loosing your own language
By LiminaL
@LiminaL (164)
Italy
March 5, 2007 10:24am CST
It's the second year now that I haven't been speaking my mathertongue, if not for a few days from time to time. I only use it in the written form. Unfortunately, I have to notice, that it is loosing quality, and that it always takes a lot of talking before I re-start thinking really in its terms. Especially if the content of the discussion in complex, It starts to be hard to work out sentences as I used to before starting living abroad. Any experience of the kind?
1 response
@gwendovere (1279)
• United States
4 Apr 07
I don't have personal experience with this, but I think it is important to keep in touch with your native language and culture. I would write letters to friends and family in your native language, read books, watch tv, listen to radio and music... anything you can get your hands on that is in your native language. Phone conversations, joining groups of people who share your native language. Anything you can do to keep your native language alive will help.
@LiminaL (164)
• Italy
4 Apr 07
I've never given importance to the fact of keeping my original culture alive, on the contrary I've always been thinking that it was impossible for it to move away from the first position in my way of thinking etc. Since I thought it stands at the base of me anyway, I've been rather focussed on opening my view to other cultural and linguistic realities. after a few years of this kind of approach, my approach to the thing is pretty much the same, in the sense that I'm more oriented towards the "stranger world", but one thing has changed: I now notice how precious the language I was grown up with is. through it I can get into a very specific and elaborated kind of thinking that I can never get by using any foreign language. I just need this capacity of using a language perfectly, and I feel that the first language of my life is the one that I never wont to be lost, not even a little.So, probably the only way to solve my problem will be to do things of the kind you are suggesting me. I wouldn't do it for cultural reasons, but for the sake of the language yes
