thanks but somehow the first paragraph doesn't show up properly on my end
It happened the first time over dinner. I was saying something to my husband, who grew up in Paris where we live, and suddenly couldn’t get the word out. The culprit was the “r.” For the previous few months, I had been trying to perfect the French “r.” My failure to do so was the last marker of my Americanness, and I could only do it if I concentrated, moving the sound backward in my mouth and exhaling at the same time. Now I was saying something in English — “reheat” or “rehash” — and the “r” was refusing to come forward. The word felt like a piece of dough stuck in my throat.
FYI, often Archive Today will see multiple fetches, one of which works. You can report failed fetches as well with the feedback ("report bug or abuse") link, top right.
I'd also found the initial paragraph partially obscured by a video element. Removing that (Element Inspector, uBlock Origin's element zapper) fixes that for me under Firefox.
I grew up in Stockholm / grew up speaking Swedish. Haven't spoken Swedish unless I'm at IKEA (for some reason Swedes flock there?!), which doesn't happen very often.
I can still read/understand but it's hard to remember words
I remember reading about a German woman who after the end of WWII married one of the American soldiers and moved to the US with him. She then never needed to use German again until she was quite old. She barely spoke any German by that time. I think she was interviewed by a German journalist - that's why I ended up reading about it.
I'm almost sure this was pre-Internet and paper. Asking Google is useless, I only get general pages about German "war brides". I'm trying to ask ChatGPT but right now it seems to hang while loading. I thought about asking DeepSeek, but I don't want to create a login (the ChatGPT site does not require one).
EDIT: ChatGPT actually loaded. I used the first paragraph of my comment as query. It did not give me a specific story, but it claims it "knows" about the phenomenon of German war brides forgetting much of their German, when they did not use it much after moving. Too bad I can't tell what the sources are for that information, ChatGPT saying something isn't proof.
There were large swathes of Americans in those generations who stopped using German publicly because of World Wars One and Two. German was at the time the second most commonly spoken language at home in America. You still see vestiges of it in recorded data about ancestry [1].
I suspect many among them would've largely forgotten a functional knowledge of German by the ends of their lives, even though it was their mother tongue and kitchen table language growing up.
In the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country was a town that Bismark that changed its name to Quentin after Quentin Roosevelt died in the Great War (WW I).
That's interesting, because for me, being able to read a language comes first, then being able to understand it being spoken, then speaking it in some (but definitely not all) contexts.
So, you spoke German at some point, but these days, you could not decipher a restaurant menu or ticket-vending machine? Not meant disparagingly, just truly curious...
The person you're responding to must have meant as a child, but I can also provide an adult anecdote: I could understand spoken German sooner than written because I, well, never read the language (can't understand it anyway) but was listening to conversation at the dinner table of German family and so picked it up that way
I know someone who learned to understand German spoken on TV and would sometimes speak it themselves (on day trips across the border primarily I imagine), so they've got a good intuition for e.g. word gender (that their native language doesn't have) but they can write most words only phonetically and don't know the grammar. Thankfully German orthography is not like English', but it's also not a 1:1 map (cheese isn't kese; name arbitrarily has no h)
My parents spoke German when I was a baby, but switched fully to English when I could walk so that I would fit in with other neighbourhood children. I learned to read in English.
I can still understand sufficiently simple spoken German and decipher some written German. You could say I read it at the level of the two-year-old I was.
I visited my mom's uncle when I backpacked in Australia, he moved there from the Netherlands at a young age.
He could still speak a few words, but definitely wouldn't be able to hold a full conversation in Dutch.
I'm Natively Dutch myself but live in Denmark, and sometimes also struggle to find the correct Dutch words when talking to my friends. Not that my Danish great, my partner isn't Danish and since I work at an international company, the default language is English.
Languages need a lot of upkeep if you want to keep speaking them fluently. On the other hand, just like muscle, once you've had it it's a lot easier to get back than having to put it on for the first time.
My husband's mother, a German who spent a few semesters in Britain in the late 50s and subsequently taught English and geography in gymnasium (German academic track middle and high school), taught him and few other neighborhood children some English during her maternity year after his younger sister was born. He was 4. She then went back to work, he went into regular German Kindergarten (preschool), and the whole matter was forgotten.
Until he was 10 and started classroom English in 5th grade - he had a very easy time of it. That year of getting English sounds into his little kid brain, despite coming from a non-native speaker who had only spent a few semesters in England, did some sort of magic, because ever since I've known him, he's sounded British enough to fool Americans (British people, on the other hand, can hear that something's off, and of course can't place his accent). He's a more fluent English speaker than I am a German speaker, but we both have to speak more English at our jobs than German.
I've lived in Germany for twenty years, and despite speaking what I would consider a merely adequate and certainly not native level of German, I've noticed that there's something a bit off about how I speak English. It's glaringly apparent when I'm back in Texas. Like the author, I make some strange word choices that are almost like direct translations from German, and it's had an effect on my grammar, too.
