After that little musical interlude (I had a little listen to Eluveitie by the way, and they're a bit too metal for me), it's time to get back to my log, with another rambling post about a random topic.
I am writing this week's post in English because it just would not feel right to try to cover this topic in another language.
How do I even English?No, this is not going to be a post about struggling to find words/grammatical structures in my native language due to aaaalll the foreign language learning I'm
not doing. There are plenty of those on this forum already. It is, however, going to be about me losing my grip on my native English, and how that bothers me a bit more every day.
I am a native English speaker and I live my life in English. As I work in customer service, I speak, hear, read and write a LOT of English every day. The majority of the media I consume is in English and I chat to my friends on social media in English, for the most part. So I consume and produce a fair amount of English on a daily basis. The thing is, I want more, and I feel like I should be doing more with English.
Let's just take a moment to go back into my past (please excuse the smell), to see where my interest in language came from. Setting aside my brilliant secondary school Spanish teacher, who pretty much speaks for himself (and I should hope so), I was also inspired by my English Literature teacher at the time. He was so obviously passionate about his job, and had this air of intelligence about him that really impressed me. (Ok, I'll admit it, maybe I had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him
). The subject interested me to no end as well though, so much so that I took English Literature AND English Language at college (this is of course UK sixth form college I'm talking about, from 16-18).
I enjoyed both of these subjects greatly (for anyone who has read my previous logs, this is about the time that I hated Spanish
) and although I was doing much better in terms of essays, exams etc. in English Language, I considered that English Literature was more of a prestigious subject to study, and so went to university to study it. It was there that I worked out that the history/culture-focused part of studying literature did absolutely nothing for me. I discovered that it was studying the use of the language itself that interested me. I loved to see how words were put together, played with and used to convey meaning, without the need for some historical/theoretical relevance. I think this is why I am such a fan of stand up comedy as well. Wordplay just fills my heart with joy, and I am actually quite proud of my own sense of humour for this same reason
During my Spanish degree (which I actually completed, unlike the English Literature one), I not only studied foreign languages, which I absolutely adored, but I also took several English linguistics modules. In the most part, I enjoyed these modules too, but I faltered often when some sort of cultural significance had to be found for the use of one word or phrase or other. Can't we just enjoy the spectacle that is the beauty of language without always looking for a reason why?
Anyway, I seem to have gone off on a massive tangent, so let's bring this back to my original worry; I don't think I am dedicating enough time to my first language passion -- English. More specifically, I don't think the quality of the media I am consuming in English allows me to fully appreciate how brilliant my native language is. As you all may know from my previous posts, I only really watch youtube nowadays, no tv or anything like that. Now, I watch videos in multiple languages, and the quality* of the language used in those videos varies, sure, but I think I need to start prioritising the use of my leisure time. It's time to reduce the amount of Youtube I watch, to free up some time for watching/listening to more 'worthwhile' media, such as TV shows, documentaries and podcasts. I need to do this for all of my languages really, but English should also be a priority.
I'm sure a lot if you feel the absolute opposite to what I'm about to say, but sometimes I find myself thinking I'm maybe wasting my time doing things in other languages, when I could be enriching my experience with my own native language by learning more words, listening, reading and pushing myself to write and speak about more varied/complex topics. *sigh* I dunno...
*I know that the idea of 'quality' could start a whole other discussion, but please allow me to throw the word around here.