Discussion → Introduce yourself!
-
Hi all,
I'm Canadian , born in England to a British father and Italian mother. My first language was Italian, because my parents spoke only Italian to each other at home.
I started speaking English at the age of 3 when we came to Canada, but my mother always spoke only Italian to me, so the two languages were always a bit scrambled in my head!
I know a litte bit of French, un petit peu.
Very nice to meet you all!
-
Hi, Carol!
Glad to see you had the good sense to be born in Britain and then the even better sense to emigrate! I'm happy you are joining us with your trees and silence.
Lou
-
Hola H.M. Brown, bonjour Carol!
yes, very nice to meet! i didn't expect the Second Tongue group to grow so quickly, but there we are, with 15 members already, after not even 15 days of existence. so exciting.
to add some words, i now followed the poetry theme from Nora, and included 'en/core' -- a poem i pieced together on a trip to Spain.
viele grüße! (german for 'many greetings')
dorothee
-
This is Ajay from India.
When it comes to languages, India has a bit to offer (what with 25-odd 'national' languages and a few hundred dialects). I am pretty sure almost everyone in India speaks, reads and writes at least two languages, English not necessarily one of them.
My mother tongue is Malayalam, the native language of Kerala, one of the two southern-most states of the country. Since I have lived in Bombay all my life, I grew up speaking Hindi as well, the most common language spoken in the country. I started with English at school (where it was the 'first' language and the medium of instruction). So these are the three languages I am reasonably good with. Additionally, I can understand (but not speak) Marathi (the language of the state I live in) and Tamil (due to...er...television viewing habits of my folks). I have only ever written stories in English though and it is the language that I think in.
As far as what I do is concerned, I just quit my job as a private equity investor to partner my brother in his business of managing independent artists and promoting music festivals. I also used to be a business consultant and an investment banker earlier.
-
wow, missed page 2 of this thread entirely due to the clever encoding ("2")...welcome carol and ajay. excited to have you on here, too. i agree with doro, we've had a good start, now we need to come up with the questions that we have inside us, not just what everyone sees (which is arguably more - or different - for the bi/multilingual author). merry christmas to y'all in all tongues you master or dream in. or watch tv in (that made me laugh, ajay).
-
Hi
I've been lurking here for a few days, thought I'd introduce myself at long last.
I was born in Russia, and my mother is Russian, but I am German, and I consider German my native language. I can understand Russian very well, speak it decently, read like as if in elementary school, and not write at all.
I can read French very well, but due to a lack of exercise my written and especially spoken French have deteriorated to the point where I started to converse with my french fb friends in English
I have a decent command of English, too. Just as well since I'm writing my phd in English (and I wrote my MA in English as well) at a German university. I have been a poet for ages, but during the past 3-4 years I have learned a lot about how I write, and developed my writing, all in English. I haven't written a German poem in years. So I do creative and academic writing in English. My blog is largely in English as well. I speak and dream in German though.
I can understand some latin, but it's actually pretty much gone down the drain...
Yeah.
-
Welcome, Marcel!
I really appreciated your comments on my Strassenbahn poem, and the link to your blog. Now I know exactly where to go if I want a good breakdown of contemporary German literature. I wish I had half your linguistic abilities.
I liked 'Ted' but was a little confused about the pests and their 'spiky bits.' Not that it really matters - it's not so much what you intended but what I take away, right?
-
Right. My poems tend to be confusing, and they surprise even me. I work intensively on all kinds of formal aspects but I don't touch the imagery.
-
Hi,
Native English speaker here. I'm from New Zealand, where I lived until I was 24. Then I moved to Geneva, with a month's warning, during which I read halfway through Hugo's 'French in Three Months'. I've been in Geneva for four and a half years now, and can read most French with no problems, understand spoken French without any problem if it's spoken clearly like on the radio, and spell French better than the average netizen. But since I speak English in my job, and just about everybody in Geneva starts speaking to me in perfect English the moment they hear my accent (often because they're not native French speakers either) I have not had much practice speaking it.
Nonetheless, I have attempted to write a few half-English, half-French poems, which I think make sense, though I can never quite be sure. Tangentially related: A great book on the subject of translating poetry (among other things) is 'Le ton beau de Marot' by Douglas Hofstadter. It's in English, but it's written around dozens of translations of a French poem into English and other languages. I translated it into a half-English half-French poem about a sick computer (the original is about a sick girl), but haven't got around to making any other translations of it.
I am a member of the Geneva Writers' Group, where people with all sorts of native languages (often more than one each, the veinards [if you'll excuse my French]) write in English better than I do. I have great admiration for the people who go to the trouble to learn English and move to English-speaking countries only to be treated as idiots by monolingual anglophones for the few faults they make. I have a similar admiration for the people who go to the trouble to learn English and not move to English-speaking countries, to make monolingual anglophone visitors to their countries feel less like idiots, despite the fact that they'd be treated not only as idiots but as extremely rude idiots if they went to said visitors' countries without bothering to learn English first. This admiration extends to everybody in this group. It was part of my reason for wanting to move here.