We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
> I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.
Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.
> Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.
I say this as a native English speaker… but I speak South African English (or something similar), and I’ve heard that this expression is due to Afrikaans influence!
Haha ok- but then so is German. Dutch has Low Franconian origins, and the more you learn about it, the weirder it gets. Also, it did not have the consonant shift- e.g. water (en) vs water (nl) vs wasser (de).
That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.
I don't know, I think maybe Dutch and German are more estranged siblings. English is a weird case because the German part is very German, but then the non-German part is pretty big!
Not OP here. You're right, but you could be more charitable in your reading of the previous comment. While it's wrong at the micro level it's not even nonsense on the macro level. Dutch and German are at the very least very related. They share a lot of constructs and words.
You could use it in English too so long as you add 'ago' on the end. "Since two days" makes no sense in English because "since" refers to a point in time not a duration.
That still doesn't sound natural to me. You could answer 'since when' with 'two days ago', but declaring it as a statement I'd say 'for the last two days' or 'since the day before yesterday'.
You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.
Do you notice an increase in this usage lately? I see it a lot on reddit and hn. All romance languages probably have it by the way. I know Italian does for sure.
I said this long before I moved out of the US. I live in NL now. I wish I could tell you where it came from. Probably from my stepfather who was raised in a rural Texas area that probably had some old Germanic roots.
That sounds perfectly British English to me, to the extent that I thought your point was going to be it was something German had stamped out of you.
Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.
(For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)
This example at least sounds perfectly natural to me, in California. I can remember my dad saying it, who was also a born and raised Californian. No German around whatsoever, shrug.
I grew up in a many-lingual house and really only know English, though I am trying to finally learn proper German.
But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out.
As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.
Similar timeframe in Germany, not only did my English got worse, even though I have more years of speaking English (since the age of 10), I also occasionally miss some Portuguese words, my native tongue.
Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.
Lately I noticed that I cannot even speak my native German dialect as easily as when I was a teenager (I moved away from home to university when I was 20). I often hesitate because I am not sure whether some word I said was correct in my native dialect, or the local dialect where I live now, or the dialect of my wife (Swiss German). At home, we speak a wild mixture of 3 different dialects and standard German. Our 5-year-old mainly speaks standard German because that's what they speak at kindergarten (most of the teachers don't speak the dialect, and there is a significant number of French, Italian, Ukrainian, and Syrian kids for which learning the dialect would be even harder). At work, I speak a mixture of English and standard German.
After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.
I have the same experience as well. After living in Germany for 12+ years, my English sometimes has this weird mix of English words and German grammar.
My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.
Some youths in Sweden are doing this in Swedish, being unable to properly communicate in their native language. Their English is usually not that great either though.
Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet.
Learning language is a lifelong journey, I'm convinced we continue to master our native language as well as we age. Maybe more so if we care and pay attention to it. So I hope there is still hope for some of the youth..
And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.
I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.
I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-)
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
I wouldn't worry too much about it, English is prevalent and useful enough that as long as gets to a reasonable level early enough, he should be able to pick stuff that separate him from your specific manerisms
Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one
I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life
Yes, you can (I submit myself as the example), but I'm not sure that the article/author is talking about fluency. Anecdotally, I lost fluency in my native tongue during my teens, though I don't carry a non-native accent when I do speak it.
However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.
Heck, I'm an English-only speaker, and I still get were/was wrong all the time. Honestly, I have no idea what the rule is there. They both sound correct-ish to me.
In this structure, “were” is used in cases where you are entertaining a hypothetical, and “was” is for something that was true.
English grammar is often confusing in cases like this because verbs mostly don’t have distinct spellings/pronunciations for the subjunctive mood, even though the subjunctive conjugations are part of the grammar.
It also doesn’t help that “subjunctive” is kind of the “else” condition among the three verb moods, the other two being “indicative” and “imperative,” so you often notice that it’s the subjunctive by ruling out the other two.
As a native US english speaker, this was fascinating to read and uncover my unknown learnings. You are not incorrect, but I would make a big caveat: 'as if it were' or 'as if it was' can, depending on context, sound foreign, in a transliterated way. Many native speakers, I think, expect some other phrasing to express the same meaning. Often through helpful ambiguators like 'like'.
Same here. I left my native country (family chose to move) when I was 8. By 12 or 13 I was probably more fluent in English than the original, although I continued to read, etc. I can still read, think a bit, help my family with duo lingo, but fluency would be a stretch so many years later. However, I have no doubt that if I moved back home, I could pick a fair amount up again in a few months. But I would probably forever be "teenage slang" non-fluent, as well as missing out on common idioms, etc.
My father left his birthplace when he was 4 or 5, and only knows a few words of his first language.
I lived in a Hindi speaking area for my first 23 years. Then I lived in a cosmopolitan area for 5 years. And then I lived in US for 14 years predominantly speaking english.
