Foreign Languages.

[Asif]

I am an Anglophone.
I was born in the UK: I am as English as one can be.
But English is my least fluent language.
I speak French so well that French people think I am French.
I speak Spanish less well, but still am far more fluent than in English.
French flows beautifully: one breathes quite differently when one speaks it.
Maybe the need to carefully compose a sentence when speaking a foreign language has something to do with it?
Who has any input on this?

[Sam]

I am 13 and from New Zealand, I was born in Finland however, but I came here when I was very young, however I still know how to speak Finnish. I dont like to socialize alot with anyone else accept my family because I dont speak english well, in terms of stuttering.

I just dont know why this happens.

[Professor]

im 17 lived 4 years in Yugoslavia lived 7 in a half years in Germany and now livivng 6 years here in the US.

in yugoslavia i stutter the most, in german i dont even talk it anymore really but taking a class in HS. And in english i only stutter a bit depeds with who also.

[Sup2u]

I'm 13 live in USA taking Spanish. I barely stutter at all in spanish. I agree with AsIf. Your trying to compose a sentence rather than how to say it. Its pressureless.

[ysy]

For a long time I've been thinking about the relation between stuttering and speaking a foreign language. I'm Chinese but I also speak English. My stuttering is farrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr worse when I speak English. So from my point of view, having to compose a sentence does NOT help. The only thing that works, is that people TEND to only think that my English is not good, they will not realise I'm ACTUALLY stuttering. And this tends to make me less nervous.

My theory: you just stutter less when you try to speak in a language that people don't expect you to speak so well (for whatever reason). And also you stutter less when you are speaking in a language with words that typically contain less syllables than your mother tongue; or stutter more if otherwise.

Anybody with me?

[llw03c]

My theory: you just stutter less when you try to speak in a language that people don't expect you to speak so well (for whatever reason). And also you stutter less when you are speaking in a language with words that typically contain less syllables than your mother tongue; or stutter more if otherwise.

Anybody with me?
definitely...also its about pressure. no one expects you to be fluent so there is no pressure. its similar to the scenario where you tell people you stutter and and they expect it and all of a sudden you're fluent. our "problem" is terribly annoying isn't it??? :rolleyes:

[Gary1450]

I also took Spanish but I stuttered much worse. There's so many syllables.

[stayathomemom]

Asif are you a part of a group called hi5.com?

[Flash]

I came to the U.S. when I was around 3 years old. I pretty much began speaking both Russian and English at the same time. Maybe Russian a little bit earlier but not that big of a time period difference beween the two because I went straight to preschool. I probably know English a lot better than I do russian because when my parents are yelling at me (in Russian), I sometimes tell them that I have no clue what they are saying. I also only speak Russian at home and haven't studied the language.....just the stuff I learn from talking with my parents. I can't read or write in Russian.

When speaking English, I stutter a lot and people can easily see it.

When speaking Russian, it's not as bad, but you really can't compare the two because I only speak Russian at home or with family.

Also in Russian, you can structure your sentences in many different ways where as in English you can't do it the same way without changing the words. Here's a small example.....in english you say "I'm eatting bread." In Russian you could say "I'm eatting bread" or "I'm bread eatting." Kinda sounds wierd lol but saying it either way in Russian would still be correct. Anyways, where I'm trying to get with this is that if I know i'm going to stutter on a specific word, then I can change the word order so that the word can be later on in the sentence because I tend to stutter more when starting sentences and less at the end of sentences.

This is kinda like Spanglish, but with Russian. When speaking Russian at home, I can sometimes use English words if I know that there is a Russian word coming up that I will stutter on. I call this Ringlish. :cool:

I also took Spanish from 7th grade until 11th grade and went up to Spanish 4 (1 down from the highest). Didn't take Spanish 5 the next year because I thought it would be too hard for me in terms of content and information. As other people already mentioned in this thread, they stuttered less when speaking a foreign language because they had to think a lot about what they were going to say. For me, it's kinda the same. I still stuttered when speaking Spanish but I think I didn't stutter as much because I had to think about what words I had to say, if I was pronouncing those words correctly, and what order to say them in.

[sloth]

I've been learning my native language over the past few months and I find that I stutter more using those words than I do with english words. English words you can kind of make softer so you don't get stuck as often, but in the other language there are glottalized sounds, meaning that there is a stress that needs to be put on the sound. For me, forcing those sounds out without stuttering is not as easy as it is in english.

[Andrew]

I took Spanish 1 in high school, but since the class required a high-level of talking, I dropped it. I have enough problems with my native tounge (English) so I thought I should master English before I look to other languages.

It really seems like stuttering took over my life... preventing me from partisipating in class the way I should be a ble to (if a answer is hard to say, i resort to "I don't know"), my career choices, etc. Even saying my own name is hard... embarrasingly enough.