spoke English and French. Nino spoke Italian and French and I, as stated, spoke English and Italian. We had a great time together.
I took a speech-language pathology psycho-linguistics class in grad school, and in that class we learned of a particular case from the late 19th century in France, where there was a man who grew up in the region where they speak Franco-Provençal, but moved to Paris when he was around 8, and subsequently only spoke standard French and essentially forgot Franco-Provençal over the years. Following a traumatic brain injury, he completely lost his French speaking abilities, but was somehow able to communicate with broken 4-year-old level Franco-Provencal. I might have messed up the details but it went something like that. It goes to show that there's something special about your first language, even if it's not the language you end up being most proficient in as an adult.
I mean, the brain never truly forgets things, right? It mostly cuts connections to unused parts. Injuring his head probably damaged the bits that knew French and his brain somehow used the rest through our innate ability to learn and produce language.
Yes, very possible, I lost my native tongue at only 4 years old because when I came to Canada I immediately had to learn English from Malayalam and so I went through 4 months of ELL in school (english learning) and my parents only speaking to me in English which made me over those 4 months lose Malayalam.
but you were very young, which makes it very difficult to preserve your native language
This was fun and very validating to hear as a fellow bilingual person!
One of the first points resonated a lot with me, I have not forgotten my native language Spanish, but I have always felt something which is that Spanish was not my language, I’ve felt this way even since before I learned English. Today I can express myself better and conduct interactions way better in English than my own native tongue. It’s something I’m embarrassed to mention to anyone since I’m aware it’s quite weird and I don’t even know why but it is true for me. When I’m speaking Spanish, even in Spain(not from Spain but I live here) I feel like I’m struggling more to express myself and I’m pretending a little. I feel way more comfortable speaking English. I don’t know why but I think it’s got something to do with inflections, I feel like English inflections have always resonated better with me, maybe due to being exposed to American culture and media since I was very little.
I come from Iran and living in Australia I have not spoken Persian for close to 50 years as I have never come in contact with anyone from Iran. Thus, speaking Persian/Farsi/Parsi became extremely difficult. Over the past year due to dramatic events in Iran, I started following events by watching various news and such on CZcams. I could only understand maybe around 40% of it at first. Now, I understand around 95% of it. There are words that I am not familiar with and these are new words. I have to say that I still have foreign accent. My accent is a mixture of Persian, English, American and Australian and that is because originally I learned English by having American teachers and watching American shows. Then I went to England and so I lived there for a couple of years, and then to Australia where I really tried hard to speak with Australian accent but I never mastered. I left Iran in my late teens.
That is very interesting and I’m glad you’ve reconnected with Persian it is the most beautiful language and I want to speak it one day
I heard that some parts of the Eastern United States (such as Maine, parts of New York) are linguistically influenced by archaic variants of Cockney like the Australian accent is, so I wonder if your combination of an Aussie and American accent would sound normal in those areas?
@@johnnyjohn-johnson7738it would not
No. You have a Canadian accent. Not American. And you watched Canadian TV. Not American. And you have Canadian teachers. Not American.
The only reason why I haven't forgotten Spanish is because I live with my parents and in an area of the US where Spanish is spoken regularly everywhere. I also like to watch Spanish tv shows and when I watch something with subtitles I put those in Spanish instead of English. I do not know how to use Spanish words in my own profession since I use English at work and online. Whenever I feel like I start to loose my Spanish, I read a book or watch films and tv shows in my mother tongue. I must say, that has caused me to use Spanish words most Cubans don't use in the island.
No. You live in Canada with your parents.
Since we have discovered you’re talking about Canada, edit your comment to say “Canada” and NOT “US”.
When I was young I spent a lot of summers in south Louisiana, I developed a Cajun accent just from that level of interaction that stayed with me until I was in my mid teens. But my accent has shifted quite a bit over my lifetime, I've hear recordings of myself that sounded like a northern Texas accent all the way to today where I just have what I would call a mild rural accent. So accent can shift a lot over ones lifetime in my opinion and personal experience.
My uncle grew up in the Twin Cities with the rest of his family, but later moved up north. All of the time I knew him (he was in his mid-30s when I was born), he had a strong northern Minnesota accent. Nobody else in my family talked that way except for his wife and kids.
