Do You Speak More Than One Language Fluently?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I speak both English and German.

Someone who doesn’t speak anything but English asked me how I don’t get confused when speaking one language, then turning and speaking another language without missing a beat?

It was a fair question.

I told him it was sort of like having more vocabulary - I just use some words when speaking with one person, and use other words when speaking with a different person.

He pressed me further saying, “Well, sometimes you have to slip up and use a wrong word in one or the other language, don’t you?”

I told him that happens rarely - usually when I don’t know the word in that particular language I will just throw out a word I don’t know (can’t translate) and see if it works in that language.

Still - it is a good question.

I know learning a second language is practice and training, and it has never really been a problem switching from one to another.

Still, how does the brain know to keep those chunks of words in one language together and not mix them up?

And do you have a better explanation as to how this works for someone who does not speak more than one language?

2

English and Hindi. And it’s called code switching. My coworkers are amused by it, because I’ll talk to my dad, and be rattling along in Hindi, and English words will come out, and each will have its own accent without any problem.

Hindi is my first language. I think in English, most of the time, but if you catch me unawares, I may curse in Hindi.

But I learned both very young, and languages i have learned since I was an adult will never be that good.

3

English and Spanish. The best part is realizing i switch what language I think in depending on which one I’ve been speaking last.

4

English, French, German, and Spanish. I learned the latter 3 in junior high school/high school/college and was always able to get a thick line between the three. I’ve got German and Spanish speaking friends that keep 'em current and I tend to talk to my dog in French a little too much.

That said, some languages, like Dutch, will not fit into my brain. I’ve tried to learn and it stops me and says “sorry, this word/phrase is already registered to German, please try again”.

5

English and Japanese. When I was a Mormon missionary, we would regularly use certain Japanese words in our English conversations, mostly for words having to do with things particular to living in Japan or as missionaries. We’d say things such as “let’s go down to the eki” instead of "let’s go down to the train station.

Coming back from my mission, it was a bitch trying to reset to using just English when talking to people who weren’t missionaries, so I decided to keep the languages as separate as possible.

My daughter at 4 1/2 is completely able to separate her choice of languages. She speaks Chinese to her friends and mother, Japanese to me and her mother, and English to grandma and me.

My son, at 2 1/2 isn’t as good at separating them. He wants me to understand his Chinese, but also speaks Japanese or English to me.

I never did a whole lot of translation, but on occasion I’d have to do a whole day or two in a row. There would be times at the end when I’d get tired and would start to talk the wrong language to people. It would be the whole language, though and not just words.

6

English and ASL. I often think in sign. Not necessarily the hand shapes, just the syntax. Like asking myself “phone where” instead of “Crap, where did I put my phone?” I don’t think I’m “fluent.” I don’t think hearing people ever really are. I can carry on a conversation with a native user of ASL with little trouble though.

7

English and Chinese. My Chinese is much worse than my English though, as I grew up speaking it as a “home language” only (born and raised in America to Chinese immigrant parents) and have close to no formal education in it, so my vocabulary is very limited compared to my mastery of English, and I am functionally illiterate in Chinese. I am able to carry on casual conversations on social topics with relative ease and with a native or near-native accent (until I exhibit some kind of vocabulary gap, strangers often think I’m from Taiwan).

In terms of separating the languages, it’s contextual and there is often code-switching involved to plug the vocabulary gaps - or even when the vocabulary is known in the other language, if it’s just more natural to say it in English or Chinese to someone else who knows both. For example, I always want to say familial terms and terms for food in Chinese when speaking with Chinese-American friends of my generation (assuming they know Chinese) because it just feels weird to refer to “my uncle” when the Chinese term clarifies if he’s my father’s younger brother or my mother’s older brother, or to say anglicized versions of food terms, especially when they’re anglicized pronounciations of the Chinese term.

More interestingly, I apparently “revert” to Chinese in specific kinds of stressful situations in a kind of flashback to childhood. It’s happened a few times. Here’s the best example:

Cut me off in traffic and I will swear in English. I know this, because it is a regular thing.

A few years ago, when a large green spider streaked across my computer keyboard late one night, I also yelled in English (“what the f*ck --?!”) while grabbing a nearby magazine and smashing it into a crumpled, leaking heap with a quick stroke.

But when I went to clean up said spider with a napkin fetched from the kitchen, fifteen minutes later, and it twitched, revived and ran up onto the back of my hand, I yelled in Chinese the equivalent of “OMG IT’S STILL ALIVE!!!”. It just came out. (I didn’t say it, but I suppose there was a subconscious addition of “Mom!!!” or “Dad!!!” somewhere in there, eh?)

And just a few days ago, it happened again, when my cat slipped into my bedroom while I was in the shower in the morning getting ready to go to work, and deposited a dead mouse on top of my dark dress socks where I had them laid out on the floor. Hoo boy.

