hey, i’m trying to catch up in this thread!
Man, it’s been a struggle trying to flip the switch from Spanish to French.
Backstory: I left France in late 2017 and at that time I had advanced French. But I have spoken almost no French since then and my level has dipped considerably. Since ditching French, I’ve moved onto Spanish and lived mostly in Mexico since then, so now my Spanish level is advanced.
A week ago I got to Paris and like 20-30% of the words I try to use are Spanish. It’s like my brain has 2 modes: English mode and foreign language mode. For now, foreign language mode means Spanish. So trying to construct sentences in French means thinking a lot in Spanish unfortunately. Wondering if this happens to anyone else? It probably doesn’t help when your foreign languages are in the same family. I’m sure it wouldn’t be much of an issue if I wanted to transition from Spanish to Japanese or something.
Also, the general level of English seems way better in Paris than 5 years ago, which I guess is a bit of a double-edged sword for me. I’d like to practice a bit more of my French, but I’m struggling so people just auto-switch and most waiters/store owners seem to have solid English even in non-touristy areas.
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Yeah, close captions were definitely helpful for me
I have this exact problem with Spanish and French. I’m pretty sure I’ve posted about it as well.
Also my Paris experience about 10 yr ago was exactly what you describe today. I think that the level of English in Paris has always been quite high.
Yah, it’s super nice to be able to learn one after the other b/c the vocabularies overlap so much (and also a lot of English/French overlap), but then it’s a bitch to switch between the languages b/c of those similarities and the vocab starts to run together.
Yeah, there are a lot of people on here and 22 I’d never have guessed. Yuv is another one.
In real life I can almost always tell (like everyone probably can). I think that the critical time is to have learned it before about age 10. That doesn’t guarantee that you will pass for native, but just about everyone who can pass for native learned it young. I have encountered a small number of people who learned English after age 10 and have no giveaways, but I can count them on two hands. Maybe my sample is just small. Interestingly, Russians are overrepresented in this group in my sample.
I’ve heard the cutoff for sounding like a native is 6 years old. Other than that, if they sound native then they’re either incredibly gifted or have extensive phonetics training, like a singer or actor.
Incidentally, my girlfriend who’s had a few hundred students learning Spanish says that women tend to have less of an accent than men.
Yeah, most of my under 10s are under 6.
Also accent is not disqualifying. I know plenty of people who speak accented English, who learned it before age 6. And can understand it and speak it perfectly (i.e. they can do stuff like understand most of the lyrics in a fast song on the radio). I’m counting all of those people as native speakers, although they may not meet the dictionary definition.
Accent is definitely correlated with being a native speaker, but imo, someone can be a native speaker and still have an accent.
Take Singaporeans for example. English is one of the official languages of Singapore and the one that is most commonly used when you’re out and about. Nearly everyone learns it even before going to school. Most Singaporeans are bilingual and will learn another language that they also speak at home. If you’ve ever heard a Singaporean accent, it’s quite odd and unless you are familiar with it you probably wouldn’t be able to place it if you heard it. Nevertheless, I’d say the vast majority of Singaporeans qualify as native speakers. But if a random American had a convo with one, they would probably describe them as a non-native speaker that just speaks it very well.
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Would also not have guessed Yuv isn’t a native English speaker.
Everyone has an accent whilst speaking any language. Not having an accent simply means you have an accent that is considered a normal and/or prestige accent for that language.
Linguists don’t even formally use the term native language anymore but instead prefer L1 and L2 languages. Even then, there is controversy on what constitutes an L1 language. One group (which I also subscribe to) says that the key difference between a native/l1 language vs a second/L2 langauge is whether the language is acquired (ie via immersion and w/o any formal knowledge of grammar and syntax) vs l2 (by learning about grammar and vocabulary and such).
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That’s a good way to approach it, imo. Not surprising that people who study this for a living had it figured out.
TLDR y’all have accents … Various North American accents (in most cases)
Agree, which is why accent is not a necessary condition to be a native speaker as far as I’m concerned.
Not sure when they start teaching now, but I started learning English in the 4th grade so roughly 10.
It still doesn’t come natural to me to refer to things as ‘it’, as everything is either male or female in hebrew grammar. other than typos those are my most frequent edits (although i have plenty of other grammar mistakes)
Additionally, there is often a significant gap between writing/reading and speaking/comprehension fluency. It’s common for many L2 speakers to achieve much higher fluency in the former as opposed to the latter. On the other hand for certain L1 speakers (think your average hick/hillbilly) it goes the other way with the spoken tongue being more fluent than the written word.
My hypothesis is that this correlates well with the learning process where acquisition helps with speech but formal learning helps with writing.
I think you’re right about all of this, but I assume everything breaks down once you get to a certain level of fluency. Eventually you hit a point where almost the only person that can tell if you got there via L1 or L2 is is the speaker themselves.
More or less, though there are often very subtle cues - but then these are more along the lines of linguistic origin than a simple native/ESL dichotomy.
E.g. where would you place me on that binary.
A “standard” language is just the regional dialect with the biggest army.
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Agreed. Often very subtle.
Hard to place anyone anywhere based on internet posting. For example Yuv can easily pass for a native speaker on here, but IRL I’m assuming one could suss it out.
Are American spellings considered standard anywhere but here (e.g. colour, metre, etc.)? We definitely have the biggest army.
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