'I can't say my own name': The pain of language loss in families | Hacker News Reader

'I can't say my own name': The pain of language loss in families

bbc.com

36 pointspseudolus29 comments

This is a thing I saw a lot when growing up in Toronto. It's bizarre to go to something like a BBQ at your friend's house and they'll introduce you to someone like their grandma who only speaks Portuguese or Mandarin but your friend only speaks English. Often times it's the middle generation that is bilingual because they were raised in their native language at home but they aren't confident enough to do the same with their own children, or they married outside of their culture so only one of the parents knows the language and it doesn't get passed on.

I am one of these relationships, my partner is Australian and I am Norwegian. We both want our kid to learn Norwegian of course, but it's clearly going to be hard, as we keep forgetting to speak Norwegian at home ourselves.

After some life experience, I honestly believe the default mode is to lose the second language. Both my parents could speak French but as an adult I'm basically starting from scratch on my own. What they didn't do is the extra effort. When I was young, I knew kids that were Jewish and had to go to Hebrew Sunday school even though they hated it. As an adult I know families that send their kids off to Bulgaria and Hungary during the summer to live with their extended families. Francophones in Ontario enroll their kids into French immersion classes, and others sign their kids up for after school calligraphy classes for Arabic. Another example is a local private school that is run by a Greek orthodox church which has Greek as a core language, the students' experience culminates in a class trip to Greece. It is a real uphill battle that takes time, money, effort, and access to some kind of community to maintain.

This is super important to me. My dad really wanted us to be Americans, but now that I'm older, I'm trying to connect with my heritage. There aren't a ton of English language resources for learning about the culture, and so the best most viable option is doing it in the native language, which I wasn't taught. I'm learning it on my own, and it's challenging, but definitely worthwhile.

I'd heavily suggest connecting with foreign family ( cousins, neighbors, etc ) on Facebook to practice language. They'll be excited to hear from you, and even more excited when they see you trying your best to communicate in the language of your ancestors...!

My great grandparents were Italian, and didn't teach their children Italian, because at that time Italians weren't considered "white" and they wanted their kids to fit in. I'm connected to my heritage, almostly entirely through food. As adults, my mom and I have learned bits of the language but we're far from fluent. I wish that my grandparents had taken the effort you are taking today. Thanks, on behalf of your grandkids.

It's worth a couple of lifetimes, imo :)

I recommend looking on italki.com to see what options there are for language lessons. I started using them years ago, doing two lessons a week, and it’s helped massively with my native language progress

> My dad really wanted us to be Americans, but now that I'm older, I'm trying to connect with my heritage.

Which means he succeeded.

Yes, he's pleased. He's also happy and surprised I'm digging into all of this old stuff. It's been fun.

I have been teaching my toddler Bengali and it's hard going. His mother has been trying but struggling to learn it. Much of the time if I say something to him I need others to understand what I'm saying too, so I have to revert English.

Recently I've started to refuse to give him what he wants unless he asks in Bengali (and helping him to do that). Exactly because I want him to be able to speak as well as understand.

My goal is to make him bilingual, as I believe that will help with further language acquisition in the future. It seems really obvious to me that his mother struggles with this _because_ she's monolingual.

I'm getting used to it but it's taken a couple of years of very conscious effort to get this far.

my father would do this with us, only respond to us in his native tongue or even acknowledge it. We speak 3 languages at home and were fortunate that my parents picked one language to start us off in and english for example would come second as we'd learn it in school. I think its absolutely crucial to learn your mother/father tongue that is not english because knowing the language is knowing the culture as well and that to me is priceless.

I don't understand the general gist of this article.

No, it's not too late to reclaim it. I've learned languages in my 30's and see no reason why I couldn't continue to do so in the coming decades.

If it were really that "painful" you'd do something about it.

> I've learned languages in my 30's and see no reason why I couldn't continue to do so in the coming decades.

I think you're giving your age away.

I picked up basic German in 3 days of very hard work at age 20. It worked, I still remember it and it's still useful.

In my early 30s I picked up basic Norwegian in about 6 weeks of light effort. I can still recall some of it and still communicate in it, very poorly.

I also picked up a smattering of Spanish, Swedish and tiny amounts of Japanese without much effort in my teens and 20s.

In my mid 40s, I started to learn Czech. After 3 years of effort, I was getting nowhere, so I started paying professional teachers. After 5 years of that, I just about struggled past level A2 (advanced beginner).

