Korean Job Discussion Forums

laogaiguk · Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Location: somewhere in Korea

First, I think my English is actually very good, especially compared to the atrocious spelling and grammar on this site. But still, after studying a few Asian languages, I find I am consistently forgeting my question marks after questions. I have to review every post I make to make sure I included them and even still, I tend to leave some out. Does anyone else have this problem? For obvious reasons, I never had this problem in French school.

Hater Depot · Joined: 29 Mar 2005

Since studying Korean, apparently tend to drop pronouns more often.

Novernae · Joined: 02 Mar 2005

Delirium's Brother · Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 2:05 am Post subject:

My biggest problem is that my third language interferes with my second language when I am speaking; but not when I'm writing. It makes me really reluctant to practice my L2. I'm way more fluent in my third language than my second, so the words flow more readily to mind. I haven't noticed any change in my L1 writing, just the same silly careless mistakes that I always made. And that's even after proofing everything one hundred times. I don't have a lot of opportunities to write in my L2 or L3, so who knows how my writing scans in those languages.

p.s. My L1 and L2 are both Indo-Europen languages; and my L3 and L4 are Western Malayo-Polynesian languages. I don't know if that makes any difference.

daskalos · Joined: 19 May 2006 Location: The Road to Ithaca

Wow. Feeling pretty inadequate hanging around still just working on my L2, which has a damned semi-colon for a question mark. I spend an hour a night on it here in Korea, which (as far as I'm concerned) gets me off the hook for not attempting any real jab at Korean, since I'm decidedly not here for the long term, and will live for the rest of my life with my L2.

My biggest problem with its intrusion into my English is that I sometimes forget how to pronounce English words derived from L2, giving them an L1-L2 mix, which when explained to people makes them think I'm a pompous ashhole. So I don't explain it anymore, preferring to be thought stupid.

Woland · Joined: 10 May 2006 Location: Seoul

Learning to write in Russian destroyed my ability to use commas in English. Russian requires that every clause be set off by a comma in complex sentences. It's easy and consistent, unlike English. Now I have to really think about which clauses require commas in English and which don't.

Russian (my third language) has come to completely interfere with my spoken Spanish (2nd language). I constantly put grammatical fillers from Russian in my spoken Spanish.

Turkish (language 4) is actually proving to be a great help with Korean now, while on my first attempt with Korean 10 years back, I really struggled.

There's actually a whole literature developing now on multilingualism and its effects. Cool stuff.