Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Calling all non-english natives!

Griesmeel

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First of: great, big Muito Obrigado to Sara for the invite.
Next: Hi all!

Contrary to what's displayed on the left my name is Jos. (Griesmeel, Dutch for semolina, a nickname I got eating a plate of porridge, sort of rimes with my surname)
I was born and raised in the Netherlands (Hiya 10trackers! :) ) but have recently moved to Portugal (Hiya Sara! :) ) to move in with a wonderful Belarusian girlfriend in Lisbon.

I basically grew up with English on television, everything subtitled. Then in highschool the compulsory booklist for my English exams were so much more interesting than the Dutch one that I stuck with reading in English pretty much exclusively. Of my other language classes German sort of stuck but French never managed to get me interested.
Leaning Portuguese now is tricky, but I think I should just get out more. :)

I studied at a merchant marine academy when the Iron Curtain came down so, via some menial jobs, I ended up a server administrator. Last year, thoroughly fed up with office life and unable to get a job just yet, I moved and am now living of the sale of my house. Not entirely sure how my professional life will look in, say, three years but now I'm taking a serious swing at being a writer

Liking AW is easy, everything you ever wanted to know about writing and were not afraid to ask, and all that in good humour, pleasantly civilized.
 
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alleycat

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Just a note to the moderators.

A few months back we had a casual but serious thread in another forum about the differences in language in the UK and the US. It generally concerned what terms were used for what on either side of the ocean.

It might be appropriate to move that thread to this forum, even though this forum is primarily for non-English speaking issues. People from elsewhere might want to learn more about the differences in what things are called in the UK vs. the US. To tell you the truth, I've forgotten what forum it was in, but I could find it easily enough.
 

Fenika

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I was born and raised in the USA, but I'm fully Polish. I am currently visiting family, which mostly live in north Czech, and rather enjoying improving my Polish and traveling around.

I was raised bilingually, but only recently took to studying written Polish seriously.

I love AW for it is AW. :)
 

Torill

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I live in Oslo, Norway, just at the edge of the wonderful forests where I love to walk in all kinds of weather. And just half an hour by train to downtown Oslo too boot. That's what I like the most about my country, it's great for outdoor life.

I also like the fact that we have a stable democracy, a stable economy (I saw an overview of the economical situation in Europe these days - doesn't look good - but we were the only country with no 'red numbers' - no debts. Let's hope it will last - if the rest of Europe go down the drains, I guess we will too...) with a welfare policy that works (or, mostly, most of the time...).

Which doesn't mean everything here is perfect, very far from it! I could list a lot of drawbacks, but since this is a sort of promotion thread, I won't. Mostly, I do love my country. :)

Don't think the food here is much to recommend, though - with some exceptions - cured meat with sour cream in 'lefse' is very tasty. So that's not why you would want to come and visit. Tourists usually complain about the price level, too. But you know, wages are high as well compared to many other places - so it's not as expensive to us, relatively speaking...

As for culture - we are a reading nation. I saw some statistics about this, too, somewhere - people here are supposed to buy more books than most. And be members of all kinds of strange organisations - social life used to be centered around these volunteer organisations more than clubs and bars, which could make it a bit difficult for strangers to get to know us - but I believe this is about to change.

@Mie - Hi! I've just posted an answer in the Norwegian thread you made. Your place sounds wonderful! I have a different opinion than yours on our native language, though - to me, it's not stiff and formal at all! We have some truly great Norwegian writers, imho. Which of course begs the question: why do I write in English?

Well - I'm not sure I know. Except I started writing fanfiction (Harry Potter related, by the way) in English, since I read the books in English and posted in English language fan forums. My current WIP kind of grew out of that. It was not a conscious choice - I mean nothing like 'Norwegian is not good enough for me'. In fact, I hate it when people import too many English words into our language, when there are perfectly good Norwegian equivalents. But by now, my WIP has developed too far in English for me to restart it in Norwegian. Just one of those things... :shrugs:

As for this place - I just recently stumbled upon it, but it looks great: friendly, fun and full of interesting discussions about writing. Just the right mix between intelligence and silliness. Chances are I'll make this my new home online.
 

