RatCreature's Journal

You know, writing/reading in English so much has some odd (and rather embarrassing) side-effects. Like in English in German there are some fixed expressions, some quite similar to their English counterparts, but not exactly. And I have developed the odd tendency to take the English phrasing, with German words, instead of the German one. For example, today I caught myself with the phrasing "das Ding ist, dass..." (the English "the thing is, that...") instead of using "die Sache ist die, dass..." as I should have. I also catch myself rather frequently with using "hast du eine Idee, was..." (the English "do you have any idea what...") instead of using "hast du eine Ahnung, was..." and I'm sure there are more examples.

It gets really annoying when even after thinking for a moment I'm not sure whether you can use some phrasing in German. I mean, these transformations are always more or less grammatically correct, they could exist, they are just not the right phrasing, and it's really disconcerting to have lost hat feeling of certainty in some instances. Of course I'm not alone in doing this, and in some cases the process is so far along that the "English" wording is replacing the one previously used or becoming an alternative like it has happened with "das macht keinen Sinn" (the English "makes no sense") and the German "ergibt keinen Sinn", I googled both combinations, and "macht keinen Sinn" is now about six times as common as the other one. And it's not like I'm some kind of language purist and think that the process in itself is awful, but it still is sort of embarrassing if you are doing it with phrases for which it is not common yet.

I think that the embarrassment of this is only surpassed by using common fixed expressions that don't exist at all in German, but are useful in English, so I use them in German as well (notorious is "I get the idea" though I really watch myself with that one by now). Just they don't exist (yet), and of course people look at me funny. Or I barely stop myself in time, and then have to scramble to think of how to phrase in German. I'm really starting to see why bilingual people, when they talk with other bilingual people (that is when they share the same two languages) seem to switch between languages in mid-sentence fairly regularly for some words or expressions without missing a beat. It sounds sort of odd at first, but I see why that is fairly common.

I got a mail from amazon.com that the delivery of the Nightwing TPBs I ordered is going to be delayed. When I ordered on February 1st their website said they'd be able to deliver them in one or two weeks, now they hope they can send them within the next two weeks. This sucks. Also I'm slightly envious of all the people who get to go to fun slash cons, like Escapade. Sigh.

Not really fandom related, but in keeping with my generally disgruntled mood, I'd also like to mention that my Spanish skills aren't really improving. Not least because my Spanish course fell victim to a cost-cutting measure, an all too common fate for these things it seems.

You know, once upon a time -- okay not quite that long ago, but when I started college anyway -- my university offered free language courses for students, even if they didn't have that language as a major or a minor, or as a requirement. The university just provided the opportunity for all its students to learn and practice useful language skills. Since here a physics major doesn't allow for a minor in a language (and I wouldn't have wanted to do one anyway), that was a great opportunity for me to practice my French once a week. But then the university implemented "cost-cutting measures", and wouldn't (or couldn't) offer language courses for free anymore, unless of course you study languages. But those are quite different courses from the ones aimed at students from other departments anyway.

Well, that ended my regular French practice, though reaching the sort of "frustration plateau" where you don't seem to be really getting better also had its part. I mean, I don't know if it's that way for everybody, but for me at first when starting with a new language progress seems quite fast, and okay you can't say a lot of interesting stuff, but you really notice how you understand more and more. Then after a while comes the point when you know all the major basic grammar stuff, understand quite a lot, know more or less how to talk in "standard situations" (like introducing yourself, buying or ordering food, asking for help and directions, naming your hobbies, expressing likes and dislikes,...) but you still can't really talk freely about interesting things, because your active vocabulary is just too small for that, and also your passive vocabulary isn't large enough enough yet to read real books without looking up every other word. And watching films and such is also a problem because your listening comprehension has huge gaps as soon as people start to talk really fast, mumbling or in dialects, so for tv and movies it sucks pretty much all the time. And then it seems like your skills are going to suck like that forever, like it doesn't get better at all. The only language where I really got past that point so far has been English, mostly I guess because you get so much more exposure to it without having to seek it out.