At that point, I moved back to India. And I had to converse with a telephone company call center, even though I selected English as my language in the phone tree, they repeatedly put me to Hindi speaking ones - I just could not converse with them. I tried. I could absolutely understand them, but I could just not speak hindi. The words or rather the sentences will not form.
Not any more. I think now I am truly bi/trilingual, but there was that day / week / month / year, when I had lost the ability to speak in Hindi. Not sure why, and it was not a one time event.
[ The only additional information that may be relevant : In between these years, I learned a semester of Russian. I learnt french. I got familiar with a multitude of south Indian languages - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam hearing friends speak them on a regular basis. And I was also conversant with Punjabi, common in our region in north india. But I never spoke any of these in day to day life for 14 years. And all these languages blurred into each other when I really had to use something other than English. ]
[ Also, I had a reason to switch to English pretty much exclusively. My son has learning disability and would find it hard in school as he will speak in Hindi and teachers would not understand. This is a long time back. So I decided not to confuse him and switched to english exclusively and lived like that for about a dozen years before this telephone company incident happened. I have posted about him before, this is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665942 ]
Wow. English+Hindi+French+Russian+Tamil+.... So cool. You should probably add some Arabic, some Chinese, some Xhosa, some Gaelic and some native American languages to this list to appear endlessly awesome :-)
I can not speak most of them. But having friends speak them for years makes you start catching the words, phrases, sentences and even the context though not equally well, not all the time, and not the same for each language - this is for the South Indian languages. I did formally study French and Russian (1 semester). And lol, I took Russian when the USSR still existed :) Those were the days.
Edit - I think I am done. I want to learn Spanish since it will be useful locally, but my brain can not take any more confusion. When you do not use these regularly, but have a faint notion of many many words, the brain does get confused on a regular basis. And I was not trying to brag, expressing helplessness.
I speak a few languages, and find myself losing the grip on the native one.
People I know that know more languages than me seem to be worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and grammar.
I have noticed it with a lot of Indian people I know, an aptitude for language. My understanding is that many learn Hindi, their home tongue, and english at school.
Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who went through university and learned English in school.
Yes, a lot of Indians that emigrate to foreign countries will have gone to schools where classes are taught in English, except for the local language class that is taught in that language. There are so-called "English medium" schools ("medium" as in the method of conveyance of knowledge in this case). There are also schools that are $local_language medium, but they were generally for poor people / lower social classes.
Only around 40% of Indians speak Hindi at home. Many Indians don’t speak Hindi at all. But a lot of Indians will learn Hindi and English in addition to what they speak at home.
I grew up in Romania. Spoke German at home, it was my Muttersprache (German minority in Romania). Went to a German school, but learned Romanian in K-12 there, spoke it fluently. Left Romania when I was 18. I can still understand most when I listen (I can watch Romanian movies not dubbed). I can read it and understand most of what I read. But I cannot form sentences anymore, cannot speak it for the life of me. Pretty strange. I guess it needs effort to revive it in one's brain.
Same here! Just that my family emigrated when I was 5 years old, plus my Romanian native mother passed when I was 14. this was some 25 years ago. Now, I do understand Romanian media, but can’t speak past a simple „Buna ziua, ce mai faci“.
Interestingly, some 18 years ago I went to intern in Mexico. After 6 months there, I was quite fluent in Spanish. But when I wanted to think of a Romanian word, all that popped up was Spanish. Pretty wild how the brain works.
(Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, … are all Latin influenced languages, btw.)
As I learned French as an adult, when I didn't know a French word, the Spanish word would often come to me.
Now I'm learning German, and often the French word comes to me when I don't know a German word. However, I've also struggled to speak French again because the German often comes to my head first.
It has been amusing to observe that one doesn't learn a third language as a strict subset of the second. For example, I know a lot more French than German, but I know the German "Tierarzt" (veterinarian) but not the French equivalent.
Don't worry, you will get speaking skills with practice quickly. I think you can talk to OpenAI app in Romanian. Not sure. After not speaking for 3/4 of my life I understand only about one half of audio news and bit more of text.
I feel languages and cultures also gradually change over time and over a couple of decades it can be fairly different when you've been disconnected from it.
I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.
That is true of all languages, but I think that Cantonese has a particularly high change velocity in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation compared to, say, English.
I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin) and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text. Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape, Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding ground for new language.
I know a guy whose mother came from italy to the US when she was young. He went back some Family over there. He was told “you speak Italian well, but you sound like my grandmother”
Same thing happens in the US too —- at least in the north east. If you go to New York, northern New Jersey, Boston or even Chicago, people in their 40s and younger don’t often sound like their parents; there’s little to no accent.
I work with a younger guy from the south and he definitely has an accent but that could be an anomaly.
This is from 90s. Tamilians in Sri Lanka were fighting the government. This is well known. Many of them escaped and came to India.
One of my Tamilian friends who lived in Delhi all his life went to visit Chennai. He was asked more than once if "he was from Sri Lanka" due to his accent - which was probably not Sri Lankan Tamil accent, but unfamiliar enough to get them thinking.
