How can i improve my mother tongue?

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amharic111
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How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby amharic111 » 2015-08-25, 21:35

Hi guys
I just wanted to ask about something that has been aggravating me the past few months. I am a 16 year old Ethiopian that's lived in the United States since birth. I've grown up however understanding both English and Amharic fine. The thing is, I do not speak Amharic fluently. The sentences I can say in Amharic is maybe at the level of a 5/6 year old.
The problem I'm having now is I've been struggling to improve it and I needed some tips on how I can improve it. I've been using the Colloquial series book for Amharic so far and that hasn't really helped with my speaking, it's just building up on my vocabulary.

Is there any way I can improve my Amharic with any other resources? I couldn't find many online. Would asking my parents to stop responding to me when I give them an English reply be a good way? They always speak to me in Amharic but I always reply back to them in English.
What's the best way to improve my speech for a language with such little resources :hmm:

Thanks

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby Johanna » 2015-08-25, 21:38

Welcome to the forum! :)

amharic111 wrote: Would asking my parents to stop responding to me when I give them an English reply be a good way? They always speak to me in Amharic but I always reply back to them in English.

Yes, that would be a very good way, even better if they pretended not to understand you at all :) The key to learning how to use a language actively is practice, and if your parents force you to use it with them you get quite a lot of that.

I would also recommend reading a lot of novels and other texts not aimed at learners in Amharic, and if possible watch TV and movies in it, that helped me tremendously with English, both to build vocabulary but also getting a feel for what sounds natural in what circumstances.
Swedish (sv) native; English (en) good; Norwegian (no) read fluently, understand well, speak badly; Danish (dk) read fluently, understand badly, can't speak; Faroese (fo) read some, understand a bit, speak a few sentences; German (de) French (fr) Spanish (es) forgetting; heritage language.

amharic111
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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby amharic111 » 2015-08-25, 22:11

Johanna wrote:Welcome to the forum! :)

Yes, that would be a very good way, even better if they pretended not to understand you at all :) The key to learning how to use a language actively is practice, and if your parents force you to use it with them you get quite a lot of that.

I would also recommend reading a lot of novels and other texts not aimed at learners in Amharic, and if possible watch TV and movies in it, that helped me tremendously with English, both to build vocabulary but also getting a feel for what sounds natural in what circumstances.


Thanks! :)

I guess I'll have to try that out then. It'd be best I guess to turn the house into a non English zone as I'm surrounded by English every day anyways. It's the speech I've always been scared of because I know I'm not good at it. And that has harmed my grammar too, which I'm now improving with the book :D.

I'll try to buy some novels too, maybe shorter ones to start of with and I'll watch more Amharic movies too over English ones.

Thanks Johanna! :)

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-08-26, 0:16

It sounds to me like you're in a fairly similar position to where I was at your age. I was born and raised in the US, too, and couldn't speak my heritage language (Malayalam) very well. I think I could understand my parents, but sometimes I didn't catch what they were saying and they'd assume it was because I didn't understand Malayalam so they'd switch to English immediately. It took me years to get past that problem. The way I personally did it was to keep reading stuff in Malayalam, starting with children's textbooks, then moving on to comics and children's stories, then short stories, and finally, after many, many years, novels. Starting to read novels in Malayalam really did wonders for me, and the fact that my vocabulary improved significantly after that also made my parents feel not only more confident about talking to me in our language but actually compelled to try to do it. Of course, I'm only speaking from my own experience here, and everybody's different, so what worked for me may not be what works for you. But just in case any of this helps, this is what my own experience is, and I'm sure you'll get to the point where you can speak better Amharic, too! :)

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby amharic111 » 2015-08-26, 10:20

vijayjohn wrote:It sounds to me like you're in a fairly similar position to where I was at your age. I was born and raised in the US, too, and couldn't speak my heritage language (Malayalam) very well. I think I could understand my parents, but sometimes I didn't catch what they were saying and they'd assume it was because I didn't understand Malayalam so they'd switch to English immediately. It took me years to get past that problem. The way I personally did it was to keep reading stuff in Malayalam, starting with children's textbooks, then moving on to comics and children's stories, then short stories, and finally, after many, many years, novels. Starting to read novels in Malayalam really did wonders for me, and the fact that my vocabulary improved significantly after that also made my parents feel not only more confident about talking to me in our language but actually compelled to try to do it. Of course, I'm only speaking from my own experience here, and everybody's different, so what worked for me may not be what works for you. But just in case any of this helps, this is what my own experience is, and I'm sure you'll get to the point where you can speak better Amharic, too! :)