Also, I've developed a touch of that accent in the last year, and I have no clue why. I think it's from Canadian CZcamsrs, like how I picked up a little British pronunciation from British CZcamsrs. I once genuinely forgot how Americans pronounce "patronizing."
Yeah, accents are very sensitive to context. I have many examples of friends who normally speak with no accent, but the moment they encounter and speak with someone from their native region, the accent comes back completely.
I love this video. It is so relatable
thank you for a very lovely video! my opinion might differs from you on pronunciation tho. I've have plenty of friends that lived abroad in different countries for a variety of time, and what i've noticed is that the longer they have stayed overseas in that country the more of that accent (from the people they have interacted with) they have taken on. i might very much be completly wrong because this comes very much from personal experince.
My father left eastern Poland with his parents and sister in 1932 at 12 years old. He spoke Yiddish and Polish. When he arrived in the USA he only spoke English and a little Yiddish. In 1969 we received a letter from two of his cousins who had miraculously escaped to Argentina. Everyone else in the village was killed in the war. We had no idea the cousins survived. The two cousins came to visit. My father couldn't remember enough Polish or Yiddish to communicate with them. I had to use my Spanish to interpret for them for a month.😂
No. Your father, his parents, and sister went to Canada. Not the US.
Since we have discovered your father, his parents, and his sister went to Canada, Edit your comment to say “Canada” and NOT “USA”.
I am Mexican-American, Spanish was my first language and only language spoken at home as a child. But once I enrolled in school and only spoke English at school, I began to forget my Spanish. And now in my 20’s i have a hard time speaking Spanish and finding words but I could still understand it perfectly.
No. You’re Mexican Canadian.
Since we have discovered you’re Canadian, edit your comment to say “Canadian” and NOT “American”
I served a mission for my church where they sent me to Canada but specifically assigned me to serve in this latino community so I had to learn Spanish. As I was surrounded by Spanish a lot (we were encouraged to speak Spanish to the other missionaries even if we both spoke English), I noticed some of these things happening to me when I had to use English. We'd talk a lot about setting goals for the week, and since we'd discuss those in Spanish I got used to saying it that way (fijar metas), so when someone once asked me about setting some goals in English, I had a moment where I completely forgot the word "set goals" and could only think "fijar metas." Also certain false cognates began to trip me up in the opposite direction (in English I'd say "assist" instead of "attend" since the Spanish verb for attend is "asistir"). And I developed certain habitual phrases in Spanish that I nearly accidentally used in English conversations ("está bien" and "chao" still manage to slip their way into my English sometimes). Its cool reading the comments here and seeing I'm not alone haha
I’m French and learned English mostly through online exposure, as well as reading books in English and watching series. I can speak English fluently now even though I can still struggle when it comes to reading novels and writing, and I take every occasion I have to listen to/say things in English because I really enjoy the language. The symptoms I’ve experienced as a result are that sometimes the two will blend together in my mind, to the point where I’ll try to use English grammatical structures in French, or spontaneously put an English word instead of a French one in the middle of a French sentence because it feels better suited to what I want to express. A few times I even said an entire sentence, then looked back on it bcs something sounded off, and realized only afterwards that i’d actually used an English word in it.
I’m learning German aside from that, and I’m starting to experience the same effects of languages blending and frustration at my lack of ability to express my feelings accurately with solely my mother tongue (even though my French vocabulary is at least as good as that of any other native speaker).
I'm Polish and moved to US at 14. When I was in my 20's I began to struggle due to lack of exposure to proper speech (this was before the internet and Ponglish doesn't count). I have since reverted due to marriage to a Polish woman and of course the availability of reading and watching material online. Nevertheless, when listening to political debates in Polish, I realize that I would not come across as very eloquent, although in English I probably would.
My Brother in laws Mother was a German speaking Austrian who came to England when she was 14, by the time she was in her eighties, having never gone back to Austria and remained in the UK, she had completely forgot her native language.
i speak both English and Spanish, the latter being my first language, i learned english fairly young (6 or 7) and my grand grand mother spoke to us in german when we were toddlers, so i picked up a lot of the sounds required
the only things i do in spanish is when i send emails to other spanish speakers, on meetings at work, and conversations with people that live here, everything else i do in english, my electronics are in english, i exclusively consume english content, i read novels in english, books for work in english, i often find myself in the situation of "how do i say X in spanish now?", and when translating in real time i struggle to keep proper grammatical order of some things (spanish usually uses noun adjective, english is usually adjective noun)
thanks for the video!
