During my one and a half month long stay in my home country, I came to this question. Throughout the year I would use English 70% of the time to communicate with my peers, including school. Leaving a mere 30% of communicating in my mother tongue. Does that make English the dominant language in my life? maybe. But as I spend more than a full month speaking only Flemish with my family and friends at homeI realized that maybe there is no need to define which language dominates my life in general. I figured that my ability to fully express myself changes depending on where I am. Quite logically, I'll be able to express and tell about my experiences in more depth if I do so in Dutch than in English. This can be explained by the fact that I had talked and experienced these things with people who speak Dutch like me. Thus, I also picked up a few more dialect words and sayings which may describe these specific ideas better than I possibly could in English. On the other hand, I found out that I can talk about more intellectual topics that was discussed during my education much more easily using the English language than the Dutch, which seems logic since my education is fully embodied in English. As a conclusion, the ability to speak using one or another language is a constant-changing ability which adapts to the situation and people you are surrounded with.
Thursday 18 August 2016
The battle of the languages
A battle of between my native mother tongue Dutch (Flemish) and between the English language.
During my one and a half month long stay in my home country, I came to this question. Throughout the year I would use English 70% of the time to communicate with my peers, including school. Leaving a mere 30% of communicating in my mother tongue. Does that make English the dominant language in my life? maybe. But as I spend more than a full month speaking only Flemish with my family and friends at homeI realized that maybe there is no need to define which language dominates my life in general. I figured that my ability to fully express myself changes depending on where I am. Quite logically, I'll be able to express and tell about my experiences in more depth if I do so in Dutch than in English. This can be explained by the fact that I had talked and experienced these things with people who speak Dutch like me. Thus, I also picked up a few more dialect words and sayings which may describe these specific ideas better than I possibly could in English. On the other hand, I found out that I can talk about more intellectual topics that was discussed during my education much more easily using the English language than the Dutch, which seems logic since my education is fully embodied in English. As a conclusion, the ability to speak using one or another language is a constant-changing ability which adapts to the situation and people you are surrounded with.
During my one and a half month long stay in my home country, I came to this question. Throughout the year I would use English 70% of the time to communicate with my peers, including school. Leaving a mere 30% of communicating in my mother tongue. Does that make English the dominant language in my life? maybe. But as I spend more than a full month speaking only Flemish with my family and friends at homeI realized that maybe there is no need to define which language dominates my life in general. I figured that my ability to fully express myself changes depending on where I am. Quite logically, I'll be able to express and tell about my experiences in more depth if I do so in Dutch than in English. This can be explained by the fact that I had talked and experienced these things with people who speak Dutch like me. Thus, I also picked up a few more dialect words and sayings which may describe these specific ideas better than I possibly could in English. On the other hand, I found out that I can talk about more intellectual topics that was discussed during my education much more easily using the English language than the Dutch, which seems logic since my education is fully embodied in English. As a conclusion, the ability to speak using one or another language is a constant-changing ability which adapts to the situation and people you are surrounded with.
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