Sociopath Community

• 7:48  Damien: Everything seems different than said in my own language.
• 7:48  Damien: More dissociated.
• 7:49  Damien: I wuv it ^.^
• 7:49  haart: Yes I feel the same
•  
• 7:49  haart: I don't like it so much lol
• 7:49  haart: I almost feel like I'm not 100% me
• 7:49  haart: Even when I try to be
• 7:50  haart: Like I try to be honest, but it's once removed
• 7:50  Damien: I'm always calculative in a way before opening my mouth
• 7:50  haart: I guess because you have to think a bit more
• 7:50  haart: Yeah exactly
• 7:50  Damien: Like first form the sentence then say it
• 7:50  Damien: Not create on the spot
• 7:50  haart: Exactly!
• 7:51  Damien: In my language too, tho to a lesser degree
• 7:51  haart: Much lesser degree
• 7:51  Damien: So I'm good.
• 7:51  haart: It's almost automatic in your own tongue

That's interesting. I get that disconnect no matter which language I use to communicate. It's an ADD thing.

My mind moves quickly and it's so full of neat shiny stuff. It's like a river full of salmon about to spawn.

Speaking (or writing) is like being the bear who has to reach past all the other distracting traffic noise and shit (The river. The river of noise D:) into that pile of wriggling critters (The language. The fish :)) to grab the best one for my purposes.

I'm better in print, bc I have more time to wade through the tangle of words to express what I really want to say.

I'm hilarious out loud. I have to be careful  how many random brainfarts I let pass in front of other people, tho. I've been told I'm perceived as shy bc I am a little guarded about the things I say. I'm not shy, but people think I am. I just prefer to hang back until I'm able to choose my words properly.

Things are even more tangled in french bc there's another layer of stuff to reach through, like I have to pick through the salmon to get to some other type of fish in muh bear pond. The language is full of hilarious mistranslations just waiting to happen. My daughter was in french immersion for awhile. Every time she was late for school, she had to go get a "Retard Passe"  lololol

I can pick out a few phrases in other languages, but not enough to try to speak. I usually just listen if Idk wth I'm tryina say to people.

Xena stated: source post

That's interesting. I get that disconnect no matter which language I use to communicate. It's an ADD thing.

It feels very different in a language that isn't yours.

My mind moves quickly and it's so full of neat shiny stuff. It's like a river full of salmon about to spawn.

Speaking (or writing) is like being the bear who has to reach past all the other distracting traffic noise and shit (The river. The river of noise D:) into that pile of wriggling critters (The language. The fish :)) to grab the best one for my purposes.

I'm better in print, bc I have more time to wade through the tangle of words to express what I really want to say.

I think you're taking more about being eloquent in a language. It's not quite what I'm getting at - which is being even passably coherent in one. I get sometimes accused of being pretentious because I'll use a word that isn't really colloquially appropriate.

I'm hilarious out loud. I have to be careful  how many random brainfarts I let pass in front of other people, tho. I've been told I'm perceived as shy bc I am a little guarded about the things I say. I'm not shy, but people think I am. I just prefer to hang back until I'm able to choose my words properly.

Things are even more tangled in french bc there's another layer of stuff to reach through, like I have to pick through the salmon to get to some other type of fish in muh bear pond. The language is full of hilarious mistranslations just waiting to happen. My daughter was in french immersion for awhile. Every time she was late for school, she had to go get a "Retard Passe"  lololol

That's more what I'm talking about. Expressing yourself in an unfamiliar tongue to people who know it naturally.

I can pick out a few phrases in other languages, but not enough to try to speak. I usually just listen if Idk wth I'm tryina say to people.

I have another example, which I'd be interested to know if other people can relate to. Sometimes I'm not 100% confident of an idea in English, because I don't always think I'm expressing it right. But I'd be more confident of it in my mother tongue.

And I usually do still express most of my ideas, but I wonder sometimes if I'd come across differently, or if they'd come across differently (and I don't at all mean this as "it wasn't my mother tongue that's why I sounded dumb". Sometime's my ideas are probably dumb. And sometimes the people who disagree with me aren't speaking in their mother tongue either.) So... Not using this as an excuse, more an explanation of the way language influences expression...

I mentioned this in chat but thought I'd share it here as well. Language can affect the way we think and perceive the world, and one interesting example of that is the language of a small Aboriginal community in Australia:

 

I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right.

The Kuuk Thaayorre, instead of arranging time from left to right, arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. 

That's really interesting.

I can speak on the differences I feel in English. One, for example, is the use of the possessive. In English, it's always very clear who belongs to what. Not so much in other languages, where it can sometimes require some grammatical effort to make it clear who "own's" what. We don't always have words like "own's".

I can't think of anything else at the moment, but I'm sure I will later.

I met a young man in Cameroon who told me a joke:

Him: "Gunny... what do you call a person who speaks two languages?"

Me: "Bilingual."

Him: laughing "Yes, yes... you are a smart man, Gunny.  What do you call a person who speaks three languages?"

Me: "Trilingual?"

Him: still laughing "Yes, that is correct, Gunny. What do you call someone who speaks just one language?"

I sat there staring at him for a minute. Then he said: "We call them Americans."

He's right...

I can only give limited input on this topic from my two years of learning Spanish and French in high school.

The of memorization of the embedding of gender in grammar took a moment, and seemed a rather antiquated way of speaking. I also found it interesting how nouns were designated genders (ex: la biblioteca). I wondered if there was some sort of meaning behind this, or very subtle unconscious associations at play.

I did not find it difficult to formulate sentences, though nor did I reach a level of proficiency where double-meanings and those sorts of things came into play.

I felt there was much less nuance in these languages...but again, I never attained the speaking ability of someone for whom either language was a mother tongue.

Tryptamine stated: source post

I never attained the speaking ability of someone for whom either language was a mother tongue.

Not quite what you said but I'm wondering if it would even be possible to get to a point with a second language where you feel as much as home with it as with your primary. Well, unless you grow up multilingual, I suppose.