Love is Deafness

I assume most people are familiar with the expression that "love is blindness". When you're in romantic "love" with someone, you fail to see their flaws and see only the positive traits and are "blinded" by love. While I don't believe romantic love with a significant other can last for more than a few years (5 years would be the maximum, I'd say, in terms of the psychology and scientific explanations, since release of neurotransmitters adrenaline, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, vassopressin, etc. all return to "normal" levels after as early as 2 or 3 years but also as late as 5 years) I never thought that it could be the same for languages. As in a previous entry, I noted that language learning is like being married. My love affairs, flings, and short-lived romances with foreign languages I never married and my eventual polygamous marriage to the current languages I'm learning are extremely parallel to the psychology behind human relationships!

I find this realization fascinating. English is my native language so I suppose this language isn't a marriage at all. It's perhaps like a mother to me. I don't love in romantically, but I do appreciate the language and I love English when it's spoken not with an American accent, but with a foreign accent (British, French, German, Irish, Polish, Romanian, Russian). Swedish and Korean were my "second" languages, due to my ethnic background. I was exposed to these languages since infancy, so these are like my "siblings". My siblings in real life I love dearly (in a platonic way, of course. Kar and Ken know I love them =) Love you guys!) But as for my language "siblings" my feelings for them are pretty neutral. I don't hate them, but I do feel appreciative of them and find them interesting sometimes. Needless to say, I do not feel "passionate" about either language.

Then come the real "foreign" languages in my life. Spanish was an arranged marriage. At one point, I hated Spanish since I was being forced to learn it. After having spent a good chunk of my academic life and sacrificing countless hours to learning it, I feel an obligation to be "married" to it. It would be a waste of time and energy if I were to forget it or "divorce" it now. In fact, I've really come to like the way "Castellano" sounds, perhaps because my roommate in New York was a Spaniard from Madrid? I'm not sure.

French was my first love. As a 5-year-old at the JFK airport waiting for my father who was coming back from his military assignment in Germany, I first heard French as an airport announcement while with my pregnant mother and infant brother. The soothing sounds of French enticed even my puerile ears. "What language was that?!" I asked, fascinated by my new discovery. 

"That's French," she replied, while putting a hand over her 8-month pregnant belly. 

"Oh!" I exclaimed. I didn't say the rest aloud, but I clearly remember thinking, Wow, I want to learn French! After this airport discovery, I rummaged through our family library to find an old atlas, looking for France on the world map, discovering its capital, learning about the Eiffel Tower... 

It took 13 years to finally learn French and go to France for the first time. My first few years of being "married" to French were wonderful. It was like a childhood dream that finally came true. Everything about the language captivated me entirely and I devoted innumerable hours to it. My love for it felt endless and limitless. Meeting French people and speaking French with them made my heart beat faster with excitement. These were the blissful early years. 

Now I've come to realize this excitement is gone. It's now been nearly 5 years since I've been "married" to French and the initial burning passion I have for French seems to have waned to a flicker. No longer do I feel so excited and my heart doesn't beat any faster at the prospect of speaking it. Perhaps it's even further killed by the fact that I live in France where everyone speaks it. Not only that, but I've come to realize that French isn't always so beautiful as it sounded to me before I learned it. I love Parisian French. The Parisian accent is by far my favorite. The Alsatian accent (I live in Alsace) in French does not sound very nice. Most people speak standard French here (especially the younger generation) but the older generation and people from villages have strong Alsatian accents which I find unattractive. Québécois, the French spoken in Canada, sounded beautiful when I didn't know a word of French. Now, I really dislike this accent. Sometimes even standard French sounds unattractive depending on the speaker and the way it's being spoken on the streets. Before, everyone who spoke French seemed to me to have beautiful voices and spoke beautifully. Now, I find some peoples' voices to be annoying at times. Before everything sounded beautiful, now, now that I know French relatively well, it doesn't always sound so beautiful and it's a little sad that this initial passion is virtually gone. 

It's not just French either. German was the second language I married for love and even with this, my passion is slowly waning. Before I knew a word of German, all German speakers sounded the same. Now, it's not the case. I know which accents in German I like the best. Standard German I still like very much and I definitely like the northern German accent and the Eastern German accents the best. The southern German accents (Baden-Württemberg and  Bayern being the most notable examples) and the Austrian accents are not very attractive to me anymore. Sadly, the city next to Strasbourg, Kehl, is in Baden-Württemberg... so they all speak German with a rather unattractive accent.