I'll show this to my Danish friend. Thanks for helping him.
Beginning at 2:07, Metatron gives us an example of a "hypothetical" person. What I find weird is that the details of this person match up closely with the mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, who moved from Poland to England at the age of 12. I remember seeing Bronowski on TV in 1973 saying that he had forgotten every word of Polish he ever knew. Coincidence?
How can someone be such a well known philosopher but also so moronic in a sense
I struggle with forgetting words so often, and the worst thing is that I live in my own country. I think it’s because I hear and read English so much during the day. My family also makes fun of me because almost every single one of my sentences with end with an English word. My catchphrase is “ What is that called?” And I’m not even that good at English so it’s kind of weird.
About the part where you talked about the psycholigical conditions and trauma that might make you prefer other languages. Personally, while still having to speak german in my daily life, I much prefer speaking english and specifically avoid and have a harder time to articulate my personal and emotional problems in my native language. I already suspected that it might have to do with childhood trauma and it was even more interesting when hearing someone completely unconnected to me talking about the same thought.
This is very interesting for me and has been a thought in my head for quite some time, especially this year. I am a translation/interpretation student in Turkey, in my second year. Growing up, I'd love to learn new things, be it from playing video games or things I did as a child. I'd say my journey of learning a language started around when I was 8-9, and it was not a conscious decision. I'm a native Turkish speaker, and I'd consider myself native English speaker as well, at least native-like. Now, as a person, I don't feel any connection to this country and its culture. There have been times when I went months without speaking any Turkish at all. I often find myself being unable to produce the words I'm thinking of in my native language, but I can very easily say it in English, or sometimes in German too, which is very surprising to me given that I've only been learning German for a year. The part in this video mentioning that an individual's brain can literally put a barrier on the usage of one's native language really did captivate my interest. Very intriguing!
This hits hard to me. In my early years I was fluent in Vietnamese, but then I consumed a lot western media which brainwashed me to learn English. Now, I barely know the simplest words and can barely put together basic sentences. It's truly sad. I wondered if anyone else experienced the same thing, and reading these comments, specifically because I am at a young age, has given me hope to reconnect with my family's communication fully. Not only that, I go to Vietnam pretty frequently for a prolonged amount of time, which helps my Vietnamese whenever I stay. However, I keep telling myself I'm trying hard to relearn my first language, but in reality, I am being lazy. Watching this video has woken me up. If you've made it this far, or even if you've seen this, thank you for caring enough to listen to me rant about my language history.
I'm an American living in Poland. Forgetting specific words (especially when someone asks 'How do you say X in English?') is a real thing. Also spelling is a problem. There are also all sorts of words related to the legal and government systems and sometimes foods or birds or plants that I understand in Polish just fine but have now idea how to say in English.
No. You’re Canadian living in Poland.
@@anonymoususer8895 Canadian? There is _no_ need to insult me like that! I have no idea what you're even talking aboot.
@@cliffarroyo9554 You’re Canadian hoser!
@@anonymoususer8895 I am most certainly not, eh?
@@cliffarroyo9554 Yeah you are beaver boy!
On the topic of pronunciation, I’ve had friends and relatives who literally “lost” their native accent due to solely speaking English in foreign countries for long periods of time. For example, my cousin moved abroad with her family when she was 12 and now (around 15 years later) sounds like a non-native speaker when speaking my language. It was especially noticeable with her pronunciation of Rs and diphthongs.
I once went to Disney World and also met a family who spoke my language. The parents moved to the US and the children were born there. Funnily enough, I noticed the same thing with them - not just the children, but the native parents as well. They were people who lived in my country and spoke the language for 25+ years, yet when I met them 20 years after their emigration I still noticed changes in the pronunciation of their mother tongue. To be fair, non-native speakers would have a very hard time to notice these changes, but for me and my family, who are native speakers, it was immediately noticeable.
very good video 👍
One thing I've always wondered...
