I have finally successfully managed to grow canterbury bells in my garden. I didn't realize that the volume of flowers they produce is so huge that the flowers, if not staked, keel right over. So I cut a few of the keeled over ones, and they are sitting in a noise of purple on my coffee table. And ever since then, I sneeze a lot. I don't know if these two events are connected, but I'm getting to the point where I look at purple flowers and I start to sneeze.
When I sneeze, the noise I make is ha-cheee. Not ah-chooo. My sneezing is in German. Boris the dog has been barking lately, I think he barks in English: woof woof woof, not wau wau wau. The rooster cookarookoos, which is closer to German than the English cock-a-doodle-doo. I can't seem to make up my mind on the childhood noises. I think that is the last thing to go when switching languages.
If you don't know me in person yet, and you met me, it probably wouldn't occur to you that I have ever spoken anything other than standard Canadian-accented English. And yet, about once a year, a random stranger will call me on it and express a suspicion that it's my second language. It last happened in March, at a meeting in Saskatchewan. If I could hear what these infrequent people hear, it wouldn't be there (it would be obvious if I was having some high-falutin conversation about Beethoven - BATE-hoven not bate-HOVEN, thank you very much - or Bach, which is not pronounced BaCK, but no, ordinary conversation). But there is something that gives me away to the very rare ear. The only time I notice it is during involuntary things like sneezes.
Kids learn language very easily. It certainly didn't take me long to learn English, and I'm sure I lost most of the accent within a year or two. The last things to go were what comes out when I hurt myself - It was Aua! not Ouch! until I was at least sixteen, and then it didn't become ouch but Shit! (I'm all class) - and the use of the word "with" in a sentence. I could say "with" no problem (W/V things are hard for Germans. As are VWs if they have a lot of maintenance issues, but that's another matter). I could, for example, say very easilly "with this chocolate I will pig out". But if you switched it around to "I will pig out with this chocolate" I was sunk. It wasn't just the W, it was the th (another tough one for Germans, and making BaCK forgivable because I understand about sounds your mouth just doesn't know how to make) - so my sentence would be I will pig out vit tis chocolate. Say the sentence properly, and feel your tongue in your mouth - do you feel how much farther up between your teeth the first th is than with the second? That takes focus if you have to learn it. For some reason, I managed to do it quite easily if it was the beginning of a sentence, but had to stop and reset my mouth if it was the middle. Or come out sounding like one of dem people who doesn't know who to do ze th.
But that's all ancient history, except for the sneezing. I'm such an English speaker, I catch myself thinking "how cool would it be to speak another language? I wonder what that's like?" No, really, I do. I wonder this even as I'm listening to, say, an Edith Piaf CD and understanding the French lyrics and flipping through a German novel. But it doesn't count! My French is terrible - I refuse to speak! - and I never *learned* German, not like I would have to learn Spanish, or Norwegian, or Inuktitut - or any of the other languages I will be fascinated with at some point in my life.
And my language is English. I prefer to write English only (I don't much care about the reading), I prefer to have complicated conversations (and simple ones) too in English. There are German words I find handy, and in conversations with other German-speakers will lazily resort to those, but they tend to be the untranslatables. I don't *need* them, I *like* them. I could only do my work in English. I speak English far better than German. But my German is fine. I speak it with a regional accent, I don't stress out about having to switch to it sometimes. It just is. I probably have 1.8 languates (2.0 if you give me 0.2 for the rudimentary French).
But there are people who have a total of 1.5 language, and no 1.0 in either one. I know lots of these - the ones whose German did not get maintained as well as mine (I spent significant chunks of my 20s in Germany, including some university stints, in part to avoid losing the first language) and whose English never did lose its sound of "this is my second language". There are so many people who can't speak either language without an obvious announcement every time they open their mouths: I don't speak this language perfectly. It happens to all sorts of people. Sometimes, I am entertained by the language that is developed as a result, when you take your original language and start to absorb new words and expression that are borrowed. My parents, for example, will go to the dump and maybe run over raccoons on the way there - "dump" and "raccoon" don't get translated to German (there are German words for these concepts, and they are cumbersome and were not in usage in their German lives).
Oh, and my car? bremm-bremm, not vroom-vroom. But then, it is a VW. It also makes my mechanic's till go ka-ching ka-ching.
Posted by Johanna at June 29, 2006 06:49 AM