Relearning language

[STN]

Has anyone here ever managed to re-learn a forgotten language? The first language I ever spoke was Welsh and I more or less had to learn English when I moved to England aged 5. I can no longer recall a word of Welsh but have now purloined a Welsh picture dictionary for kids from my mum's house and a lot of the words have a strange resonance/familiarity. Does anyone on here have any simliar experience with this?

Apologies for obscure, self-indulgent post but, hey, you didn't have to read it etc.

 

[gabriel]

my friend juliet's mum was brought up by german-speaking parents (in england i think, perhaps in germany for a while, i'm not sure) and spoke german as her mother tongue in her early years (maybe till she was like five or something). last year she went to germany for the first time in years and didn't think that she could speak german, but found that she could, without knowing how, ie she was listening to people speak and translating, but sometimes without being able to say what specific words meant. she said it was really weird.

who's welsh?

 

[STN]

Well, if it does all come flooding back to me (and a lot of people seem to think it will) I will have the vocabulary of a five-year-old boy. I'll be alright as long as they're talking about knights and dragons and giants and bats and lions and dinosaurs and race-cars and ice-cream.

who's welsh?

In my family? No one. That's why I expect it's a bit of a weird situation - most people who grew up with another language have (at least) one parent who is fluent in that language. My mum was pretty fluent then and can still speak a tiny bit of heavily-accented Welsh but I don't think my dad ever learned - the only reason I spoke it is that I had to at school and so did all my friends.

 

[bassnation]

Has anyone here ever managed to re-learn a forgotten language? The first language I ever spoke was Welsh and I more or less had to learn English when I moved to England aged 5. I can no longer recall a word of Welsh but have now purloined a Welsh picture dictionary for kids from my mum's house and a lot of the words have a strange resonance/familiarity. Does anyone on here have any simliar experience with this?

Apologies for obscure, self-indulgent post but, hey, you didn't have to read it etc.

i'm welsh and learnt it briefly at school but forgotten most of it as i've been living in england for 18 years. i feel the same if i hear it even though i can't speak more than a few basic sentences.

also had the same thing spending four years working with a team of mostly spanish and south american people in london. by the end of that i found i could understand conversations (at least partially, anyway) without even making an effort to learn the language. its kind of hardwired in us, isn't it? in fact theres a bizarre connection between south america and wales anyway, as i liked to remind my colleagues at regular intervals - there was a welsh colony in patagonia in the 19th century, must be the first and only of its kind. its in the blood, i'm telling ya.
http://www.data-wales.co.uk/patagonia.htm

bit of a tangent sorry!

 

[martin]

Funnily enough, and partly fuelled by some serious pub reminiscing with STN about the golden age of 'Tricolore', I was thinking about trying to pick up French again. One problem is that I'm completely crap at it verbally, but it'd be nice to be able to read some original stuff by Jean Genet and the like and actually appreciate the language they're using, rather than sit there squinting and trying to translate it.

I really liked German, one of the few things I enjoyed about school, even though 'Deutsche Heute' lacked the brilliance of 'Tricolore', the thriving cultural epicentre of La Rochelle and that raven-haired beauty with the ribbon tied round her neck and her teasing minx mate with the blonde bubble perm from the first volume. Weirdly enough, the last few times I've been to Germany, I've managed to sort of hold OK conversations with the locals (though I can't pronounce 'bratwurst' properly for shit, apparently it's 'brot-vorst'). Which surprised me, as I haven't looked at a German textbook since I was 16.

 

[Woebot]

Does anyone on here have any simliar experience with this?

An experience i have which i reckon is pretty similar to this is half-remembering things about my very earliest childhood, things like the views up from cots, from bringing up my son. I couldn't actually put my finger on anything precise, just an eeire feeling of reminiscense.

They say when you're really really old that you start to remember a lot more things. My granny used to say that it was one of the magical things about getting old.

