Forums » Smalltalk » People whose first language is not English

I need to know something, and that people whose first language is not English confirm it to me.

I am Argentina, I was born, I grew up in Argentina and to this day I still live here. My first language is Spanish, which is the language I speak every day, I think in that language, etc. Obviously, I've done roleplaying in Spanish. And one thing that I have noticed is that I sound much smarter and more expert when I role-play in my language than when I do it in English.

I've been on RPR for months now, so I've improved a lot with the way I role-play in English, but sometimes I go blank because I know exactly how to describe my character in a situation but I don't know how to put it in English, but in Spanish I can do it perfectly.

I know that it is something common that happens to people who speak other languages, but I would like to read experiences so I do not feel alone in this lol

French is my first language and it is the language I use in everyday life. However, I was sent to learn English at an English school where I live, as of the age of five in kindergarten. I have done all my schooling in English.

I started to role-play at the age of nine in English since most if not all AD&D modules and other table-top RP material was not translated into French. I currently work as a teacher in the school I attended as a child in English and though it is not my first language, I do consider it my dominant language for reading and writing. Role-playing and collaborative writing has helped me tremendously in improving, though there are times, especially when I'm mentally tired, where I do struggle to find the correct word(s) in English.

Same!

I often go blank when I don't know the right English words to describe my characters situation.

I'm struggling with grammars and time tenses. Regular and Irregular verbs, Auxiliary verbs... etc, because my first language doesn't have tense marking. But I always want to make sure my post is easy to be understand, so it takes time for me to respond to roleplay, sometimes it can take hours.

And English gender pronouns often gives me limitations to describe some situations. In Indonesian language there's no 'he'/'she'/'him'/'her', only one word for every gender, 'dia'. No 'girlfriend' and 'boyfriend', only 'pacar' for both gender, and etc.

And because of that, when I want to put situation like this for example: character A talking about 'other character' to character B and the character B still don't have any idea whether that 'other character' is a female or male, which is a thing that normally happens for Indonesian, I can't write that in english.

This is an example:

Character A: "Hey, temanku bilang dia sedang cari pacar." (hey, my friend said he/she is looking for a girlfriend/boyfriend.)

Character B: "Oh, dia siapa?" (oh, tell me who's he/she.)

And I don't think I can use 'they' pronoun to write that kind of situation.

It is 100% okay to use They in this situation,

My friend said they are looking for boyfriend / girlfriend (or you could use a word like 'partner' if you want to keep the gender vague)
Oh, tell me about them!

Ohh, Claine, thank you so much! This is really helpful! 🙏🙏🙏

Btw I have other question, still about alternative english words, I'll pm you 😄

I'm actually the opposite, lol. I'm Danish and I speak Danish daily of course, but English was always a bit part of my life right from when I was born. I would listen to my mom's music and try to say the same English words. At first I was better at speaking rather than writing English, now it's the opposite since I'm no longer taking classes. Because of everyone I have met on here I have improved my writing sssooo much to the point where I find English just such a much more interesting language with more creative ways of writing than Danish, so now I basically only RP in English!!

That's ssooo interesting!! In Danish we do not say boyfriend or girlfriend either, we just a word "kæreste" which just means...well you're in a relationshop But the gender is not revealed.

Ohh, really? Interesting! It makes me want to know more about Danish language 😆 how similar are Danish and Dutch? because we have loan words from Dutch language and I just read from google that Danish also have these same words, like 'tante', 'atlas', 'plakat' and 'gratis' haha

Lol, it made me remember english class in my school days... hahaha.

What my teacher taught me about pronouns: 'Father' is 'he', 'Mother' is 'she'... 'book' is 'it'... 'they' mean 'a lot of people'. 'They were', not 'They was', 'he has' not 'he have'
And how hard it was to memorize irregular verbs... eat, ate, eaten, etc 🤣

i have the exact same struggle; in my native language, i feel as though i can describe emotion and actions down to every last detail and be pleased with how it turns out. in english, despite having studied the language for a decade in school, i struggle with describing emotions and simple actions with depth - something that comes easily to me in my native tongue - because the words that exist in english just don’t capture it well enough. it’s much easier for me to describe a character being angry in my native tongue because i know how my partner will perceive it (it won’t be misunderstood easily) but in english? it’s difficult to write something deeper than the facial expressions of the character and why they might be angry

I have the opposite problem. Sometimes I forget words in my native language and use the English word instead I'm slowly un-learning my mother tongue hah

AHAHAHA omg I relate to that struggle so much lol I won't say I'm the best at grammar but definitietly after talking to so many english writers for several years they have helped me improve a lot!! And yes it definitietly seems like we have similarities between the languages ahaha, that's so cool!!

I’m from Norway so my first language is Norwegian! I’ve never RPed in Norwegian and I started doing it in English since there isn’t much an RP community in Norway. At least form what I’ve noticed. Though I have had one Rp where we wrote majority in English and dialogues in English, Danish and Norwegian because of the nationalities of the OCs.

Rping in English is the only reason why my English is as good as it is!

For me I struggle with croatian, my native language, more than english. Croatian is, like, a convoluted language with grammar that is just complicated for me (and I struggled a lot with learning it in school). When it comes to english I express what I want to say with ease, whether it's in rp or a conversation. But croatian? Nope. There are times when I use english words or phrases cause I have zero clue how are certain things said in my language (in some cases I forget croatian words).