Perhaps it's language dependent? My Indian colleagues mostly speak English with each other, even if they have a common native language.
On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was partly why I learned Mandarin...
I'm the same. Spoke Hindi in India for the first 17 years of my life, and then the next 15+ I've lived in foreign countries and barely talked to anyone in Hindi, just English. I can still understand Hindi movie clips on Youtube, but reading Hindi articles on Wikipedia is hard when I try occasionally (I have to read out aloud and then listen), and forming sentences is extremely difficult because I just cannot remember most of the words. My brain keeps bringing up English words, and Japanese words because I spent a lot of time listening to Japanese, instead of Hindi words. It's the same feeling as "the word is on the tip of my tongue" where you keep remembering other words instead of the one you're looking for.
Yes you can. I know a few people who did. They came over to the US as teenagers and their parents refused to speak their language. So as the aged, they forgot more and more.
Coincidentally, I was watching an interview today with someone from my country. This person lived for decades in a country where English is spoken, and several times when they pronounced a word from here, it came with an English accent.
From personal anecdata, I can assure you it's entirely possible to 'lose' a language ability. Native tongue? Not so sure, but a closely-related one, definitely!
I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).
This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.
I knew a guy back in the day who grew up in the Netherlands and then South Africa. And somehow the Afrikaans messed up his Dutch, and he basically didn't have a native language. His English was rough as well, I felt sorry for him despite being completely monolingual myself.
Something strange. I (Spanish speaker having lived in an English speaking country for 15 years) still struggle with maths. It’s really difficult to understand numbers that are relatively high (hundreds and thousands) unless I can see them written.
And making calculation is almost impossible. I need to switch to Spanish and then translate it back
I was just talking about this exact thing with a friend. Spoken English in everyday and professional settings is fluent but when it comes to math, we have to think the numbers in Spanish.
My Spanish is such that if I'm reciting a prepared script, it'll go fine until I try to read numbers as digits. So if I was preparing a script for myself I'd write them all out in words.
my favourite anecdote about languages was when I went to see Salman Rushdie talk. His accent was perfectly north American while he spoke about contemporary things, but when he spoke about his childhood in India, he started speaking with a slight Indian accent.
I think the memories are encoded in terms of the thoughts of the time, so when they are revisited, they reactivate the same speech patterns.
Yes. My native tongue is Bengali—the 7th most spoken language in the world.
I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where English was obviously the primary language. Then I moved to the US and spoke Bengali only at home.
The final nail in the coffin was when I moved again to Berlin, Germany, and started picking up a little German just to get by. Now I speak English at work, Bengali at home, and a tiny bit of German. These days, my Bengali is a horrible hodgepodge of English and Bengali words strung together by alien conjunctions and interjections.
People from the subcontinent have this weird habit of adding English words randomly in their conversations. Sentences in Hindi/Bangla/Tamil etc and then straight up English words, and then switch back.
Do you mean Anglicisms? Those are very common in many languages nowadays. Especially those in the west. Youth language in the German speaking areas of Europe is around one fourth English words.
There was an interview with Gukesh Dommaraju after he won the chess world championship, and the interviewer from India asked him to respond in his native tongue which, so far as I understand it is Tamil. It was very odd listening to it when I could understand about 30% of the words!
Absolutely. Have met multiple people who could not speak their native language after a long absence from their homeland.
In a few cases I've met people who could speak no language well. Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language.
One was a tailor in Montreal. Tried English and French, they were so so at both and said they were from Italy originally. I speak some Italian so tried that. They struggled more than in English or French. They looked around 80, likely had been many decades.
Perhaps, but he was still a skilled tailor. I've also met much younger people with native proficiency in no language. Not many, perhaps only 3 total in my life but they exist.
It would be interesting to know what happens to native language skills if they returned to a native environment though. I expect they'd recover fairly quickly, at least in younger people.
>"In a few cases I've met people who could speak no language well. Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language."
Me, me, me ;) My spoken Russian has somewhat degraded. And my English and "strong proficiency" are worlds apart. 30 years of living in USSR and then 30 years in Canada.
You know that's a fair objection. My sample is small and I didn't know the tailor when younger. In the other cases I couldn't know how skilled they were in their native language when they spoke it.
I‘ll join the ranks of Germans loosing their mother tongue, I wonder why we are I susceptible to it. Even though living in Germany I am in an English speaking academic bubble, spending 10h a day reading, writing and discussing in English.
Interestingly I’ll be the 3rd generation in my Familie to loos his mother tongue.
My grandfather spoke east Prussian which was lost to low German. My mother spoke low German which was lost to high German. I grew up in high German and probably at some point will be mostly English speaking .
I was born in Norway, but between age 1-2 we lived in Sweden, then age 2-3 in Norway, and age 3-7 in Finland. I spoke fluent Finish, and started to struggle a bit with Norwegian. When I was 7 we moved back to Norway, and I had a thick accent. I'd still speak and read finish for a couple of years home.