Thanks for sharing your story and approach! :)
I'll use your approach too for my Amharic learning. I'm sure I won't find any comics but I will try and find some children's stories to start reading. What was the progress like when you were reading and how is your Malayalam now?
Thank you for the tips :)

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-08-26, 16:06

amharic111 wrote:Thanks for sharing your story and approach! :)

No problem! :)
I'll use your approach too for my Amharic learning. I'm sure I won't find any comics but I will try and find some children's stories to start reading.

Yeah, I mean, the point is simply to start from relatively basic reading material and keep trying to challenge yourself by increasing the difficulty level of what you're reading. Personally, I preferred to stick with one kind of reading material for a while before "graduating" so to speak to the next one. :P Actually, I was hesitant when I first started reading novels because I thought that would be too hard for me to handle, but I tried anyway because my dad suggested it and encouraged me since he finally felt like I could handle it (he also helped me pick out my first Malayalam novel).
What was the progress like when you were reading and how is your Malayalam now?
Thank you for the tips :)

So, when I was about twelve years old, my dad told me that I knew Malayalam well enough to get by in Kerala (the state where it's spoken), and I guess you could say that was my starting point. To be honest, I would say progress was awfully slow for me, but basically, what would happen is that I'd start reading one kind of reading material such as cartoons, and then once I'd read a bunch of cartoons, felt fairly comfortable that I could understand what was going on in them (and perhaps got confirmation of this from my parents), and either was ready to move on to the next level or got encouragement from my parents to do that, I'd move on to the next level.

Once I started reading novels in particular, since the vocabulary they use is relatively advanced, I started to get used to words I had otherwise never seen before. Sometimes, my dad likes to challenge my vocabulary skills by asking, "Hey, do you know what [word] means?" and sometimes I can guess. Whenever this happens, he's impressed and keeps trying to find new words to challenge me, and it also helps him feel like my Malayalam just in general is at a high level, which in turn helps him feel comfortable talking to me in it. Sometimes I learn new words from him, usually because he just happens to use them (sometimes he'll also stop in the middle and ask me whether I know what that word means, or even interrupt discussions at parties with other Malayalee people, because it's not very likely that I do :lol:), and then I try to write them down so I can keep quizzing myself over them.

By now, I think it's fair to say that I'm fluent in Malayalam. I can understand novels reasonably well (sometimes the details make my eyes glaze over or even make me want to put the book down and roll my eyes), I can understand clips from TV shows without any real problems (although I can find new vocabulary words in them, too, which is also cool), I can even understand poetry somewhat well, but movies can be really hard especially since I have to keep track of the rather complicated plot in addition to understanding what everybody's saying! I still stumble sometimes when I'm trying to form a sentence, but no one even seems to notice, and it's fairly rare that anyone points out any mistakes in what I said (even though people used to do this all the time and sometimes I do catch myself making mistakes). In fact, my dad often brags about how good my Malayalam is to other people including my mom and feels like I speak Malayalam better than anyone else in my generation (even in Kerala itself). I'm not so sure that's true, but it's great to have that much encouragement! :lol:

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby amharic111 » 2015-08-26, 18:16

No problem! :)

Yeah, I mean, the point is simply to start from relatively basic reading material and keep trying to challenge yourself by increasing the difficulty level of what you're reading. Personally, I preferred to stick with one kind of reading material for a while before "graduating" so to speak to the next one. :P Actually, I was hesitant when I first started reading novels because I thought that would be too hard for me to handle, but I tried anyway because my dad suggested it and encouraged me since he finally felt like I could handle it (he also helped me pick out my first Malayalam novel).