JaggedJimmyJr

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Pastéis de nata:
458319636_ec7699ce2a.jpg

That is just delicious. I've had the chance eat a few *cough* dozens *cough* when I visited Macau. They messed up my stomach a little (I don't have any problem blaming it all on my gluttony and other dozen different things I tasted that day...) but it was worth it. :)

About me; Well, I'm Turkish and I learned English at a relatively old age, during my preparation year at the university. It took a lot cursing and hair pulling but I think I got through the hard part. Reading the books I loved in their original language was a great motivation.

I like AW (though I'm kind of a lurker mostly.) for its community, and the members' willingness to share their experience and patience for the "newbies" like me. :)
 

Maxinquaye

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My name is Max, and I'm swedish. Currently I reside in Sweden, and enjoy that time of writing called unemployment - you wouldn't believe how effective it is for me to write stuff when I don't have to juggle a schedule.

However, I consider myself a UK resident - even though my memories of London is starting to get a little stale. I'm trying to get back there after living in that city for nealy three years.

I write in English, for the UK market, primarily. When I work I tend to work in the news-industry, but given the state of that industry I suspect I will have a career change when I do get a new job.
 

aruna

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I'm really impressed with the level of English of you "furriners". Even after living over 30 years in Germany, I still make far too many German mistakes. You guys seem perfect!
 

SaraP

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I lived in the USA when I was a kid for three years, in a fairly small town. I had no choice but to learn the language. After we returned it was easy keeping up with it. I also prefer to read in english. So, not very hard for me. I pass as a native most times, some even think I'm an expat or something.
 

Dave Willhoite

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Hi Sara,

I am afraid that I don't qualify for this thread.

I was born in Mississippi, and raised by a native English speaker.

I pretty much live in Bayrisch now, however. It's one of the reasons I became a hobby writer. I need to keep my English skills.

Dave
 

OneWriter

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Wow... I just stopped by to look again at this forum and it's growing so fast! Kudos for such a brilliant idea, AW is now truly without boundaries. The threads in all different languages, alphabets and ideographs are fascinating!
 

DrZoidberg

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Hej alla. Jäg är från Svärje.

I'm Swedish, even though I have plenty of extended family from and in England, and some in Scotland. I still consider myself fully Swedish, and I still live here.

I see all language primarily as a tool for communication, where the goal is to be understood as well as possible by the target audience. My target audience is thinly dispersed all over the globe. Almost to two billion people can read and write English. 10 million can read and write Swedish. Available quality books in either language follow this ratio. Not to mention books on writing. So when I started focusing on writing seriously, I chose very early on to drop Swedish completely as a focus. It's so far proven to be a wise strategy.

I'm considering moving to Australia though. I'm pretty sick of the cold, and I've got a good job offer down there. Another, and pretty major reason, is to be able to join face-to-face English speaking writer's clubs. We just don't have them here. They're all in Swedish.

That said, Sweden is a really nice place to live. It's super safe, and super clean with lots of forest around the corner. No guns and no poisonous animals to worry about. And we've got lots of tall blondes.
 
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aruna

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A question to all: how many of you have children, and did you raise them bi-lingual? Were you yourself raised bi-lingual? I find bi-lingualism of prime importance. People with two or more languages are the actual, and only, bridges between societies that speak different languages. They are the ones that draw communities together. It's so sad that in England today a second language is no longer compulsory in school.

In that connection I highly recommend the book The Lieutenant, by Kate Grenville. It's about a man who was one of the first pioneers from England to Australia, who set himself the task of learning the aboriginal language. It's fascinating -- and based on a true story.
 

Sophia

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Were you yourself raised bi-lingual?

My brother and I were raised bilingual. Our parents spoke Urdu with us until nursery school age, at which point Dad would speak with us in English. This is in the UK, so we watched English TV. I don't remember not being able to understand English, but I know from family anecdotes that there was an age when I couldn't speak it, and nursery teachers, for example, had to rely on my expression to know I needed to go to the bathroom. There are tapes of me and my brother babbling in Urdu to each other when very young, but now we speak together only in English.

