Re: the wrong number?

Wayne Brown wrote:
"Skitt" wrote:

Hmm. I've spoken English for 57 years now, and my usage is:
I chased girls
I love the sea
I dialed a wrong number
I talk about the weather
Buses should run on time I have very little experience with the
police.

Are you saying you've spoken English as a native language since you
were born 57 years ago or that you started speaking English as a
foreign language 57 years ago?

It was English as my second foreign language.

If it's the latter, then much depends
on your age at the time of transition. If you were a small child
removed from the influence of his native language by not speaking it
to his parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, then
chances are good you made the transition to English as a native
speaker. If, however, you entered an English-speaking environment in
your teens with years of schooling in your native language and
continued speaking, even reading and writing it, then chances for
gaps in your English are high. This becomes apparent to a native when
a non-native ventures into language areas where he has to use
formulations and constructions that are not part of the language
repertoire he has had down pat for years. Then non-native slips
become obvious. There're said to be geniuses who have achieved native
proficiency in a foreign language as adults, but they are certainly
the exception rather than the rule.

I think that I might be one of those exceptions. I tried extremely hard not to be different from the native speakers around me.

I was sixteen, but I think that I have a knack for languages. I had already lived in Germany for five years and spoke fluent German, another language that was non-native to me.

After arrival in California, I still spoke Latvian with my parents, but once I returned from a three-year stint in the military, I spoke only English to them, but they answered in Latvian. This was in 1959, and I have spoken practically no Latvian since then. There was a rare exception in 1996, when I visited Latvia and had to speak it again to get by. I managed fairly well.

When I first joined this group in 1997, I wrote an e-mail message to Rey in German, but only he can be the judge of its correctness and fluency. It had been forty-two years since I had last used that language.

There are a few contributors to AUE who have heard me speak in person. I believe that it would be extremely difficult for anyone to peg me as a non-native speaker of English, but there have been a few, maybe three or four in the last twenty years, who have asked me where I was from. I did not make them specify whether they felt I was from abroad or just "not from around here". In the years before the last two decades, people have asked me if I were originally from the "other coast". This happened on both coasts. There is a quality of my speech that might set me apart from many -- I try to enunciate words clearly, but that is attributable to the public speaking courses I've taken, rather than to my roots.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
http://www.geocities.com/opus731/

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Leodhasach & Hearasch - Gaelic help please
    ... course our own traditional language is even more neglected than Gaelic is. ... who speak English soon get the gist of it. ... is someone who truly appreciates Scottish culture in that you won't find ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: amazon to move to eire because of bliars education, education, education...
    ... I'm expecting him to make the effort of speaking my language. ... I do this too, and have to say that when you're on holiday, it's kind of embarressing speaking in English and not even attempting a word in the other country language, even if they do speak a little / better English then the English. ... Having said that, from my experience, the Belgians (in French or Dutch), Dutch, and Germans are not too fussed if you pronouce something wrong, or get the male / female of an object mixed up. ...
    (uk.politics.misc)
  • the tomasites , english and the filipino
    ... And they came to teach English as part of the "policy of attraction" ... a Filipino is deemed illiterate even ... Even a secondary Spanish school like Colegio de San Juan de Letrán ... wrote a textbook to teach the English language as early as 1902. ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)
  • Re: the tomasites , english and the filipino
    ... this change was documented in books written in English or other ... European languages not Tagalog or any other of the Filipino dialects. ... second language, unfortunately it seems that we did not use these ... Even a secondary Spanish school like Colegio de San Juan de Letrán ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)
  • Re: True western view of new Baltic masters
    ... English skills of their kids. ... Latvian, bad Russian, and no real linguistic home ground. ... What do you mean "language isn't national"? ...
    (soc.culture.baltics)