What is insane about French and German now is I even have a preference for people speaking with a French or German accent in English! I didn't think this was possible, but it is. For instance, a Parisian speaking English with a French accent sounds a lot better than a Marseillaise speaking English with a French accent. Sound insane? Maybe. It's worse for German, actually. I really like Germans from northern/eastern (esp. Sachsen) German who speak English with a German accent but really dislike the German accent when someone from Baden-Württemberg or Bayern speaks English with their German accent. All Austrian accents and Swiss-German accents, in both German and in English with German accents, don't sound very nice to me. Strange, since I'm not as picky with French when it comes to the Belgians or Swiss speaking French. But with German, I've developed extreme preferences.

Actually, in the past few months, I've come to realize that my love for Russian has surpassed my love for German. I'm still a beginner in Russian so that passion and excitement is still strong and burning. Everything is so different in Russian that it's fascinating. It's different from French in that while I loved Russian and that's why I decided to learn it, I didn't love it as much as I loved French when I started it. It was my 3rd favorite language when I initially attempted to learn Russian, resulting in the lack of motivation at first and my on and off relationship made it difficult to make progress, especially as I focused on my French or German. Last year, however, I realized I'd begun to like Russian more and more. The more I learned the more it became interesting. It equalized in terms of interest level with German and now I'm sure that I prefer Russian over German. I mean, French was so easy to learn (for me, it was the easiest language I've learned so far) that while I felt satisfied in the early stages, that feeling of satisfaction is virtually gone now. Russian is a little different. It's so hard to learn that I sometimes wonder why I'm so masochistically attracted to this language. Still, the satisfaction level is amazingly high, higher than it ever was with French.  It makes me wonder, though, will I also develop such preferences for Russian once I speak it well? Five or ten years from now, will the passion I have for Russian die just as my passion for French?

Don't get me wrong. I still love French. But the feeling of being wildly and "madly in love" is gone. French is still my favorite language but my love for French isn't growing anymore. Meanwhile, my love for Russian has been steadily increasing. I'm a little afraid to admit it, since I've loved French for such a long time (nearly 18 years) but I think it's a possibility that maybe in the future, my love for Russian will surpass my love for French.

As for Italian, I used to love it almost as much as Russian when I started out but my love for it hasn't been increasing or decreasing and it's been pretty level. Satisfaction levels for Italian are not that high since it's not so difficult to learn, especially not after French and Spanish. I love it a lot more than Spanish, but less than French, Russian, and German.

Maybe I'm just an extremely picky person when it comes to serious relationships, whether with a human or a language? For instance, I even have preferences for the genders of speakers. My favorite speakers for each language are different. For French, I really prefer French when it's spoken by a woman. I don't know why, but it sounds nicer when a Parisian French woman speaks French than a Parisian man. Even in English, I prefer listening to a Parisian Frenchwoman speaking English over a Parisian Frenchman. The language sounds so much nicer to me when it's spoken by a woman. For Russian, I definitely prefer it when it's spoken by a man. I don't have accent preference or anything but I just like it when it's spoken by a man with a nice voice. For German, I prefer it being spoken by a man from northern or eastern Germany. Italian, I prefer when women speak it. I'm not fluent enough to have accent preferences, but I usually prefer listening to Italian being spoken by a woman rather than by a man. Spanish, I guess I just prefer anyone from Madrid over any other city. I'm pretty gender-neutral when it comes to Spanish since it wasn't out of love that I started this language. My preference for the Madrid accent probably comes from the fact that I lived with a friend who spoke with that accent.

Hm, I'm actually not picky but I'd prefer the term sound-sensitive. Out of the 5 sense, if I were forced to give up all other senses and keep only one sense, it would be to have my sense of hearing. Sounds are amazing. Music is capable of stoking emotions. Languages can seduce you. For me personally, the extent of what can be expressed through sound and speech is astonishing. I know I'm not alone in this since my siblings agree with me. They might not choose the sense of hearing over all other senses (the sense of sight is more important for some. For me, the sense of sight comes second after hearing, so sight is also very important), but they're also very sound sensitive. Both my siblings want to date people with a nice voice, in addition to nice looks. I suppose for me this has evolved into accent preferences within language preferences, while it's not the case for my siblings.

Today's Random Picture: 

Rodent Dumbo? Still pretty cute =)