Does the severity of your stuttering depend on your mother tongue?

[Count]

I'm not a native English speaker. But yet I can overcome blocks more easily in English than in German which is my first language. It's also easier for me to make speeches in English than in German. In English most sentences are shorter and you can abbreviate a lot with some nice phrases and that magic -ing form. In German and Spanish (my third language) everything is much longer and time-consuming to say. Especially for stutterers like me who struggle against nearly every k,d,b,t and p sounds it's not a good idea to have one of the most difficult languages worldwide with many, many consonants in the words and uselessly complicated grammatical structures as his first.
The problem is that German is harsh (sounds as if someone wants to declare war on you as I was told by a foreigner) and English is soft (makes men more intelligent sounding and women more attractive in my opinion). The tension in my vocal chords is less when speaking English, though.

I envy you English native speakers. Appraise what you've got there.

[Asif]

I envy you English native speakers. Appraise what you've got there.

Good post. Lots of tricky points there.
My French is almost as good as my English, but I speak French with far more ease than English.
I find English to be very broken up: full of "glottal stops".
French has a flow to it that makes a rhythm far easier to achieve.

I am also a master mimic.
I have an ear for accents (in English).
Irish flows from my lips as easily as from the Irish themselves.
But I don't know why these things are as they are.

[supergeo]

Count, you're not alone. I too find I stutter a lot less in English than in my native language, Mandarin. Like you said in English there are plenty of opportunities to abbreviate or stretch a word using "ing" or another suffix when you're in a jam. English is also very rich in vocab, so you can quickly switch to a different word in your mind if you sense a block coming. I'm not sure how similar German is to Mandarin, but it's a very abrupt, short, halting language that trips me up badly.

[John Woo]

Count, you're not alone. I too find I stutter a lot less in English than in my native language, Mandarin. Like you said in English there are plenty of opportunities to abbreviate or stretch a word using "ing" or another suffix when you're in a jam. English is also very rich in vocab, so you can quickly switch to a different word in your mind if you sense a block coming. I'm not sure how similar German is to Mandarin, but it's a very abrupt, short, halting language that trips me up badly.

Hey, supergeo

you said your native language was Mandarin. So I guess you must a chinese, right? I am sorry for hearing your feelings about Mandarin. But I stutter more severely in english than in mandarin. The reason for this is that I speak manadrin almost all the time and speak less english only in some special surroundings.
:confused: Moreover I think the practice is the point. The more frequently you practise a language, the more flucently you can deal with your speech.

[eva]

I think I am more fluent in finnish than in english. Maybe because I'm more used to talking finnish, i can get over blocks more easily. Sometimes in english i simply dont know how to get the sounds out. Takes also more time to think of the right words and how they are pronounced.

sounds as if someone wants to declare war on you
Lol, that is exactly how it sounds like. In german, like in swedish i don't stutter much, but that's because i don't feel i can properly communicate with those languages anyway. I can imagine why german is difficult for a stutterer though. Maybe i will experience that when i learn the language better.

[Count]

I'm not sure how similar German is to Mandarin, but it's a very abrupt, short, halting language that trips me up badly.

They're not similar at all. It's a circuitous and wordy language.

Example:

English:
A woman sitting under a sapling awhile thought and worried about what's next.

German:
Eine Frau, die seit einer Weile unter einem jungen Baum sitzt, machte sich Sorgen und dachte darüber nach was als nächstes kommen sollte.

[Happy stutter23]

if i remember corectly,i did not stutter in english classes.Is it me or this stuttering is a strange 'phenomenon'...i mean the way our brains react in some situations?:(

[Paranoid]

Yes, I can relate to this ed up phenomenon... my Croatian is 10x better than my English... ing weird ass shit. :o

[Paranoid]

if i remember corectly,i did not stutter in english classes.Is it me or this stuttering is a strange 'phenomenon'...i mean the way our brains react in some situations?:(

Yes, we are special people or better yet (unique) according to Asif...:D

[emily445455]

Example:

English:
A woman sitting under a sapling awhile thought and worried about what's next.

German:
Eine Frau, die seit einer Weile unter einem jungen Baum sitzt, machte sich Sorgen und dachte darüber nach was als nächstes kommen sollte.

Neat!! :D

I kind of know Spanish and American Sign Language. I stuter about the same in Spanish and not at all in Sign :p

[Count]

I find English to be very broken up: full of "glottal stops".


I've never got the chance to talk to an English native speaker. But I suppose I would stutter much less if anything. The reason is that it's not my mother tongue and people don't expect me to be completely fluent in it. So the pressure is away and my stutter as well.

[nate]

i can barely speak LUO. in fact when i try i sound even more like a moron. it was my first language as a juniour and i speak it so slowly i even forget what i was trying to say. hopeless.
Nate

[Silent]

I don't stutter in English as much as I do in my native language.

And German isn't that difficult :) Though those long strings of consecutive vowels make it hard for stutterers.

What I find cool about Spanish is that words don't start with sp or st, but rather esp and est. My theory is centuries ago they did with sp and st like they do in Latin, but then there was a Spanish king who stuttered and had particular difficulty with those combinations so he changed them to esp and est by law so as to make his tricks not look weird ;) Anyone who said a word starting with sp or st would be decapitated :D
If I were king, I would ban all spoken languages and introduce the sign language as the official language :p

[Count]

I don't stutter in English as much as I do in my native language.


I thought English is your native language.

[Silent]

I thought English is your native language.
My first language is Polish.

Re German, I meant consonants, not vowels ;)

I think, in general, we stutter more in our first languages because it's the languages we've "learned" to stutter in, so their sounds and words are more strongly anchored to the humiliation and other negative emotions we've experienced (and thus to the stuttering response) than sounds and words from foreign languages.

When you speak a foreign language, your brain does not always recognize it as speech, and it's not as eager to sabotage it...

[Count]

My first language is Polish.


My parents come from Silesia. I am a Polish-German guy. I don't speak Polish, but whenever I listened to my parents talking to each other in this language I guessed I would stutter terribly in it. I can't even pronounce one Polish word correctly.

[Silent]

I don't speak Polish, but whenever I listened to my parents talking to each other in this language I guessed I would stutter terribly in it. I can't even pronounce one Polish word correctly.
I do stutter terribly in Polish, and not nearly as terribly in English or German, though still badly.
German is formally my second language, as it's what I was taught in school :) I have lived in Köln for a while, but I used English most of the time ;)

[stutterpress]

I would agree, it could differ from language to language. I tend to stutter alot less while talking English compared to Hindi (Language spoken in India). Its probably because the Hindi involves alot more digraphs, consonants, etc. The words are much harder and the sounds are more complicated.

[Asif]

Quote:
"Does the severity of your stuttering depend on your mother tongue?"

Probably.
Her tongue was long, prehensile and covered in foul-smelling fur.
She smoked like a coal-fired power-station and lived on pills.
Scared the daylights out of me.