Do you ever struggle to express yourself when you aren't speaking in your mother tongue?

Yes, a lot of the time when I get EXTREMELY mad I start speaking Italian. It’s not even intentional it’s just first nature.

Yeah me too. When I get mad at someone I instently talk in Spanish. It’s just like that’s what I’m sorta use to.

Yeh i do! Even when i’m not mad!, sometimes i can’t describe everything properly, by the way i’m African

i speak spanish at home and at one of my classess. sometimes i get tangled in english lol

I’m just the opposite way. I’ve been in the US since childhood, and every once in a while, I can’t get what I want to say across to my parents in Russian, it’s frustrating.

What language do you speak?

Siswati and a little bit of Zulu

this one?

Search for my Tongue

You ask me what I mean by saying I have lost my tongue. I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue. You could not use them both together even if you thought that way. And if you lived in a place you had to speak a foreign tongue, your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out. I thought I spit it out but overnight while I dream,

Sorry the spacing didn’t come out properly.

Sawubona then. Siswati? Is that maybe in Swaziland?

yeh thats the one I studied it in school lol

Yeah it’z in Swaziland but i live in South Africa, yebo sawubona kunjani? I hope u cn understand that

Sometimes when i’m speaking Farsi its really hard,but french and arabic are really easy to express yourself in.Spanish and hindi aren’t too bad but htey aren’t many expressions.

well my polish friend starts arguing in polish,because she cant talk english fast…so she starts raising her voice and talking fast slowly using more and more polish words.

Oh yes! It usually happnes with me,English is like my second language and nobody speaks it around me,usually D: so I find it difficult and sometimes just cannot explain heat I want to …

*what (not heat)

I know yebo means yes, sawubone means hello, I think kunjani is how are you.. I understand more of Sotho than Zulu. I’m also from South Africa.

Cool! I do also know a few words in Sesotho but more Setswana!

Yes! :\ English being my third language, I find it somewhat difficult to say what I want to say because I can only remember the Russian way of sayiing it. There are times when I’ll be answering a question and all of a sudden, I’m like “Um…I forget the word.” so often times my teachers will ask me to show them, it’s like charades in class.

Another instance is when I am talking to people in Russian and English simultaneously, causing me to blend the words together to form some odd Rusglish word. :P Seems to happen more and more as I get older. LOL.

I think it’s pretty common to see difficulty talking and expressing yourself in another language that isn’t a native because the majority of children speak their native tongue at home and English at school. At school, I speak English, but at home, I speak Russian, and bits of Moldovan and Farsi. It gets a bit tough when you can also write in your native tongue because if you’re like me, you’ll forget people write in English at school. Lol.

I also know some words in Tshwana. Have friends in class that speak it.

That’s so cool, the people who have commented on here, who have English as their second and third languages can spell better than many of the people on Funadvice who have English as their home language

I like the way that sounds in my head the way you two are talking.

LOL. It probably sounds funny with your accent :P

yeahhh and iam not english and sometimes its sooo annoying that i cant say what i want to say or sometimes we use some words in my language but English people dont have that word…so yeah..

It happens to me all the time. :s English is my 2nd language and Tagalog is my first - Im from the Philippines. I tend to say uhh or like pause a lot and it annoys me so much. I am better at writing than speaking it.

I dont know if you guys get this but like, my thinking process is something like this: i think in tagalog then translate the idea to english. So there’s this lag time of translating it instead of thinking in english in the first place. Its kinda hard to explain especially if one can only speak in his/her mother tongue. :s

we use a mix of english and tagalog everyday but I only talk in straight english when i was in english classes back in school or like when im presenting something at work or when im talking with non-filipinos or when me & other people feel like it.