DKII
A question for you. Do you ever feel like a different person when you're speaking a different language? I wonder more and more about this being here in D'Land. If we hit people with stereotypes, I'd say on the whole, Germans are very correct (genauso), very orderly and organised and very punctual. Often in a hurry and impatient. Probably not the warmest, nicest people I've met in my travels. And the ones that I teach get very disturbed if I change a routine.
And then I think how the language is structured. You can't start a sentence unless you know how you what you're going to say at the end (or all your conjugations go to shit), - and I wonder if this causes people to 'think' in categories and be organised. You ask for the time, literally by asking "How late is it?" - and most Germans I know are constantly rushing somewhere because it's social death to be late, there is no word for 'kindness' and "happy" has the same stemword as "lucky" (like it's more an unusual condition to feel happy - really, I often get treated suspiciously here if I smile too much).
Japanese - you speak it better than me, but it's very layered and contextual - you understand things a lot in relation to other things - and life rarely happens in straight lines in Japan in terms of personal interaction. i can't say I think at a high level in Japanese so I can't add more - but just off the top of my head.
What do you think? I'd be interested to know - do you feel like a different person when you're speaking another language?
Interesting points there. I have found this to be accurate as well.
To say that I feel like a total different person would be too much, but I definitely think and act quite differently. I learned my Japanese in university and have, besides from family, only used it in a professional environment, so I am always rather polite. I can speak the whole bandwith from informal Japanese to Keigo fluently, but even if I speak informal, I am rather polite. I rarely swear (besides the occasional 畜生 that is...) in Japanese as well.
Japanese is VERY structured though, and Japanese follow the rules and respect boundaries more than Germans I would say, in culture and language you can see that.
I can't say about my German, but I would say I am very straight forward in German. Polite in the right situations but always straight to the face.
You kind of adapt to the environment around you, if you learn Japanese on a university campus and going drinking with your buddies, you won't be very polite and rather rude. I have seen quite a few intelligent people fail in their job search because their fluent Japanese was just not suitable for a business environment. The whole concept of Keigo is easier understandable for a German than for English speakers I think.