Suppose you decide to retire in a country where you've learned the language as a second language and you're fluent in it. As you reach old age and your mind starts to go, are you more likely to lose your second language, even though you use it every day, because you learned it later in life?
It's probably going to be very random - a word forgotten here, a word forgotten there, but you won't just completely forget one language on another. The language in which you were fluent at least once over a lifetime is very deeply neurologically connected to many of your emotions and past memories, even if you would "forget" to speak 90% of the words, you would probably still find yourself randomly generating thoughts in this or that language or even say or yell random words and phrases when feeling something.
Metatron helping emigrants get over their fears one video at a time
I remember seeing an interview of a Finnish woman who moved to France like five years ago to be a baker or something. She spoke Finnish on the interview but she had this sliight French accent which stuck with me due to how interesting/weird that was.
I also have immigrant friends who moved to Finland when they were like ten. Whenever they visit their family back at their country of birth, their relatives comment that they have a "foreigner accent". I don't know if you meant all this with your comment on the pronunciation but these examples came to my mind!
6) I've been living abroad for more than 25 years and, although I speak Italian at home with my partner, it does happen quite frequently that I need to think hard to find certain words in my own native tangue.
I'm suprised that you did not know "gelsi" or what fruit it is, for "granita di (more di) gelso" is a specialty of Sicilian cuisine.
I was on a train in Taiwan and an Asian-American guy asked me if I would ask for directions in English to one of the Chinese passengers. I said ok, but why don't you ask them? He said they wouldn't understand why he would speak to them in English if he asked in English because he was etnically Chinese. But he said if he asked them in Chinese, it would be weird because he only spoke Chinese until he was 5 years old and he sounds like a little kid when he speaks Chinese. Ha ha.
4:23 this is something I experience every day. My native language is German and I self studied lots of topic on the internet, especially though youtube. Therefore while learning the topics I picked up the specific vocabulary only in English making it hard to explain many interesting things to friends and family because of the language barrier.
I didn't really have a first language, but there are languages that I spoke as a kid that I can barely understand these days and definitely can't speak fluently. But I started learning English in school (when I was 6 years old) and lived 1 year in England in my early 20's-- but I'd often have people assume I was a native speaker.
I had a Scottish English teacher in 8-10th grade and she had moved to Norway as an adult and lived there for 20+ years, she sounded a bit Norwegian when she spoke English. I don't think it's common though.
There is a video called "How I Learned Norwegian on My Own" or something similar to that-- it's very good for any language learned I highly recommend it no matter what language you're learning! She's not a native English speaker, but after learning Norwegian she now has a Norwegian accent when speaking English!
I’m French and Spanish but always lived in France. So my French is native and fluent, but my Spanish accent is not the best. I don’t have a French accent, I just haven’t properly developed my Spanish accent. I speak Spanish with my mom and the Spanish half of my family but that’s it. The funny thing is that since it was my mom who mostly took care of me, I learned Spanish first, and French came second, but my French is more developed. I am able to easily switch between the two and I created some mixed words and expressions with my parents and sometimes I like to pronounce french words or sentences like it’s Spanish because my mom started it as a funny thing to do and I like doing that.
I never really realized how much of a gift being able to speak multiple languages natively is. Thank you for reminding me that in certain cases languages can be weakened, it makes me want to practice my Spanish more.
This topic interests me greatly since I was born in Germany and lived there during my early years but after living in the US for decades I lost a lot of my German . I have Autism and that may be an aspect to this as well as early childhood trauma from being mistreated as a foreigner in Texas in the early 90's by family and people.
I spent a year as an Erasmus student in Norway, from France, at age 19. I was quite good at speaking English before going. In Norway, I had all my courses and exams in English and spoke English to everyone I met. I also studied Norwegian (it wasn't compulsory but I wanted to learn some and had some German language background so it was interesting to learn). I consume most of my media in English, and I didn't call home much (maybe twice a month or so?). I also sorta avoided meeting French people in Norway, because I wanted to practice English and meet international and Norwegian friends rather than make a bubble of people from my country and stay in it like I a lot of people do.