We'd take trips to see relatives in Finland every summer, and I could speak fluent finish up until I was 16 - after that I needed more time. Then there was a 10 year gap where I did not go to Finland, due to studies and work, and spoke minimal.
Now I can barely get a simple sentence right. But I can still read a bit, and I can sort of listen to people have a conversation. But speaking is rough, really rough.
With that said, I've bet some Norwegians that have lived in, say US, for 50-60-70 years, and have a really thick accent - and use lots of English words when they can't come up with the Norwegian word. Two of my grand-uncles moved to respectively Canada and USA when they were 20, and lived there until they passed away in their 90s. Overhearing grandpa talk to them on the speaker phone was...interesting, to put it that way.
I've lived outside the Netherlands on and off since 1998 and permanently since 2005. I still speak Dutch with family and some friends but not that fluently; my mother teases me when she catches me making silly mistakes.
I rarely write in Dutch and I've noticed that things that I shouldn't have to pause and think about actually have me in doubt when I do. Little spelling issues. Grammatical stuff. Etc. It's still there but I have to stop and think. It would all come back pretty quickly if I'd move back probably. That's what happened the last time I did that, 25 years ago. But even after just a few years away it took me a while to adjust.
And even though I live in Germany, it's not my first or second language. More like a distant third. I'm speaking English most of the time. With an accent that sometimes confuses native speakers but I wouldn't be able to pass for a native speaker mostly. I sound more obviously Dutch when I get tired. My grammar gets worse, etc. Accents are hard to lose.
I understand German well enough but I'm barely able to form a coherent sentence. I have no hope of getting it even close to the level of my English. And I have no use for a language that makes me sound like a verbally challenged migrant in business situations. The non trivial amount of effort to even get close to my English is not time I have left in this life. So, I'm not super motivated to spend a lot of time on that. I stopped apologizing for / feeling guilty about that many years ago.
Anyway, we're heading for universal translators now powered by LLMs. The main challenge is speed; not quality of the translations at this point. Less need than ever to learn a new language. Fun times might be ahead for people that are a bit adventurous. No more need to ask "do you speak English?".
I'm finding that ei/ij is something I now need to look up regularly. Vocabulary sometimes takes me a second to remember (new words, that I learned after moving away, probably as much as old words), or whether an expression/saying is Dutch or German or English or an Internet reference, but nothing is a hindrance to fluency as much as the dumb ei/ij thing—that we could simply have abolished centuries ago instead of learning it by heart for generations—since I need to really pause and do an external lookup instead of thinking/umming for 500ms
For others who read this: ei/in is like whether to write cocoa with a c or a k, if both letters were equally common (it's a 50/50 split with no logic to it) and sometimes the other variant has a completely different meaning
Are you speaking English primarily with Commonwealth speakers? Because while it isn’t the same, a Dutch accent is surprisingly close to a lot of American accents. I have never encountered difficulty understanding native Dutch speakers who have good English (which is most of you). Yes, it’s obviously not an American accent, but compared to Scots? Way easier to understand.
If it weren’t for the fact that I am a huge, huge fan of Trainspotting I would have been utterly lost in Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow. My wife could barely understand anything said by about 80% of the Scots and I would have to repeat sentences for her. Especially in noisy situations like crowded restaurants.
> Are you speaking English primarily with Commonwealth speakers?
A mix of mostly expats from all over the world. And I have some Irish friends and colleagues. And lots of Germans. But it helps that I get exposed to a lot of English/US media, youtube, etc.
Right, but if the listeners are not American or Canadian then they may find your accent challenging. Americans and Canadians spell things differently but we largely speak the same language. And we would not find your accent a challenge.
Culturally, I am closer in some ways to Australians, but linguistically I have more in common with English speakers from Quebec than Aussies.
I think it's pretty common actually among some immigrant groups (2nd gen Indians in the US at least, of which I am one).
I was born in the US, but my first language was Marathi, and it was really the only language I was fluent in until I was around 4. After learning English in school, I started to always answer my parents in English. We didn't really live near a Marathi community, so it came to be that I could understand Marathi fluently (albeit with very limited vocabulary) around family but couldn't form a sentence to save my life.
Same story for all my US/Canadian cousins, and most other 2nd gen desis I've met.
I speak Russian at home (in the USA), English at work, and do not have exposure to Ukrainian except for occasionally looking at local news sites.
When I visited Ukraine after 8 years, I found that, for the first several days, my brain was formulating sentences in English first when I wanted to say something. I needed to force myself to switch to Ukrainian.
But, overall, I felt that Ukrainian was moving into the "foreign" part of my brain.
Not that I ever had to actually speak Ukrainian, I knew it so much better than the vast majority of our political elite. However as I was leaning Polish I have discovered that it sneakily replaced Ukrainian in mind. Just a couple months ago I have met a moron here in Warsaw who went to accuse me of shit and I wanted to answer him in perfect Ukrainian and... I couldn't. Not a word. All Polish.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadI'd also found the initial paragraph partially obscured by a video element. Removing that (Element Inspector, uBlock Origin's element zapper) fixes that for me under Firefox.
