I say,our personal feelings can be expressed BETTER in our mother language..

Hi umadper, we could say we have been learning or more appropriate to say to keep in close contact with our respective mother tongues from the embryo time. that's what so-called antenatal training. Whereas second language or any other languages which are not our native languages we usually learn them when they are needed. It's sure that we can't manage to use second language as freely as like what it is expressed in our own native language so fine and smooth, no matter how good the foreign language we can master. I usually find not enough or short of appropriate words to describe my feeling or opinion, etc when expressing in second language Happy posting

it depends such as in many cases some words,sentences are not the same in different languages so may be in your native language has a complete meaning and in the foreign one really general so probably you can explain as good as your feelings naturally it would be easier in your native language!

I can agree on this. It makes sense. If you are say Filipino or Chinese and trying to express yourself in English, well, that's got to be difficult. Unless you are very, very fluent in the language then you are going to be concentrating on getting and pronouncing the words right which takes away from the emotion of what you are trying to say.

Hiya umadper, Right on umad. Me myself I cannot express in both languages what I really want to either. Spanish is almost my mother tongue yet I cannot express truly express what I really feel. I can beat about the bush and try to in Spanish but it does not sound the same or anything much like it. It is not that People will not understand it they will but I feel that I have left something behind when I am trying to express something special. I only read in English most Spanish Books are too heavy going for me unless they are Magazines or such like Newspapers they use a form of Spanish that is the day to day language. English is my mother tongue and it always will be. If there is one thing you cannot do is to completely wipe out your mother tongue it is there ingrained in our very essence of being. Portugese People often speak to me and I sometimes find it hard to follow them as Spanish is very similar but very different the verbs they use don´t have the same meaning you see and although they speak Spanish most of them they have problems making themselves understood sometimes not always.xxx

Yeah i totally agree that we can expressed ourselves better in our mother tongue because what we say in our mother tongue cannot be translated back as well as it was said and with the same emotions.So when you looked at it we are not ourselves completely when we are not speaking our mother tongue we cannot be ourselves as we cannot actually express ourselves like we could have want too.

Yes, I do believe that is true, you know. Not particularly all our feelings though. My mother tongue is Gujarati but I am more fluent in English. When I get angry, I revert to Gujarati, but when I want descriptive words to express my other feelings of wonder or happiness or something like that, I feel more comfortable doing it in English. How to explain that?

That makes sense really as when you think you think in your mother tongue so to express what you are thinking is simply a matter of saying these thoughts aloud exactlty how you thought them.If you tried to express them in another language you would first have to translate them and not all words translate that well and you may have a more limited vocablury to describe your emotions.

Hmmm I think expressing better depends on our whether our feelings and thoughts are clear or not more than the language...But I agree that using our mother language will be more effective to express those feelings because talking in our mother languages makes us feel more connected and close... So I will also prefer using mother language to express my feelings.

Yes it is really easy to express feelings in mother tongue.It does not matter how many languages we know and how fluent we are in it ,We just cannot express in other languages.This might be because of the fact that while using other languages we frame sentences in our mind using the grammar of the language before speaking from our mouth.This process slows us and diverts our mind to framing sentences and finally when we speak ,we speak only half of what we wanted to speak.