I ended up completely fluent in English by the end of the year. However, when I returned to France, I spent a long time (like, a year, a year and a half maybe) struggling. I didn't have a hard time understanding people ofc. But in group settings, when you have to interject your thoughts quickly into the conversation, I couldn't. I would think of something to say and get half the words in French, the other half in English, and when I tried I would stumble over words. It's never been hard for me before to speak to a group, but that was truly painful and cost me some "friendships".
4:22 Funny thing with electric fan. I thought it was "ventilator" in Swedish, got to a page on the things used to keep lungs from collapsing, and only then recalled "fläkt", but "ventilatore" was actually the Italian word.
3:00 That issue with neologisms is exactly what my Italian father has when we visit relatives in Italy. He moved to Germany at age 19, in 1970. He can perfectly converse with people in Italian, and his age doesn’t make it odd that he speaks like an old man, but he can’t comprehend his nieces and nephews (my cousins) when they’re having conversations among each other. He also takes a day or two to “get warm” in Italian every time. About the pronunciation, even though he left Italy over 50 years ago, I don’t hear any German accent in his Italian. He has, of course, a strong accent speaking German.
I can subscribe a tutto quello che hai detto pendant ta vidéo, mélanger the languages is very important per riuscire a comunicare correctement in various languages ma a volte si ottengono d'étranges résultats, indeed!
Great video. I've experienced most of the things mentioned on the video. Regarding the changing your pronunciation based on an L2: Well, it did happen to me naturally and I had to correct it back as I found it quite annoying. I've known people with the same condition as well. You basicly speak with a foreign accent. It happens when you didn't actually add a new language into your porfolio, let's say, but you sort of replaced your main language by something else.
I am from a region in Spain that has a regional language and I speak both that language and Spanish fluently, but with friends and family I almost exclusively spoke in Spanish, and used the other language in school.
When I was an exchange student in the US, since I only kept contact with friends and family in Spanish, as I became more fluent in English and it kinda became my second second language, everytime I would try to speak the regional language, even in my brain, I would switch to English without noticing.
When I came back, the first months were a bit awkward when the teacher would ask something and I instintively would reply in English.
Great post as indicated by the number of comments. My sons were born in Japan, my wife is Japanese. We moved back to the US when my oldest son was entering kindergarten and he had no problem retaining his first language, in fact he is now living and working in Tokyo. However, I’ve always worried about my younger son losing his Japanese. When he started pre-school he stopped speaking entirely for at least a month, then just started babbling in English. He is an adult now, and when he returns to Japan he seems to be able to understand but not respond in Japanese, but that may be part of his personality, hesitant to say something incorrectly.
On how you are using your hands I understand you still speak fluent Italian 🇮🇹
Nice video. Thank you 🙏
One of my friends moved from the Netherlands to Germany (she married a German guy so moved there around her 20th year) does this other interesting thing.
She still speaks Dutch very well but she started using German grammar and expressions in Dutch over time. In the beginning she noticed it, but nowadays it's like it's normal for her.
I Moved to Romania from the USA a year ago, and I did something called a preparatory year at the university to learn the language up to level B2 after 6 months. I am now at level C1 and my family often tells me I have an accent in English. It has impacted my speaking, especially because it's the only language I use outside of my house.
I'm sure that my accent would go back to normal after a few days back home, but the fact that I spend all of my time speaking Romanian and I don't know any native speakers of English here is probably why I have developed this accent.
In Romanian, I perfected the accent, as most cannot tell I'm not Romanian. It feels quite natural for me.
I arrived at age 20 and I'm now 21. I spoke Italian as a child with my grandparents, though I lost it before i entered school, only remembering some words, so it could be that the similarity in pronunciation brought out a familiar accent.
Being a bilingual in England myself, I mostly agree with everything in the video. I have a similar experience over the last decade.
On the other hand, I only agree - mostly - because I always had the impression that people who moved countries before the internet calls on Skype and other apps had to spend a lot on international phone call. The motivation to merge with the background used to be much more forceful and I remember stories of aunties returning to the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia after the 1989 revolution. They apparently couldn't speak very well at all - and their accent was altered.
I relate to this video so so much, I am forgetting both German and russian as we speak and I think it's really sad 😢 In school they always told me that english is really really important back when I wasn't scoring A's in the subject, bet they never thought it would lead to this tho
I am linguistically speaking, fractured.
