A person who doesn't speak even one language fluently!

Super Korean   Sat Jun 27, 2009 11:13 am GMT
http://www11.zippyshare.com/v/43689691/file.html

This old woman (by force) moved to Uzbekistan when Joseph Stalin violently deported about 200,000 ethinc Koreans who had lived in the border area of North Korea and Soviet Union in 1937.

She was 12 when she was deported and after that she has lived in Uzbekistan all her life.
Her first language is Korean but she had to learn a new language(i.e. Russian) in her new home - Uzbekistan, the former Soviet Union.

After living in Uzbekistan for 70 years, her Korean became rusty. She can still speak Korean but her Korean is not a native level. Interestingly enough, her Russian isn't perfectly fluent either. She can speak Russian fine but she has an accent and makes grammatical errors a lot.

This woman didn't have a speech defect by nature but her unusual life made her a person who can't speak any language perfectly fluent.

Do you know anyone who has gone through a similar life and language problems as the old woman has?
http://www11.zippyshare.com/v/43689691/file.html
simbol   Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:22 pm GMT
It's common. Immigrant kids who are losers. They arrive in the new country at 15 or so, so their native language is not fully developed. Once they arrive in the new country they only speak their native tongue to their family and don't read books, so it deteriorates. Since they are lame asses they don't bother learning the new language either, so they speak crappy it all their lives. Sucks to be those mofos!
Guest   Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:30 pm GMT
True. I personally know many such people.
Guest   Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:36 pm GMT
Heck, I know tons of people who can't even speak their native language properly. And this is not a prescriptivist's rant.
Super Korean   Sat Jun 27, 2009 3:23 pm GMT
<Heck, I know tons of people who can't even speak their native language properly. And this is not a prescriptivist's rant.>

But don't they speak their second language fluently after immigrating to another country?
paul   Sat Jun 27, 2009 3:25 pm GMT
This is common here in the united states. Especially with kids who immigrate here when they are younger than 10 years old.
Guest   Sat Jun 27, 2009 3:48 pm GMT
Sorry Super Korean, my mistake;
I meant I know tons of monolinguals who are unable to express their thoughts and emotions properly in their only language. They are also not able to use registers (formal language). And such.
Commonaswhole   Sat Jun 27, 2009 4:26 pm GMT
It's especially pathetic when a group of people think they are fluent at a foreign language and think they don't have to use their native tongue anymore.
Here's an example of 'Dunglish' in Amsterdam. I'm not kidding you, these people often prefer to speak English above Dutch at all time and fail doing so.

http://brog.engrish.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/dunglish1.jpg
Super Korean   Sat Jun 27, 2009 4:35 pm GMT
My point is the old woman speaks neither Korean nor Russian very well. People who immigrated to the US at younger ages might not speak their first language very well but they at least speak English fluently. However, the old woman doesn't speak Russian very well either.

Anyone who understands Russian here may want to listen to her voice file:
http://www11.zippyshare.com/v/43689691/file.html
K. T.   Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:59 pm GMT
Yes, it's called being semi-lingual. I have met people like that.
Guest   Sat Jun 27, 2009 7:11 pm GMT
It is a common phenomenon. I knew a woman who grew up in a kind of a ghetto in a country that her family immigrated in. She later moved in a third country and was never fluent in any of those three languages. She had all of them mixed up in fact. It was horrible, you had to know three languages to understand what she was talking about, at times, lol.
K. T.   Sat Jun 27, 2009 8:15 pm GMT
As guest said, you have to have a multilingual person to interpret in that kind of situation. I interpreted between Japanese-Spanish-GuaranĂ­ speaker and a monolingual English teacher once. I can't speak GuaranĂ­,
but I was able to use Japanese and Spanish to find out what was needed.

As refugees and immigrants move from place to place, probably certain language combinations show up frequently with displaced people.

It's a very interesting topic and I wonder how much one's ability to learn figures into it. I've seen other children who did much better at juggling three or four languages. Without documentation, though, it's all anecdoctal.
Caspian   Sun Jun 28, 2009 5:31 pm GMT
This is really interesting.

Can anybody translate what she is saying? I don't speak Russian, but I could hear that she faltered on several occasions.
Super Korean   Tue Jun 30, 2009 3:26 pm GMT
<Can anybody translate what she is saying? I don't speak Russian, but I could hear that she faltered on several occasions.>

My Ukrainian friend(who is a native speaker of Russian) did her best job:

"We wanted to get sunflower seeds on our way - we traveled somewhere (didn't understand the name of the place), somebody or something passed us by and our horses got scared. (Further a sentence not in Russian). Mother was crying, brother was crying, everybody was crying.
-Father was taken away from her(?)
-Yes and when we arrived to ... place our mother was also taken away from us. (In Korean: My mother had come a long way - had a hard time) Mother was 30 years old then, and she died at the age of 76.
(In Korean: My mother did everything to feed us.)"

In the middle of her conversation, she uses Korean with a strong Northeastern dialect.
Caspian   Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:18 am GMT
Thanks very much! It's very interesting