 

[STN]

So it seems it may well come back to me in one form or another. I'm off to get a Trycwlwr and some language tapes.

Martin - there are bits of Genet that even the most biro-phallus-festooned Tricolore could not help anyone translate. I know what you mean though, I keep meaning to pick up French again, those parallel translation thingies don't really work.

 

[tht]

Which surprised me, as I haven't looked at a German textbook since I was 16

that is surprising, i got 90-100% in all of my gcse german papers and i could hardly understand it even then, the standard was so low (der hund ist gut, ich habe zwei eier, etc etc)

a few weeks ago i thought i'd have another go but i couldn't find a lot to of non literary stuff that i'd want to read as anything other than propaedutic

An experience i have which i reckon is pretty similar to this is half-remembering things about my very earliest childhood, things like the views up from cots, from bringing up my son

can you be sure that these are organic memories, or is the other half of the remembering actually a psychic construction? i suppose a radical (jungian?) way of looking at it is there is no difference, and even freud seemed to treat some _very_ early infantile memories as essentially accurate

conflating a little, i think it would be advantageous in many ways for children to be bilingual from infancy

 

[martin]

that is surprising, i got 90-100% in all of my gcse german papers and i could hardly understand it even then, the standard was so low (der hund ist gut, ich habe zwei eier, etc etc)

Well when I said the conversations went well, they did from my perspective. Maybe the locals were just incredibly polite (actually I think Germans are really cool, polite people in general, or maybe I've just met the nice ones). I suppose it'd be the equivalent of some German guy stopping you in Camden and saying "Hello very much! Where is the sausage to buy? Do you love the
West Ham football group? I want a yellow lager probable".

 

[nomadologist]

that is surprising, i got 90-100% in all of my gcse german papers and i could hardly understand it even then, the standard was so low (der hund ist gut, ich habe zwei eier, etc etc)

a few weeks ago i thought i'd have another go but i couldn't find a lot to of non literary stuff that i'd want to read as anything other than propaedutic



can you be sure that these are organic memories, or is the other half of the remembering actually a psychic construction? i suppose a radical (jungian?) way of looking at it is there is no difference, and even freud seemed to treat some _very_ early infantile memories as essentially accurate

conflating a little, i think it would be advantageous in many ways for children to be bilingual from infancy

i'd have to look up the research, but i think it's pretty widely believed that most of our "memories" are made-up contentwise. there's no way to store all of the info you'd need to to remember, say, the exact way something looked 5 years ago, so our brains do the efficient thing and remember bits. then during recall, we fill in the blanks.

memory is actually an act of the imagination. i guess you could call it "phantasmic"...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well when I said the conversations went well, they did from my perspective. Maybe the locals were just incredibly polite (actually I think Germans are really cool, polite people in general, or maybe I've just met the nice ones). I suppose it'd be the equivalent of some German guy stopping you in Camden and saying "Hello very much! Where is the sausage to buy? Do you love the
West Ham football group? I want a yellow lager probable".

In my (limited) experience they are very polite and cool to TALK to, but they don't understand the concept of a 'queue' and are better at elbow- and shoulder-barging than the average American football champ.

Nice people, though.

 

[shudder]

conflating a little, i think it would be advantageous in many ways for children to be bilingual from infancy

I think bilingualism is really the rule rather than the exception for the non-anglophone world. Stupid English first language bullshit....

 

[bruno]

An experience i have which i reckon is pretty similar to this is half-remembering things about my very earliest childhood, things like the views up from cots

one of my oldest recollections is of looking up at people chattering and thinking 'i can't understand a word they're saying'. the idea was there but not the words to express it.

my first language was german but i understand very little now. i suppose i could pick it up again if i had the talent, but i don't. i tend to forget even basic things in spanish, my day to day language.

i think if i stopped interacting altogether i could revert to a pre-language mode like the one at the time of the anecdote, i don't think i'd be missing out on a lot.