Uh, before this ramble derails completely, my point was that when I decided to learn Spanish the university courses weren't free anymore, so I found a great course in a women's culture center, which was with a small group and quite cheap, if your income was below a certain level. However the local government changed (to a right-wing one) and decided not to subsidize women's projects like the previous government did, resulting in much less money for the center offering the course. I mean, they now barely manage (mostly through fundraising) to keep the rooms, the library and to organize an occasional reading or event, but they couldn't keep their course program. The teacher offered to continue privately with the group, but since the group wasn't large that would have been more expensive even with splitting the costs and very moderate payment expectations by the teacher.

I tried to continue to practice, do exercises on my own, read in Spanish, but without the looming deadline of a course once a week I'm much less diligent in these matters. Also I'm definitely not at a point in my progress where I am an interesting conversational partner for any of the people I know who speak Spanish fluently (as first or as foreign language). My knowledge might be better than no means of communication in situations without any alternative and rather simple topics, but when German is there as an alternative both speak fluently, my feeble Spanish stands no chance. Also I'm somewhat shy and reluctant to talk (outside of class room situations) in a language I don't know well, so I won't open my mouth to say something even if other people have a conversation in Spanish (or mostly in Spanish, since as usual when two bilingual people talk, there tend to be these switches) next to me. I noticed this reluctance when I was in the UK for the first time as a teenager, and while my English was okay, I had never been to an English speaking country before or used English in everyday communication. I tend to have this (slightly irrational) fear that nobody will understand anything of what I'm trying to say, that I will embarrass myself horribly, etc. etc. I know that language learning only really works if you try to talk, and I know a lot of people who just jump in and use what they know, no matter the skill level, but -- I don't know. For me it's just not a very pleasant feeling to only have a minimal range of a language at my disposal, it somehow feels worse or more illiterate than not knowing the language at all. Which is sort of ridiculous, yet on the other hand, when you don't speak a language at all, others will just think that you don't speak the language, when you talk funny or wrong, people may think all kinds of things about you.

Anyway I'm not getting a lot of Spanish practice right now. At least I'm not wholly Babel Fish dependent anymore when I get Spanish e-mails on mailing lists.

Not for the first time I'm thinking that it would be really cool if English had a non-awkward extra pronoun with the function of the "general you," something that can't be confused with the "you" addressing someone directly. Using "one" instead just doesn't always work. Just think of how much hassle, misunderstandings and clarification posts this would prevent. I don't think it would really prevent flamewars, but at least you could get rid of the awkward parentheses saying "with you I mean the general you." I mean other languages have these things, they are really practical. I don't really get why English "chose" that "one" would be uncommon and/or formal. (I see that it is very dubious to ascribe motivations and actions to languages, I mean whatever complicated process it is that leads to these things in languages, however it's shorter to anthropomorphize...<g>) Okay, so English likes to be somewhat sparse in its pronouns, and usually I don't mind that the singular and plural "you" aren't different and that there's no extra polite form, but I miss that impersonal pronoun.

Though maybe I just like more pronouns in general, I regularly miss that "we" (in German as well as in English) offers no distinction whether that "we" includes the person you address or just means you, i.e. the speaker, and a third person. I've heard other languages have this distinction, I think Chinese has, but I'm not sure. Anyway, the languages I learned miss this nifty feature (but then I've learned only quite closely related European languages, so it's not surprising they all miss it).

I just had to edit an email because I wrote a German sentence with partly English sentence structure without noticing that while writing it. I put the verb at the wrong place!

I somehow find that weirder than the semi-regular bleed over of very common English idioms I experience. I mean, word order is much more essential than accidentally transferring an idiom. And how embarrassing is it to need a second read-through to put verbs in the correct places in your native language? I either write too many English or too few German emails, it seems.

Though I'd probably need some linguistical or neurological theory or something to understand these weird glitches properly...