Apart from that, I love learning languages (if only to have more words to play with... I make abortive attempts at making puns in other languages long before I have enough of a grip on the language to have much chance of success) but don't know any others nearly as well as English and French. I read 'German in 3 Months' in preparation for a 3-week trip to Regensburg (that was before I knew that Europeans all speak English perfectly), and the first 10 chapters of '40 leçons pour parler néerlandais' in preparation for a one-week trip to Rotterdam (and so that I can respond in Dutch next time a francophone confuses néo-zélandais with néerlandais, although to be convincing I need to find a way of saying 'ik spreek geen nederlands' without the unpronounceable g.) I'm going to need to learn German properly, since my job will take me to Vienna in a few years. I also was taught Maori and Japanese at school, but by anglophones, in English, so I never really learnt to use them. I have several shelves full of dictionaries and other books about languages I'm unlikely to find time to learn. It's an addiction(ary).
When speaking French, I hardly speak at all, when speaking English, I talk too much, when sleep-deprived I talk way too much whatever the language, and I didn't sleep at all last night. I'm sorry you had to put up with this.
-
"Addictionary"! thank you for that one! And pleased to meet you and all your languages, Angela.
-
Thanks for the invite, Finnegan, I really appreciate it. Hello to everyone else in this group. I am a German writing in English, poetry mostly. Hm, now - I just posted my first story on the main (fictionaut) page, but I should have posted it here?
-
morgue - welcome and thanks for the introduction albeit short...of course we all wonder why you write in english...
as for the groups: you should ADD STORY in this group after posting it to the public wall. lemme know if you have trouble with that.
your story has a german sensibility, i wonder if others think the same.
-
Hello people,
Thought I'd drop a little line to tell you some bits and pieces about myself. I am a Dutch poet, poetry reviewer and prose writer. I've published poems and stories in some reviews and anthologies and I am now getting ready to sell my first book of poetry to a publisher this year (optimism is a coping strategy, you know ;-]). For my prose, I have recently decided to try and switch to English as the Dutch market for stories and novels is not one I feel at home in at all (I will not write exactly will as this might turn into a rant and nobody likes a ranter on a forum). I also decided I would give myself a brand new name for this endeavor. Hence P. Jonas Bekker was born.
I am terrible at learning languages from books but I picked up my English mostly from American entertainment. And I love it. Compared to Dutch, it is much more concise and hard-hitting. I still prefer Dutch for poetry since vocabulary size is more of an issue there I think. Although this may also be a challenge trying to make it as a prose writer in English. But hey, I'm only 33 so I still have time.
When not writing (and this is too often the case) I am usually taking care of my two boys or playing my guitar trying to sound like I'm from the Mississippi Hill Country. Like that's ever going to happen.
Hope you like my first story and if there is anything else you want to know just ask.
Sincerely,
PJ
@ Kate: about Dutch swearing: we do cholera too, only we call it 'de kelere'. Very Amsterdam, all that, BTW. Where I live, the spoken Dutch is quite different, even though it's only an hour's drive from where you are.
-
exactly will = exactly why
sorry
-
Ah! This is the place where I can share a little poem I wrote 32 years ago when my last name was still Goldman (I'm not a man!) without officially posting it. I don't think it's substantial enough to interest anyone who doesn't know German.
German Autobiography
The difference between appleblossom
and Apfelblüte is this:
in the blossom I can tell
the wind when it sounds
like tumbling butterflies
in Apfel I hear children stumble
over Eve.Not so in apple or Blüte.
My mouth feels thick
like seven tongues at words
from trying to spit out one.I talk in my sleep saying
“Was? Was?”
and pronounce it in daytime
“was, was.”No doubt you know
where butterflies come from.
But I challenge you
where they are going.###
I do love what we do with languages and how they shape us.
I still want to figure out why in German the sun is feminine and the moon masculine and it's the other way around most everywhere else. What does it mean? Especially to this small person?
I also keep pondering the following two greeting exchanges:
Gaelic (Ireland):
Person A: It's cold.
Person B: Yes, it's cold.Sesotho (Lesotho, Africa):
Person A: Do you still live?
Person B: Yes, I still live.
.thumb.jpg)
Group Description
Second Tongue is the group for the bi- and multilingual fictionaut.
It doesn't matter to us whether your first language is French, Chinese, Greek, Swahili, Italian, Urdu, or any other of the world's groovy languages:
Make this your home, share your English writing and discuss with us what it means, for you, not to write in your mother tongue.
We also welcome native English speakers, who live and write abroad or who write in another language than English.
Share the pain - and the gain!
Dorothee, Finnegan and Nora
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.