I can still read/understand but it's hard to remember words
EDIT: ChatGPT actually loaded. I used the first paragraph of my comment as query. It did not give me a specific story, but it claims it "knows" about the phenomenon of German war brides forgetting much of their German, when they did not use it much after moving. Too bad I can't tell what the sources are for that information, ChatGPT saying something isn't proof.
I suspect many among them would've largely forgotten a functional knowledge of German by the ends of their lives, even though it was their mother tongue and kitchen table language growing up.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry#/media/Fil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin,_Pennsylvania
So, you spoke German at some point, but these days, you could not decipher a restaurant menu or ticket-vending machine? Not meant disparagingly, just truly curious...
I know someone who learned to understand German spoken on TV and would sometimes speak it themselves (on day trips across the border primarily I imagine), so they've got a good intuition for e.g. word gender (that their native language doesn't have) but they can write most words only phonetically and don't know the grammar. Thankfully German orthography is not like English', but it's also not a 1:1 map (cheese isn't kese; name arbitrarily has no h)
I can still understand sufficiently simple spoken German and decipher some written German. You could say I read it at the level of the two-year-old I was.
I'm Natively Dutch myself but live in Denmark, and sometimes also struggle to find the correct Dutch words when talking to my friends. Not that my Danish great, my partner isn't Danish and since I work at an international company, the default language is English.
Until he was 10 and started classroom English in 5th grade - he had a very easy time of it. That year of getting English sounds into his little kid brain, despite coming from a non-native speaker who had only spent a few semesters in England, did some sort of magic, because ever since I've known him, he's sounded British enough to fool Americans (British people, on the other hand, can hear that something's off, and of course can't place his accent). He's a more fluent English speaker than I am a German speaker, but we both have to speak more English at our jobs than German.
We're raising our kid to be bilingual (my husband is German), but I wonder how truly "native" my kid's English will be with me as his main source of it.
My experience is that it gets hard when they realise that they can get away with only German. Many kids choose to only use the "primary" language, even when spoken in the secondary one. They eventually regret that choice when they get to their twenties.
Not all kids do that though. I am not sure what influences this, but as a parent of trilingual children, my recommendation is to expose them to the culture as much as you can. Talk to family online, take them to English speaking places and countries, watch movies. In other words, make speaking English useful to them. If your family in the US have older kids, yours might end up looking up to them - mine have an older cousin who is one of their favourite members of the family and definitely gives motivation to communicate. Also, be more stubborn than them if they try to only speak German.
Sorry if this comes across as unsolicited advice. Nothing I said is revolutionary and you might already have thought it through. We got very lucky with ours, but this is stuff I would have benefitted from when our kids were young, so I'm passing it on.
I think that's the main thing. I have been very stubborn in "not understanding" the other (local) language with my children, even if it's obvious to them I do understand it. Today (they are still young) they speak both languages, including between themselves, and they don't seem to have a preference for one language over the other.
After a few years living in Germany (as a native English speaker), my English and that of my friends became peppered with these German-isms.
That said, after centuries of relative stability, modern Dutch is absorbing English words as fast as it can. Who knows if it is still recognisable in 50 years.
Learn your languages before spreading unwise nonsense on the internet.
There's no reason to be so disrespectful.
“Ich bin seit zwei Tagen hier.”
I wouldn't be surprised if it were most languages really, English 'for' seems the weirder construction.
You could get away with it in speech since it sounds like 'since.. [thinking] two days ago' and it's acceptable to change construction like that in casual speech, but written it doesn't seem right to me.
Interestingly, I'm not sure if it's nationwide, or a local dialect (Dorset/West country) thing - interesting because there's a lot of German/Saxonism retained in the dialect, usually about word choice or spelling though, not phrases. As far as I'm aware anyway, not an expert.
(For example we tend to prefer the -t ending of -ed verbs: 'burnt' not 'burned' etc. including in stronger cases words like 'turnt' ('turned' in any usage, not the modern slang for drunk) that Wiktionary etc. will tell you are obsolete.)
But my word choices and pronunciations are definitely not 100% native. There are moments where I can feel the vtable pointing me to the wrong language for a word. Sometimes I get back to English, sometimes I pause, and sometimes a word from some other language pops out.
As an example I sometimes say “no thank you” in Swedish in situations where that is wildly wrong. I can’t speak Swedish, but I have those basic phrases in there.
Thankfully hearing it regularly keeps me up to date, though there are those moments where right in the middle of a conversation I have to stop and reflect on how exactly something is named.
After living in Germany for nearly 10 years, but working in Switzerland, my wife recently had an identity crisis because a Swiss colleague thought she was German, and had just learned Swiss German very well.
My daughter however speaks fluent English and German so I don’t think they’ll have the same problems.