One thing we didn't think was strange until someone pointed it out much later was that we have bilingual conversations with Mum, even now. We speak to her in English, she replies in Urdu. It's how it's always been for as long as I can remember.
 

Griesmeel

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Ineresting topic Aruna, for me personally. I'm Dutch and have moved to Portugal to be with my Belarusian girlfriend. We have the definite intention to have a child, ahem.... working on that... :e2cloud9:
Anyway, for quite some time we are talking about that we might end up with a quadlingual (is that a word?) child. I will talk in Dutch with it, my girlfriend Russian, me and my girlfriend together talk English and then kindergarten will take care of Portuguese. We are considering to hire a Chinese nanny. :)

Of course, all the experience that will be so kindly shared here will help us out when the time comes, and hey, I might even write a book about it. :)
I will be a very interested bystander for the time being.
Thanks.
 

Torill

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No, sadly no children and now I'm too old for that. But everybody should learn at least one foreign language in school. To be able to think in more than one language is good for your understanding of the world, because every language will parse the experienced world in slightly different ways. Anyone trying to translate from one language to another will know that. Which means that every language dying out is a loss to the world.

Which also means that reading your reasons for writing in English made me a little sad, DrZoidberg. I may sound like a hypocrite though, because I write in English myself... so yeah - feel free to mock and/or ignore me. (But not because I think communicating in Norwegian to Norwegians only is not good enough. It just sort of happened that way...) I would be very sad if no one ever published a book in Swedish again. I think it's a beautiful language - sometimes I think it is even stronger and more beautiful than Norwegian....

I don't mean to criticise you though. Your writing, your choices. And I do mean that.
 

DrZoidberg

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No, sadly no children and now I'm too old for that. But everybody should learn at least one foreign language in school. To be able to think in more than one language is good for your understanding of the world, because every language will parse the experienced world in slightly different ways. Anyone trying to translate from one language to another will know that. Which means that every language dying out is a loss to the world.

I agree but that doesn't really have any bearing on why I chose to write in English. Not having English as one's first language, is de facto a handicap in today's highly interconnected world. At least if you're a writer with international ambitions. The English market is larger than any other. I would personally have preferred having Swedish as a second language. That doesn't mean it dies out, and it doesn't make me less Swedish.

Which also means that reading your reasons for writing in English made me a little sad, DrZoidberg. I may sound like a hypocrite though, because I write in English myself... so yeah - feel free to mock and/or ignore me. (But not because I think communicating in Norwegian to Norwegians only is not good enough. It just sort of happened that way...) I would be very sad if no one ever published a book in Swedish again. I think it's a beautiful language - sometimes I think it is even stronger and more beautiful than Norwegian....

I don't mean to criticise you though. Your writing, your choices. And I do mean that.

I don't really get the nostalgia for languages. Maybe I'm just not patriotic enough? Or maybe I've studied way too much philosophy and maths? Maybe Sweden hasn't a history of occupation and being under the thumb of empires? But I see language primarily as a tool for communication. As far as I'm concerned English is just a better tool. I can reach more people. English is arguably also linguistically more flexible than Swedish. I don't still use my first mobile phone, heavy as a brick and with almost no functions because the my Android is a better tool. Same deal with language.

I'm not a fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I just don't buy it. When a tiny language dies, it was for a good reason. I get the scientific/linguistic reason for wanting to preserve old languages. I love studying linguistics and the history of languages. But I personally have no interest in adopting obsolete languages and practices for the sake of science alone. If other people willingly want to make themselves into linguistic guinea-pigs I'm very grateful. But I won't. I want to be a successful writer. And considering the fact that you write in English too, seems to be your attitude as well... isn't it?
 
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Maxinquaye

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I was raised bilingually - though only between Norwegian and Swedish. Still, I guess some thing in my head got turned on, and I have a really easy time learning languages. Well, at least I used to. I don't know if my head is getting properly fossilized yet to stop that, and I haven't really tried to learn a new language in a decade or so :D

Like Zoidberg I write in English primarily for convenience, and for marketing. There's 60 million or so people in the UK, and 9 million or so in Sweden. The market's just a bit bigger. And maybe, just maybe, there will be an aggregate market of 300-500 million if my writing is successful enough in the UK.

