the thing about what you wrote is, i know all of it, but i'm approaching it from the other end - i am the non-native who writes cumbersome lyrics/walls of text and wish i could be as agile as a native speaker - and it makes me frustrated that you point all this out so accurately, because it's something that i can't fix about my english. i can only take my english so far, and it'll never be as fluent as i want it to. and spare me the 'but you have good engilsh, rly' stuff - honestly not going for that i swear - it's just that it almost doesn't matter how proficient you can become at playing by a language's rules, you'll still never juggle it quite like people who grew up speaking it. well i dunno people who are smarter than me probably do it, but for me there's that barrier and i guess except continuously pushing it a bit further every now and then, there's not much i can do but accept it and try better next time.
then i go and read a text by an English author or artist that i like, and they have that special streak of fluidity to their words, and i can only be jealous, what can i say. i think i once posted a thread here about this poem i like, that has a line going:
I have desired to go
Oh I have asked to go
Where a few lillies blow
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And spring not fail
man. "to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail". so fucking great.
the thing about English is, you can be proficient in it in various ways. the flexible grammar and deep vocabulary allow for very cerebral pinpointing of extremely particular threads of thought, whereas in Hebrew for example i would say it's definitely less flexible and more "crude" in a way, but it possesses a beauty and emotional weight to a lot of words that very rarely exists in English, if at all. when a motherfucker gets something right in Hebrew, like poetry or lyrics or prose, it can be unbelievably beautiful in ways English could never capture for me, and always comes out sounding too "technical" in comparison.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vixnix
Yeah because I think if you're writing in your native tongue you feel like it's not 'enough' to write as you would speak, and a lot teenagers look in all the wrong places to make their lyrics something 'more' than their ordinary speech, and turn to a thesaurus or dictionary.
I'm not talking about shitty "I don't wanna fight/every single night" lyrics, but ones that have been crafted and carefully chosen, and edited and tested and agonised over.
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