So, when I was about twelve years old, my dad told me that I knew Malayalam well enough to get by in Kerala (the state where it's spoken), and I guess you could say that was my starting point. To be honest, I would say progress was awfully slow for me, but basically, what would happen is that I'd start reading one kind of reading material such as cartoons, and then once I'd read a bunch of cartoons, felt fairly comfortable that I could understand what was going on in them (and perhaps got confirmation of this from my parents), and either was ready to move on to the next level or got encouragement from my parents to do that, I'd move on to the next level.

Once I started reading novels in particular, since the vocabulary they use is relatively advanced, I started to get used to words I had otherwise never seen before. Sometimes, my dad likes to challenge my vocabulary skills by asking, "Hey, do you know what [word] means?" and sometimes I can guess. Whenever this happens, he's impressed and keeps trying to find new words to challenge me, and it also helps him feel like my Malayalam just in general is at a high level, which in turn helps him feel comfortable talking to me in it. Sometimes I learn new words from him, usually because he just happens to use them (sometimes he'll also stop in the middle and ask me whether I know what that word means, or even interrupt discussions at parties with other Malayalee people, because it's not very likely that I do :lol:), and then I try to write them down so I can keep quizzing myself over them.

By now, I think it's fair to say that I'm fluent in Malayalam. I can understand novels reasonably well (sometimes the details make my eyes glaze over or even make me want to put the book down and roll my eyes), I can understand clips from TV shows without any real problems (although I can find new vocabulary words in them, too, which is also cool), I can even understand poetry somewhat well, but movies can be really hard especially since I have to keep track of the rather complicated plot in addition to understanding what everybody's saying! I still stumble sometimes when I'm trying to form a sentence, but no one even seems to notice, and it's fairly rare that anyone points out any mistakes in what I said (even though people used to do this all the time and sometimes I do catch myself making mistakes). In fact, my dad often brags about how good my Malayalam is to other people including my mom and feels like I speak Malayalam better than anyone else in my generation (even in Kerala itself). I'm not so sure that's true, but it's great to have that much encouragement! :lol:


Thank you for sharing your story! Reading this just boosted my motivation. It's nice you have a supportive family too! :)

I'll be gathering books of all sorts in Amharic for my reading to build on my vocabulary. It's the lack of resources for Amharic that made me lose motivation. Did you use any textbooks like the Colloquial series by the way? Or was it strictly novels, comics and children's stories?

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-08-26, 18:58

Did you use any textbooks like the Colloquial series by the way? Or was it strictly novels, comics and children's stories?

It was almost entirely novels, comics, children's stories, and short stories (also, bits of poetry). There's almost nothing out there in the way of textbooks for Malayalam, so that's pretty much all I had to go on anyway. I tried using like two textbooks for learning Malayalam, but they really didn't help much at all because they're really, really bad. My dad is a far more useful resource than any of those books.

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby amharic111 » 2015-08-26, 20:02

vijayjohn wrote:It was almost entirely novels, comics, children's stories, and short stories (also, bits of poetry). There's almost nothing out there in the way of textbooks for Malayalam, so that's pretty much all I had to go on anyway. I tried using like two textbooks for learning Malayalam, but they really didn't help much at all because they're really, really bad. My dad is a far more useful resource than any of those books.


I guess so, there's not much for Amharic either. But thanks once again I'll see what I can find! :)

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Re: How can i improve my mother tongue?

Postby Michael » 2015-08-26, 21:04

amharic111 wrote:Is there any way I can improve my Amharic with any other resources? I couldn't find many online. Would asking my parents to stop responding to me when I give them an English reply be a good way? They always speak to me in Amharic but I always reply back to them in English.

I think I went through a phase in my kindergarten years where I responded to my Neapolitan-speaking grandma in English, but at one point I ceased doing that because it felt awkward. That's one decision I'm glad I made. I also went through a phase when I tried speaking to everybody else in my household in Neapolitan; it felt equally awkward, but if I could go back in time I would have definitely forced myself to stick with it.

I also remember going through a phase around the same time when I would try to "correct" my speech to (Standard) Italian, but fortunately I only had a passive understanding of it back then from watching RAI, and thus didn't get far with that. Nowadays, I have a pretty strong understanding of Italian, but stress the importance of never, ever mixing them.

The phases of sociolinguistic understanding…
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
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