This has turned in to more of a piece about my linguistic history than my actual usage, but for what's it worth here it is before I curl up into a catatonic ball at the thought of the amount of self-disclosure involved:
I was born and brought up in Buckinghamshire in the SE of England. My father is from London, and my mother is half English and half Scottish. The English I learnt at home and school was pretty close to Standard Southern British, but two words which I picked up from my Scottish grandmother were tarrara, meaning bum (He’s got a big tarrara) and slitter, to spill food on one’s clothes (You’ve slittered all down that shirt). Two constructions which don’t belong to the standard but which my family use all the time can be seen in the following: “What did you think to the film? Was it any good of?”
I’m told I was very late (nearly three) in moving beyond the one-word stage of talking, but then came out with complete sentences. I’d obviously decided I wasn’t going to go in for this language lark until I’d got it thoroughly sussed. I didn’t learn to read until I got to school, but went my own way once I’d started. While everybody else was painfully spelling out each word letter by letter time and time again, I was learning whole words easily but having problems with the individual letters, so was completely at sea with new words. Once this problem was overcome I became an avid reader.
When I started grammar school I was introduced to Latin and picked it up very easily, shooting ahead of the rest of the class. The only one who could keep up with me was the lone Catholic in the class, who was used to the Latin mass. I was put in the language stream and studied Latin, French, and Greek. This has influenced my language in that I tend to slide into a more bookish, Latinate, style easily. It also stimulated a fascination with etymology and grammar.
At university I did first year linguistics and picked up the theoretical side very quickly, but found the practical side of phonetics in particular much more difficult. I was painfully shy and the thought of collecting data by finding people to talk into tape recorders was not to be thought of, so I dropped linguistics, much to my subsequent regret.
In my mid twenties I took a course to become an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher, and my first job was in Singapore. The language school where I was working also offered courses in Malay, Mandarin, and Japanese, and I took beginner’s courses in all three. Just by being in Singapore I was starting to recognise some simple Chinese characters, but the spoken language defeated me. I simply could not hear the different tones.
After eighteen months in Singapore, I went to Spain for a year, living in a town called Valls, which was about an hour’s train ride from Barcelona on the Lerida line. The local language was Catalan, and although I did my best to learn Castilian Spanish I found myself slipping Catalan words (which were what I was hearing around me) into Spanish grammar (which was what I was studying from books). I found it was easy enough to work out from French and Latin what Catalan and Spanish meant when I saw them written down, but used to get frustrated by the fact that my listening skills lagged far behind.
After my time in Spain finished I came to Indonesia, and have lived here ever since. As usual my reading and writing skills are much more advanced than my speaking and listening skills. I’ve lived among different social groups among foreigners here. English teachers tend to sprinkle useful Indonesian words in their conversations much more than other foreigners living here do. The most common ones are sudah and belum (roughly already and not yet), especially useful as one word answers to questions. I’m careful not to do that with Indonesians though. I’ve moved around a bit in Indonesia and have sometimes had the experience of the word I learnt in one area not being understood in another, for example, in Surabaya (East Java) the everyday word for chili is lombok, but nobody I met in Bandung (West Java) recognised this and I had to remember to use cabe.
Indonesian is of course my main foreign language now, but I am struggling to retain my Latin, Greek, and French. Spanish and I parted company long ago but I can still sometimes dredge up or work out a few expressions if necessary. Reflecting on my language learning experiences I would say I have a talent for picking up the early stages very quickly and working out what things mean from very little data so I make very rapid progress, but then slow right down because I don’t feel any need to make much of an effort. Probably true in other areas of life as well.
Bingley