Some are foreigners, others are extreme nerds who have failed to interact with people and have lived on the internet.
It's really sad.
And I would add that I think becoming more than proficient in and deepening understanding of one's own language (Swedish in that case) is important, in parallel with learning foreign languages.
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
Tangentially related, I see more and more kids developing a "TV Accent" in Spanish in their early years which eventually gets replaced with their local one I'm guessing based on their exposure to parents and media vs School/Parents/Every day life
However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.
English grammar is often confusing in cases like this because verbs mostly don’t have distinct spellings/pronunciations for the subjunctive mood, even though the subjunctive conjugations are part of the grammar.
It also doesn’t help that “subjunctive” is kind of the “else” condition among the three verb moods, the other two being “indicative” and “imperative,” so you often notice that it’s the subjunctive by ruling out the other two.
My father left his birthplace when he was 4 or 5, and only knows a few words of his first language.
At that point, I moved back to India. And I had to converse with a telephone company call center, even though I selected English as my language in the phone tree, they repeatedly put me to Hindi speaking ones - I just could not converse with them. I tried. I could absolutely understand them, but I could just not speak hindi. The words or rather the sentences will not form.
Not any more. I think now I am truly bi/trilingual, but there was that day / week / month / year, when I had lost the ability to speak in Hindi. Not sure why, and it was not a one time event.
[ The only additional information that may be relevant : In between these years, I learned a semester of Russian. I learnt french. I got familiar with a multitude of south Indian languages - Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam hearing friends speak them on a regular basis. And I was also conversant with Punjabi, common in our region in north india. But I never spoke any of these in day to day life for 14 years. And all these languages blurred into each other when I really had to use something other than English. ]
[ Also, I had a reason to switch to English pretty much exclusively. My son has learning disability and would find it hard in school as he will speak in Hindi and teachers would not understand. This is a long time back. So I decided not to confuse him and switched to english exclusively and lived like that for about a dozen years before this telephone company incident happened. I have posted about him before, this is not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28665942 ]
Edit - I think I am done. I want to learn Spanish since it will be useful locally, but my brain can not take any more confusion. When you do not use these regularly, but have a faint notion of many many words, the brain does get confused on a regular basis. And I was not trying to brag, expressing helplessness.
People I know that know more languages than me seem to be worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and grammar.
Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who went through university and learned English in school.
Interestingly, some 18 years ago I went to intern in Mexico. After 6 months there, I was quite fluent in Spanish. But when I wanted to think of a Romanian word, all that popped up was Spanish. Pretty wild how the brain works.
(Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, … are all Latin influenced languages, btw.)
As I learned French as an adult, when I didn't know a French word, the Spanish word would often come to me.
Now I'm learning German, and often the French word comes to me when I don't know a German word. However, I've also struggled to speak French again because the German often comes to my head first.
It has been amusing to observe that one doesn't learn a third language as a strict subset of the second. For example, I know a lot more French than German, but I know the German "Tierarzt" (veterinarian) but not the French equivalent.
I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.
I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin) and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text. Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape, Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding ground for new language.
I work with a younger guy from the south and he definitely has an accent but that could be an anomaly.
One of my Tamilian friends who lived in Delhi all his life went to visit Chennai. He was asked more than once if "he was from Sri Lanka" due to his accent - which was probably not Sri Lankan Tamil accent, but unfamiliar enough to get them thinking.
On the other hand, Chinese people speak Mandarin with each other when there are no English speakers in the group. It was partly why I learned Mandarin...
I had the same problem after having speaking in English for a long time and rarely any Hungarian. I had issues finding the right words.
I'm a native Dutch speaker and used to be relatively fluent in German (which is not a given: despite being close neighbors, the languages are very different). Then, I lived in Cape Town for a while, and had to learn some Afrikaans (also closely related to Dutch, but yet widely dissimilar).
This somehow 'erased' my ability to speak German! Only after moving back to Europe and after many years, I was able to do basic stuff like ordering in restaurants in German again.
TL;DR: the human brain is, like, weird, man...
And making calculation is almost impossible. I need to switch to Spanish and then translate it back
I think the memories are encoded in terms of the thoughts of the time, so when they are revisited, they reactivate the same speech patterns.
I learned English at school and later started working remotely in places where English was obviously the primary language. Then I moved to the US and spoke Bengali only at home.
The final nail in the coffin was when I moved again to Berlin, Germany, and started picking up a little German just to get by. Now I speak English at work, Bengali at home, and a tiny bit of German. These days, my Bengali is a horrible hodgepodge of English and Bengali words strung together by alien conjunctions and interjections.
Haven’t seen anyone else do that.
In a few cases I've met people who could speak no language well. Their native tongue was gone or degraded but they had not achieved strong proficiency in English or the local language.
One was a tailor in Montreal. Tried English and French, they were so so at both and said they were from Italy originally. I speak some Italian so tried that. They struggled more than in English or French. They looked around 80, likely had been many decades.
