Hacker News Reader

Comment by ad404b8a372f2b9 | Hacker News Reader

I relate to most of the things she talks about, except I think exclusively in English, to the point I'm losing my French even though I live in France.

English is convenient and quick. And everything feels less severe, I feel like a completely different person when I use it, more confident and light-hearted.

Another thing I've noticed is that I'm much more prone to swearing, the worst swears in English seem light and cute compared to French for some reason.

It'd be interesting to figure out whether these differences stem from culture, context of use, or inherent properties of the languages.

View on HN

In my experience, these things have nothing to do with the language itself, but rather that it's a second language.

As a non native speaker, you just don't have those strong emotional connections to words that a native speaker would have.

Studies show that a foreign language uses more of the thinking brain rather than the feeling brain (they showed this by asking personal / sexual questions in different languages to multilingual people.)

Visiting my friend's parents in Luxembourg, her brother said "motherfucker" to his mother. I was stunned into silence.

I never swear in my second language. Since I don't have anything close to an understanding of how the words should be used, it's unlikely that I'd be understood as I intended.

I shouted 'fuck' my first time in an airplane taking off. It was a surprising G-force and the surprise made me swear.

Thing is, we were on a flight to Ireland. It was not appreciated. I think this is basically how you were raised. My parents didn't consider it a horrible word, so I didn't either. I kinda learned that day, but it still carries much less weight than 'godverdomme'.

Next time you find yourself in that situation, try shouting "feck" instead, which is regarded as a fairly mild swearword (indeed, barely a swearword at all).

Not being Irish, I'd never heard of it until I first saw Father Ted [0], and was initially shocked at the characters uttering what I assumed was a dialectical variant of "fuck" every five minutes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted

Good advice and I was going to suggest it myself.

To anyone wishing to swear in English (as a second language), "feck" is a very good choice to try and make as your instinctive choice. It really is not offensive - I suspect it might be based on the word feckless, rather than fuck but then I'm English and not Irish and have no idea. Perhaps it is an Anglicization of a Gaelic word.

Or to go even milder: "Effing heck!"

I guess swearwords always seem less serious in your non-native language, since you're not culturally ingrained to think they are bad.

It also doesn't help that swearwords seem to be the first thing people learn in other languages. I can't actually speak French, Spanish, or Italian, but I have a good handle on swearing in all of them.

Me too. Everyone tells me how much I swear in english, I barely register it. I like to refer to that feeling as "I know the words but I can't hear the music".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com