And, fundamentally, Swedish is quite similar to English in a basic level. English isn't hard to learn for a Swede. The languages are quite closely related, I guess.
 

SaraP

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I was raised in portuguese only but when we moved to the US I had no choice but to learn english. The place we moved to was basically a community built around the university and many foreign students brought their families over. That meant a few foreign kids at school so every single public school there had a teacher whose sole purpose was to teach english to those kids.

Learning english for me was fairly easy. By Christmas I had grasped the basics and by Easter I was speaking well. I didn't need special classes any more after that one year. At home we always spoke in portuguese.

When we returned, I started two foreign languages in school, one being english (where I usually knew more than the teacher) and the other french. Two years later we only had to do one language. Even though english would be better for my average, I chose french; I ended up with a total of 4 years of french in high school. Reading my dad's huge franco-belgian comic book collection has been one way of not losing the language entirely. ;)

Fast forward a bunch of years and now I have two kids. I try to do english at home but it's not easy. They always speak in portuguese and I forget to reply in english. My youngest specifically asks me not to speak in english. I have to make a very conscious effort to keep at it. My reasoning is that even though they don't really speak it, something stays in there and that is always a good thing.

I've heard/read that languages are easiest to learn when you're a kid, as that's when your brain is more permeable to that information. After adolescence, certain rewiring makes it harder to learn and it gets worse as you age. This is why those who have the opportunity to raise children in a bilingual environment should do so.

Griesmeel, I have met two moms raising children in trilingual environments: one was a hindi, english and portuguese combo, the other was a finnish, french and portuguese combo. These kids tend to learn to talk later than their peers but the end result is so very much worth it.

ETA: Forgot to add I write in english mainly because that's how it comes out. I think my muse is american. :D
 
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aruna

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I raised my son bi-lingual from the start. We lived in Germany so all I did was always speak English to him. It was more difficult with my daughter, since their dad had moved in with me by then and he doesn't speak English, so asked me to speak German at home, and I quickly got into the habit. SO my duaghter knew only German at first.
When she was ten we moved to England. I sent her to school in the day and when she was at home continued to speak German with her. I left it to the school to teach her English.
One day after about six months I overheard her chatting on the phone with a friend: in perfect English! From then onwards I switched to English.
Her German slipped through lack of practice, and now she can understand it well but avoids speaking or reading it. English is just like her first language; in fact, of all her friends, she got the best English result in her GCSE exams when she was 16.
So yes, childhood is the best time to learn.
 

Said The Sun

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I was born in the States and moved to Portugal when I was ten. I lived ten years there and now came back for more. I like to say I have two mother languages, two mother-lands, two flags, two menus, two minds. And these are my two cents.
 

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I did live in Hungary for a little while

Then greetings from Hungary. :) I'm from Budapest, Hungary. Due to my previous jobs, I've worked and / or lived in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy (And few other countries in the E.U.). But somehow I always got back to Hungary. It's my beloved home after all. For me, it's the safest place on Earth, far away from tsunamis, earthquakes and tornadoes. It's a little sacred land with the best climate. :)
 
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backslashbaby

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Then greetings from Hungary. :) I'm from Budapest, Hungary. Due to my previous jobs, I've worked and / or lived in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy (And few other countries in the E.U.). But somehow I always got back to Hungary. It's my beloved home after all. For me, it's the safest place on Earth, far away from tsunamis, earthquakes and tornadoes. It's a little sacred land with the best climate. :)

Koszi (with accents - sorry!)! On the weekends, I lived in Budapest! Right across from the St. Stephen's statue on Vaci utca :) I love Budapest very much. During the week I lived in Baja. Also very lovely. Hungarians are special people :)
 

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Koszi (with accents - sorry!)!
Nagyon szivesen (You're welcome.). :) And no problem.

I love Budapest very much. During the week I lived in Baja. Also very lovely. Hungarians are special people :)
I'm gladly hear your opinion about us and my little country. This means a lot to me.

Right across from the St. Stephen's statue on Vaci utca :)
So you lived right in the downtown, in the beautiful fifth district. That's a nice place. I live in the first district, Castle Hill, right under the shadow of the castle. :)
 
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