If English is not your first language and you spend a lot of time online you probably find yourself consuming lots of English content.
I’d like to argue that the bar you set for deeming English content worthy of consumption is lower than the one you set for content in your first language.
Who watches Reality TV?!
A friend invited you for lunch at their place, they turn on the TV and they start eating as the opening for your local equivalent of the Big Brother rolls; in your head you think “what a moron, who watches this garbage!”, you feel in yourself a huge sense of disgust as your friend finds themselves engrossed in such a lowbie activity, they seem to even know the names of the participants!
You eat dessert and you leave in dismay, as you walk back home you pick up your phone and open your micro-blogging application of choice be it the american right wing coded one that’s called like a letter of the alphabet or the american left wing coded one which is called like the dome above our heads, or if you like to feel you’re well-read, you open Substack.
In there, since you’re “keeping up with the world events” which is what a “responsible and knowledgeable person” does you start reading, like you do everyday, in English.
You travel from thread to blog post, to YouTube video, to TikTo… um, no, that’s for short-spannies right, you don’t use that.
You start noticing something though, the shape of some of the content, the shape, not the words, is similar to that revolting reality your friend was watching.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!
You’ve probably listened, at least once in your life to a section or a full episode of JRE.
Your friend probably doesn’t listen to JRE, it’s in English and it talks about stuff that’s not relevant to the pop culture of your home country, but, I argue that, if there was a local equivalent of JRE in your first language you probably wouldn’t listen to it, but your friend would… how come?
If you’re not Italian you can skip the following sentence.
Se sei italiano e ascolti o hai ascolato JRE, probabilmente non ascolti La Zanzara, o magari si’, ma la zanzara e’ piu’ simile al reality del tuo amico, no? in JRE c’e’ piu’ succo, giusto?
An exercise
Next time you’re listening to a piece of English content you find enthralling, try to translate the English to your language word by word as you read the post or watch the video, you may find that you’ve set a different bar for what you consume in your language vs what you consume in English, at least that’s what happened to me.
I’m unsure about the correlation between this happening and one’s English level, I feel like it may be positively correlated, so that if you have a higher English level, this happens more, but why?
it may be a way in which we loosen the ties and allow ourselves to do stuff we’d never consider doing in our first language, or it may be something more complex, it seems to be the opposite of the Foreign Language Effect, so it’s even more confusing.
I don’t feel like this is a net negative, just an interesting phenomenon I noticed happening.