When you’re dealing with people who speak your second language, do you think to yourself in the second language or in your first language?
I think in English (my 1st,) but often internally speak to myself in Mandarin (my 2nd) in preparation for what I’m about to say to them, if that makes sense. Due to the grammatical differences between the two languages, I often have to instantly first rehearse what I’m going to say so that I don’t accidentally speak Mandarin using English grammar.
I once just barely got to the point of being able to carry on conversation in German and not be doing my thinking in English and translating; to be just thinking directly in German.
I try to think in English when speaking in English or preparing to do so, I’m not always successfull, specially when I’m tired.
When I’m speaking German, maybe 90% of the time I’m thinking in German, but I can be thrown back into English when I suddenly need a word that’s not there.
Change “German” to “French”, and Maserschmidt has described my situation. I don’t normally even “think about thinking in French”. I’m speaking French.
I can’t read or speak anything but English, but I can recognize certain Chinese characters (hanzi) and when I see them in Japanese, kanji, I have think of the Cantonese word first, then have to mentally translate it to Japanese. When I see 日本, I think yat bun (Cantonese), then Nippon, then Japan.
I was a crappy foreign language student in high school, and for the first year or so I studied Mandarin. Then one day it kinda clicked like a switch was thrown and I started thinking in Mandarin. If I don’t know a word or how to say something in Mandarin, then the English word pops up. Probably owing to decades of Chinglish or working with native Chinese speakers with varying degrees of English.
Then when I started Japanese, almost from day one I thought in Japanese if I had the vocab.
I don’t translate from English to Mandarin in my head. I do have to translate from Mandarin to English for the non-mandarin speakers in many of my meetings.
It depends on context, for me. I’d need to be immersed in the other language for a while before I switch fully, and it takes longer now I’m older. Even then, some situations may be more complicated than I can easily manage without thinking it out in English first, particularly in some sort of emergency when instinct starts to take over.
I think there might be two levels of it for me. When my vocabulary is sufficient, I can compose what I’m going to say directly in my 2nd language. I don’t translate back and forth. But my internal thoughts might still be in English.
When I’ve been immersed in the language for a little bit, I switch to thinking in it for internal purposes as well.
One of the consequences of working from home is not having the opportunity to switch often between my mother tongue (English) and local-ish languge (German). Therefore it takes me longer to get back to German, than it did before we started working from home.
I do not think of what I want to say in English before I say it in German. If I’m planning a phone call (doctor’s office, for example), I will plan it out in German, and I may look online for specific vocabulary.
One of the reasons I decided to further my German education was to be able to rapidly change into German, especially if I might need it in an emergency situation. Therefore I am grateful to having opportunities (chatting with neighbors and coworkers) to speak in German outside my normally scheduled course.
One of my grad school classmates (in the US) was from Ecuador. He was fluent in English, though certainly not as much so as in Spanish.
One day, I was at a church service with him, and though the service was almost all in English, there was one song where we sang the first verse in English, then the second in Spanish, and alternating from there. During the second verse, he turned to me and said “Suddenly I can understand English much easier!”.
Ah, if I only thought before I spoke (or wrote), my life would be much easier…!
But when I actually think before speaking it is usually dependent on context. Mostly I think in the language being used around me at the moment, the one I am going to use too.
But among interpreters it is quite common to mix languages a bit, for instance to highlight a particulat meaning or nuance (or to show off in fron of non interpreters). But this has to be done within some sensible limits. YMMV.
Grew up in India speaking Bengali at home with parents, Hindi with friends, and English at Catholic Boys’ school.
For me, the concept of first versus second language doesn’t jive. My mind tends to use a language in context.
For example, I was thinking about the reply to this post, exclusively in English.
Primary language is English. I can work in Spanish, and know bits and pieces of French & Russian. I have thought in Spanish, primarily to prepare myself for a clear introduction to a conversation/question (i.g. “Do you know what time the train is arriving?” vs. “Does the freight car have a clock?”).
But a strange thing is, that I have dreamt in the Russian I know. And I woke up thinking I did well asking for directions in that dream!
Tripler
I frequently get my Spanish & French vocabulary mixed up in the same sentence. Stoopid middle school.
My brain always defaults to French when searching for a word in Spanish. No idea why.
I think in the target language. I grew up with both Polish and English, so it’s pretty seamless to transition back and forth between them, and sometimes I kind of go through both languages. My vocabulary is much, much stronger in English, so I don’t speak as much Polish as when I used to, but when I do, I think in Polish. A lot of times, I don’t even realize a conversation is in Polish at my family’s house. My wife has been many times to my house where me and the family are having a conversation, and we switch over from English to Polish, and I don’t even really think about it. I then ask my wife’s opinion on something and she turns to me and says that she doesn’t know, as we’ve been talking Polish.
Even with my shitty, shitty Hungarian, my basic skills start with me thinking in Hungarian more-or-less, as the language is SO different than English in its structure that it is counterproductive, IMHO, to start with a sentence in English and move it into Hungarian. Basic sentences that I’ve used a lot just come out instinctively, no translation step required, but above that, I usually start with a sentence form I’m familiar and then try to do more of thinking in English (since that’s what holds my vocabulary) and then drop words in as familiar.
It’s also said that you know a language really well when it’s in your dreams. I have no idea if that’s really true, but I regularly have dreams with English, Polish, and Hungarian in them (as last night.) Also German, French, and Croatian, will occasionally make an appearance. They’re all in fairly simple forms (except for the first two), but there’s no intermediary step of thinking in English (I think) when a character in your dream is addressing to you in German (and I’ve been able to remember enough of the dreams to at least not remember them being gibberish.)
That’s how it works for me as well.
Seems to me that it’s a similar process to thinking in “math” or “music”.
It’s like mental muscle memory.
I’ve had the same thing happen when I was learning German (third language). If I stumbled for a word, it would come out in French (second language).
The explanation I’ve heard for this is that after about age 5 or 6, the brain’s “native language” centre is closed. New languages learned after that time are in a different brain function, so if you are looking for a word in a non-native language, they’re all stored in the same brain area. It’s likely that you’ll pick a word from that area, rather than your native language.
(Don’t have a cite for this ; read it a long time ago, probably in Discover or Psychology Today.)
That’s my experience too.
There’s a mental category for my native language (English) and “all others”. I did German throughout school and Spanish in the military. The number of long-forgotten German words that bubble up unbidden in my halting now-pitiful Spanish is embarrassing.
WTF is up with that, Brain? You’re not helping!
And boy howdy! The time spent over this last year on the Dope sure could have been better spent getting passably good at Spanish again. Maybe I need to find a messageboard for folks trying to learn the language. Then again, it’s really speaking that needs the work; I bet reading & writing isn’t real-time enough to develop much if any proficiency in conversation.