Job Discussion Forums

[MrCAPiTUL]

after being in Asia a while... have you noticed that sometimes it slips and you start speaking/typing in pigeon English, having more typos than usual, sometimes leaving out prepositions, etc. I notice this quite a bit within the business community.

[Bread]

This definitely happens to me, but I've found that a little time back in an English environment builds it back up pretty quickly. Reading a lot of books helps somewhat, too.

PS pidgin, not pigeon. Pigeons lack the capacity for language

[MrCAPiTUL]

hahaha. Good catch, Bread. Perhaps that was case in point?

[mhard1]

yea I noticed it. Also you notice that you can generally lose ambition here if you do not stay sharp and motivated. I am just waiting for the day that I have my English corrected by a student

[Mr_Monkey]

I found quite the opposite happened - my spoken and written English got better.

Teachers who deliberately drop prepositions and articles to make their language more "comprehensible" are my pet hate!

[seklarwia]

I'm somewhere between the two.

With all the specific grammar questions I get asked by both students and JTEs, I've found that I had my nose in the grammar books an awful lot and my understanding of where we use whatever and why has improved. But I find that when I speak now, I automatically use more simple words than I would have a few years ago. I also use culturally specific idioms a whole lot less.

[Apsara]

Rather than an overall drop in my English, after a while I developed the ability to tailor my level of speech, use of idioms etc to the person I'm speaking to- almost unconsciously I think. I even have to do this with native speakers in a small way- New Zealand slang and idioms can be incomprehensible to people from the US and Canada, so my English has become much more Americanised (not the spelling though!) than it used to be. Talking to New Zealanders and Australians though I slip back into a more Kiwi way of speaking quite quickly.

I have noticed that some guys here with Japanese girlfriends who don't speak much English will use a real pidgin to talk to them- and then turn around and use that pidgin on everyone else as well, no matter what their level of English, which grates. They don't seem to realise that leaving out the articles and prepositions doesn't actually make English easier to understand. My husband's English is very fluent so I don't really have to modify much, although we actually usually speak to each other in a complete mishmash of both languages.

My spelling hasn't suffered, but I also work as a proofreader (of items written by native English speakers as well as by Japanese and other non-natives), so I am much more anal about spelling than most people!

[heiko127]

My English got worse once I came back here after living in Japan for 4 months. Then it finally became better but when I started volunteering to help some Japanese international students at my uni and started hanging out with them often it got worse

[Mr_Monkey]

I wonder how much of this is perception, and how much is reality...

It would make an interesting master's thesis for a linguistics student...