When you don't know your own languages, do you consider your self stupid?

Question

I'm 26 and my mother tongue was spanish. However, my spanish is so bad because i never speak with anyone using complicated structures and idioms. Add to that the fact that i'm a quiet person, so i don't even talk in length with my parents.don' have mexican friends, don't have american friends. You could suggest i start getting mexican and american friends but i feel like a failure and they would think i'm stupid being that i don't know how to speak at my age. So, how can i ever feel good about myself?

Answer 1

Your question assumes that the indication of a good speaker is whether that person can use idioms. Who cares if you can use idioms! They don't let you use many of them in school or work anyway.

Your question actually seems quite articulate, so I think you do know how to speak. It's just that you believe, somehow, that the quality of your language is deficient. Have you considered that there might be something else wrong in your life besides language problems? Maybe you could have yourself checked by a psychologist to see if there are other problems you're not aware of.

Answer 2

NO ONE is stupid.
Every One is ignorant....About different things.

Do your parents speak Castillion? Or a dialect, much like Mexico?

One of the most difficult things for one learning a "foreign" language is pronunciation. You already have the basics.

It would be a snap for you to study the written language. You can learn structure, verb conjugations, etc., and you should have no major problems with pronunciation.
Go to the library and check out a Spanish Text. Read aloud. It will be Castillion. If you need pronunciation, tapes or CDs are everywhere. I can read more than I can speak just by a little study. I learned Italian from text books but then had to attend night school in order to speak.

Answer 3

One of the things I do is keep a diary. I've been doing this for nearly thirty years now. Of course, keeping a diary allows you to see how you've grown--if your life is worth living, it's worth recording.

In your case, seeing as you're weak in Spanish, there's a linguistic benefit you could derive from doing something like this. No matter what language you write a diary in, after you've written it for a while you eventually reach a point where the "amateurishness" disappears from your thought and sentence structure and you begin to approach your writing from the standpoint of having your words not only being the prettiest ones you can think of, but making the ideas behind those words well thought-out too.

I've been studying German intermittently my whole life, in little bits and pieces, and I'm at an intermediate level with that language. While I don't write my diary in German, I do maintain blogs and my web site in both English and German, partly to keep my practice up and partly to learn new vocabulary.

Here's my approach. First, I run my English text through the Babelfish translation utility. I know enough German to be able to tell when Babelfish picked a wrong translation ("sie" can be translated "she" or "they", for example) or did the translation with the wrong word order, and so I make corrections where necessary. At that point I suspect some words to not have been translated correctly given the context I want to convey, and so I check those against my English-German dictionary, making corrections where necessary. Finally, I plunk the translation into Microsoft Word, my copy of which has a German grammar module, and I correct my grammar accordingly. Of course, if I were fluent in German I wouldn't need to do all this, but at least it's an effective exercise and a great way to learn new vocabulary.

Another good resource is the web site spanish.about.com. If it's anything like german.about.com, you'll find online forums in which you can write in Spanish or about Spanish, and it's chock-full of grammatical tips and idiomatic glossaries.

As for feeling inadequate or stupid because of a weakness in the language, don't. While my French sucks, my Quebec relatives know this, and so they're not going to expect me to deliver something in French *perfectly*. Nor will they regard my lack of fluency in French as a reflection of my intelligence. Look at John Blackthorne in the Shogun mini-series--did Toranaga, Mariko et al think him stupid because his Japanese was at a beginner's level? Uncivilized by 16th-century Japanese standards, maybe, but not stupid.

Above all, be thankful that you can communicate in more than one language at all. The more languages you speak, the more the world opens up for you and the more culturally rich you can become. Knowing a second language helps you understand how words function in your first one. Or, as Goethe put it, "Wer keine fremde Sprache spricht, kennt seine Muttersprache nicht" (whoever doesn't speak a foreign language doesn't know his own).

Answer 4

You should only feel stupid if you cannot use the language you need to support yourself and contribute something useful to the world.

Worrying about your mother tongue is silly. If you can speak it, good. If you cannot, don't worry about it.

Answer 5

Start by getting a life and not coming on the Internet to wangst about things you can change.

Answer 6

no