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February 2009
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By globalistgirl, on February 28th, 2009

Linguistic frustrations

My parents are visiting me (easy as pie now that we live in the same country again), and talking about my research in anything except English is a little frustrating. Because I attended college in the States, I learned the vast majority of my technical vocabulary (in any field I know technical vocabulary in) in English. Many technical terms aren’t listed in a regular dictionary, or the technical meaning of the term isn’t covered. (Not that I own dictionaries for my mother tongues anyway, other than the English-Finnish E160 dictionary my mother bought me.) The English-Finnish technical dicitonary allows me to (very slowly) discuss my research in correct Finnish, but my Swedish technical vocabulary is at a high school level. Most of the words I need to describe my research, or my boyfriend’s research, or my groupmates’ research, I simply don’t know and have trouble guessing in Swedish. (Anyone know what sputtering is in Swedish?) I think my German technical vocabulary is better than my Swedish one, because I’ve read theses and books relating to my research in German!

I don’t think I’m in an unusual situation. Parents of TCKs may want to think ahead about how to provide resources for their children to use vocabulary they learn in one language in their other languages – if my mother hadn’t bought me the English-Finnish technical dictionary, I’d be even worse off.

1,376 comments to Linguistic frustrations

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