It would be interesting to know what happens to native language skills if they returned to a native environment though. I expect they'd recover fairly quickly, at least in younger people.
Me, me, me ;) My spoken Russian has somewhat degraded. And my English and "strong proficiency" are worlds apart. 30 years of living in USSR and then 30 years in Canada.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175216
https://www.quora.com/Every-service-at-Google-is-either-depr...
But in my case I know enough over time and from the family to state: this was some sort of life-long speech defect, not a matter of learning.
Interestingly I’ll be the 3rd generation in my Familie to loos his mother tongue.
My grandfather spoke east Prussian which was lost to low German. My mother spoke low German which was lost to high German. I grew up in high German and probably at some point will be mostly English speaking .
We'd take trips to see relatives in Finland every summer, and I could speak fluent finish up until I was 16 - after that I needed more time. Then there was a 10 year gap where I did not go to Finland, due to studies and work, and spoke minimal.
Now I can barely get a simple sentence right. But I can still read a bit, and I can sort of listen to people have a conversation. But speaking is rough, really rough.
With that said, I've bet some Norwegians that have lived in, say US, for 50-60-70 years, and have a really thick accent - and use lots of English words when they can't come up with the Norwegian word. Two of my grand-uncles moved to respectively Canada and USA when they were 20, and lived there until they passed away in their 90s. Overhearing grandpa talk to them on the speaker phone was...interesting, to put it that way.
I rarely write in Dutch and I've noticed that things that I shouldn't have to pause and think about actually have me in doubt when I do. Little spelling issues. Grammatical stuff. Etc. It's still there but I have to stop and think. It would all come back pretty quickly if I'd move back probably. That's what happened the last time I did that, 25 years ago. But even after just a few years away it took me a while to adjust.
And even though I live in Germany, it's not my first or second language. More like a distant third. I'm speaking English most of the time. With an accent that sometimes confuses native speakers but I wouldn't be able to pass for a native speaker mostly. I sound more obviously Dutch when I get tired. My grammar gets worse, etc. Accents are hard to lose.
I understand German well enough but I'm barely able to form a coherent sentence. I have no hope of getting it even close to the level of my English. And I have no use for a language that makes me sound like a verbally challenged migrant in business situations. The non trivial amount of effort to even get close to my English is not time I have left in this life. So, I'm not super motivated to spend a lot of time on that. I stopped apologizing for / feeling guilty about that many years ago.
Anyway, we're heading for universal translators now powered by LLMs. The main challenge is speed; not quality of the translations at this point. Less need than ever to learn a new language. Fun times might be ahead for people that are a bit adventurous. No more need to ask "do you speak English?".
I'm finding that ei/ij is something I now need to look up regularly. Vocabulary sometimes takes me a second to remember (new words, that I learned after moving away, probably as much as old words), or whether an expression/saying is Dutch or German or English or an Internet reference, but nothing is a hindrance to fluency as much as the dumb ei/ij thing—that we could simply have abolished centuries ago instead of learning it by heart for generations—since I need to really pause and do an external lookup instead of thinking/umming for 500ms
For others who read this: ei/in is like whether to write cocoa with a c or a k, if both letters were equally common (it's a 50/50 split with no logic to it) and sometimes the other variant has a completely different meaning
If it weren’t for the fact that I am a huge, huge fan of Trainspotting I would have been utterly lost in Edinburgh, let alone Glasgow. My wife could barely understand anything said by about 80% of the Scots and I would have to repeat sentences for her. Especially in noisy situations like crowded restaurants.
A mix of mostly expats from all over the world. And I have some Irish friends and colleagues. And lots of Germans. But it helps that I get exposed to a lot of English/US media, youtube, etc.
Culturally, I am closer in some ways to Australians, but linguistically I have more in common with English speakers from Quebec than Aussies.
I was born in the US, but my first language was Marathi, and it was really the only language I was fluent in until I was around 4. After learning English in school, I started to always answer my parents in English. We didn't really live near a Marathi community, so it came to be that I could understand Marathi fluently (albeit with very limited vocabulary) around family but couldn't form a sentence to save my life.
Same story for all my US/Canadian cousins, and most other 2nd gen desis I've met.
I speak Russian at home (in the USA), English at work, and do not have exposure to Ukrainian except for occasionally looking at local news sites.
When I visited Ukraine after 8 years, I found that, for the first several days, my brain was formulating sentences in English first when I wanted to say something. I needed to force myself to switch to Ukrainian.
But, overall, I felt that Ukrainian was moving into the "foreign" part of my brain.
Anecdotal account.
Not that I ever had to actually speak Ukrainian, I knew it so much better than the vast majority of our political elite. However as I was leaning Polish I have discovered that it sneakily replaced Ukrainian in mind. Just a couple months ago I have met a moron here in Warsaw who went to accuse me of shit and I wanted to answer him in perfect Ukrainian and... I couldn't. Not a word. All Polish.