Me and my family are primarily trilingual(with the first language being spoken in two dialects ).
I had no formal education in my mother tongue and I lived my toddlerhood in the US(for a time as a child I believed I was born there) so American English could arguably be considered my first language in the sense of which one I started with.
My country does formal education in two languages(primarily English) none of which were my native languages, I've been using digital devices in English since probably younger than age 5 and as my family is trilingual and spent two years in the US, they would also use their secondary and tertiary languages in everyday life alongside their first language and so I in the basic sense was fluent in my native language but I wasn't able to go intermediate or advanced level with it and the same went for my country's lingua franca with me only showing continuous progress in English since as far as reading and writing on the computer are concerned, it is the language I use almost exclusively. And believe me, I am a computer addict!
The only thing living around 90% of my life in my native country did was make me lose the American accent I had in the middle of my childhood when speaking English(again because I used English more for computers than for speaking despite speaking it much more fluently compared to the others).
I spoke Spanish just as much as English for the first 2 years of my life, and my first words were Spanish, but then my family moved and from then on I was mostly speaking English aside from my dad trying to maintain/reteach spanish when I was 5-7, before giving up and allowing me to forget it entirely. So, in a sense I forgot one of my native languages, but seeing as I was so young I would say that this doesn’t really matter much for the overall idea of forgetting a native language. My siblings’ Canadian nanny once told me about how one of her friends had moved to Quebec and only spoken French for around a decade and as a result couldn’t speak English very well, so it seems that even if you don’t forget the whole thing, you can severely decline in speaking capabilities if you don’t use your native language. And in personal experience, I would say you don’t truly forget all of a language, as much of simple spanish grammar just makes sense to me, and I find myself occasionally thinking Spanish and (as well as ASL, which I have been learning for ~4 years) words when I don’t have a reason to. Things like “de” instead of “from”, “y” instead of “and”, or “estoy” instead of “am”. I also routinely use ASL without even thinking about it, or get confused about what someone is signing when they are just moving their hands a lot while speaking. Language is weird and my brain is a linguistic mess.
i learnt english a fes years ago, i had always been mountain biking for my whole life but i never got too technical, and, in those few years of time, i began taking it seriously and watching tons and tons of videos about biking in general and bike mechanics videos. there are still to this day bike parts that i have no idea what the word for is in french (i'm french)
I grew up in the Netherlands in a bilingual household (Dutch and German). As I grew up I started using German less and less, and after age 18 or so I hardly ever spoke it any more. Then in my early 30s I moved to the U.S. and lived there for 20 years, speaking English almost exclusively. Then back to the Netherlands, and also got back in touch with my German relatives.
My experience is that I never forget anything as far as language learning is concerned. Not speaking a language means you don't improve, specifically, your vocabulary stops expanding, and speaking may become rusty. I found that there were some words that I had learned in English but didn't know the Dutch or German equivalents of, but not too many, because I had already had excellent vocabulary in those languages before I stopped speaking them regularly. I did find getting back into German a bit difficult at first, but that was just lack of practice. Within a few hours with my cousins, I was speaking like a native again.
This video popped up as a recc felt like a call out to me as I started with Cantonese but as soon as I started school I switched to English after a few years to fit in as I grew up in the UK and no one could understand me speaking Cantonese, obviously lol.
I spoke both until I was 18 and then my Cantonese drastically got worst because I stopped speaking it daily to my parents when I moved out and now I find myself forgetting it and not thinking in both languages anymore :’)
Knowing what certain words in seperate languages is totally true though and happens to me often depending on the environment I learnt certain words.
on pronunciation - i have a funny story
i live in brazil, i speak portuguese and english and never left my own state, but in some way i was able to pick up a paulista (são paulo) manner in my speech
a lot of people in são paulo usually pronouce the R like in Rat, while most of brazil pronounce it as in Hat (like saying porta/door)
i do not have any friends from são paulo irl, and from what i recall i just started using the R ironically, but eventually it sticked and in some point someone even asked if i was from são paulo because of this
with this said, even though more than half of the content i see everyday is in english, it never affected the way i spoke portuguese, so the point of the video still stands lolol (good video btw)
Very interesting; explains a few things.