Learning your first Slavic language in adulthood is brutally difficult. (New phonemes, vowel length as marker of minimal pairs, 4 genders + 7 cases + 2 plurals for all nouns + complex tense system including gendered verbs.)

Takeaways:

1. Language acquisition gets much harder with age.

2. Learning languages closely related to your own feels hard but it's much easier. Learn something distantly linked or unrelated for a long drawn out sharp shock.

How is your accent with the languages you've learned? I mean, do you think you could pass for a native speaker?

I think the problem for the writer is they cannot say their name in the native accent.

A similar but opposite example would be: a person from India who cannot say certain English words without an Indian accent.

English is my first language (I don't say native as no one is born speaking a language).

In English, I sound Australian in Australia but in Scotland sound like a Scot.

My Spanish accent is pretty good, Latinos say I sound like a person from Spain. People from Spain say I sound like a news reader.

My Portuguese accent is a lot dicier because I have learnt it from more people from many different regions of Brazil. I believe I could clean it up.

You could put all this down to moving around as a child but really I have simply just attempted very hard to imitate the sounds I am hearing and have refused to be satisfied with less than the phoneme I am hearing.

That's pretty cool, nice work learning the different languages.

I guess if you moved around as a kid, you probably had to imitate language and behaviour to fit in.

Times change. My child grew up (late completely bilingual in the language of his parents plus English (the primary language spoken where he mostly grew up, Silicon Valley).

But the "language of his parents": we didn't use the languages of both of my parents. In the 1960s Australia still had a "white" legal and social system and my mum quickly realised that the kids would use the languages spoken at home in public -- not a good idea!

Luckily I have at least one language in common with most of my relatives. But half the time that language is English.

We're at a point in time where it's more accepted than ever to speak a different language at home than the lingua franca, with more resources than ever to help one to learn a second (or third...) language. Yet I see these kinds of articles at least once every six months. I relearned my "native" language after a skip of two generations, these folks can do the same.

Facebook recently released a trove of AI models that can do TTS and other stuff in 1000s of languages. This gave me a lot of hope that languages can start to be digitally preserved!

I don't believe in technical solutions for such things.

This is, first and foremost, a societal problem: low prestige of a language, discrimination of its speakers, economic hardships that force people to leave their communities, lingering effects of colonisation in language politics and so on.

While technology is certainly useful, it cannot fix the root of the problems.

I mean; You’re not wrong that tech can’t solve this problem alone…but your lack of faith in using these tools stands against preservation.

I worked in many communities. For 14 years I served several communities where the elders were the only ones who speak the language; in many cases, the languages are practically on life support.

About the only way we can preserve many of these is technical solutions to preserve what remains and wait for the political will to incubate the language.

That and learn. I’m honored that I made friends with some of the locals in many of these towns, and even more honored that they taught me some of their history and language. It can’t just be indigenous people learning the language too - those of us who speak the dominant language and are members of the dominant culture need to learn some too.

She can't say her own name - why doesn't she learn it then? There's plenty of Bengali people in the world, pay one for a few hours of lessons.

I say this, because one thing I see over and over amongsts failed foreign language learners is that they complain endlessly about not knowing the language. They'll do anything to learn the language - except for putting in some effort of course.

She said her Bengali relatives tell her she says it with an accent. Becoming fluent wouldn't necessarily fix that. Teaching diction is a specialized area, and most language instruction doesn't go too deep into it.

So get an expert to help her say that exact sound. Or better yet, use my method - record a pro saying it, then record yourself saying it, repeat until you got it. It's not rocket science.

I thought some languages had sounds that didn't exist in others, which leads to a kind of audio colour blindness where you literally can't tell the difference between two sounds?

Japanese R Vs L is maybe the canonical example. Maybe you can train around this, but maybe you can't. Wikipedia cites conflicting evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_...

And when she wants to say a different Bengali word? She acknowledged that she can learn, but the point of the article is that her upbringing was disconnected from the language and culture.

Rinse and repeat. Why is this a mystery?

It's not a mystery. If you narrow the scope of the problem to pronunciation, then it's a solution. Good job.

As her name is Mithu, I suspect that she struggles to correctly pronounce the aspiration on the 't' - this is a feature of Indian languages that is notoriously tricky for anglophone (and indeed most european) speakers.

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