8

I’m only fluent in English, but I have tried to learn Dutch and Russian at various times. I learned some Dutch first, but I was never anywhere near fluent. Actually, I never really got past “absolute beginner”. When I started studying Russian years later, I found that my mind seemed to have a switch that said “English” and “not English”. So when I would try to relax and just talk “fluidly” in Russian (rather than thinking about every word I wanted to say), Dutch would often come out.

J.

9

I pronounce the word gay differently in English, Spanish and Catalan; I’ve got more dialectal problems when I work in “other parts of Spain” than in “other Hispanic countries”, my dialectal words are more likely to crop up and that can be a problem (some people just figure things out from context or ask - for others it’s like they’re suddenly discovering that there’s a whole big world out there they’ve never visited). We can tell whether Mom has been talking to her sister or her mother: her usually-nonexistent Catalan accent crops up, and it’s different depending on which one she’s been talking to! (Nowadays Grandma and Aunt speak different dialects of Catalan)

Your explanation is perfectly fine to me, DMark, but IME many people are no more conscious of their own code-switching than of their having an accent. How many threads have we had where someone claimed to have no accent?

That example is perfect to highlight one of the times bilingual people switch languages mid-conversation: when “the other language” just happens to be more compact.

10

I’ve been conversant (I wouldn’t say ‘fluent’) in Portuguese, Spanish and French. French kind of took over my foreign language brain center, though, and when trying to think of a word in, say, Spanish, the French word will usually come first. It’s been so long since I had to have a conversation in any of those tongues, that it would be hopeless at this point to try.

11

English, Spanish and Maya Yucateca. I remember listening to a Tex-Mex radio station when I was learning Spanish. Within the same sentence would be English and Spanish words. It was difficult. My switch would be on Spanish, then when an English word was heard I would search the Spanish dictionary (in my mind) and nothing would come up. Later, realize it was an English word. Now that I am fluent, it is not a problem. Living in Mexico, I go weeks without speaking English. And can switch between the three without problem.

12

English and French. I learned German at school and lived in Holland for a year, so it’s a tumble to bash out a phrase in either German or Dutch. Those two don’t have their own room like French does.

What’s most telling to me is what language you count in. A person might be blabbing away in excellent English, but hand them a bunch of banknotes to count and they’ll be muttering away in their first language.

Annaamika - do you count up in Hindi?

I deal with quite a few different nationalities in my job, only realising one of the girls was Hungarian not Italian when she started to count. Some of these girls speak five or six languages, so to give them a WTF I’ll start doing my counting in Irish!

13

English and Spanish. I do code switch, and occasionally cannot think of a word in my native English even if the Spanish word seems longer or more complex. The other day I got stuck with the Spanish word odontologo when I could not think of the English word dentist.

The one thing I cannot seem to do is multitask by simultaneously using each language in a separate communication stream. I can speak to my mother by Skype in English or text chat with Mrs Iggy in Spanish, but not both at the same time. I have to sequentially type a sentence in Spanish and then speak an sentence in English. And never mix the two.

If I am speaking/texting with only one person then I can drop in the occasional word in the other language but I always know which language each word belongs to.

14

English, Tagalog (our country’s lingua franca) and Ilocano (my parents’ native diallect.)

15

I used to be fluent in English and French. Now it’s just English, alas. I remember going round a château in France and the guide only spoke French and the other tourists only spoke English so I interpreted. AFAIR switching back and forth was automatic.

16

English and Finnish, although I must admit I have lost most of the fluency in Finnish that I had back in the mid-sixties. There are few Finns here in LA and without someone to speak with the skills degenerate rapidly. Still, sometimes I reach for an English word and the Finnish equivalent pops into my head. I still find myself using the Finnish letters jne ( ja niin edelleen) insted of etc. They mean the same thing, but for some reason, well… and today I could not think of the word for bread, a word I used on a daily basis in Finland. but I could recall the word for diapers, a word I am sure I never used.

I studied Russian for a semester in college and it constantly got in the way as I tried to learn Finnish. As a result I can recall only a few words in Russian now. I don’t think I was ever designed to be tri-lingual.

17

When she wants something from us and it’s not urgent, my mother will often start the conversation by asking “what are you doing?” When what I happen to be doing is in English, specially if it involves writing, I have serious problems coming up with a response more articulate than a grunted “momento” (gimme a moment); my brother has the same problem. If I’m practicing English (both of us good at it) or French (both of us intermediate) with him and she comes up asking “what are you guys doing?”, neither of us has a problem answering her in Spanish.

At least we’ve finally been able to get her to understand that the grunt is not an intentional attempt to be rude, it’s because we’re searching for the “Speak Spanish in Ten Years CD”.

18

My anecdotal 5 cents. It is mandatory in my country to learn English since you are about 11. But I sucked. like D- sucked. It was not before my late twenties I could say I was fully bilingual. There was reason for that. Books. In my mid twenties I discovered my passion for reading literature. Since I am picky and choice in my 2mio native speakers language is limited, it was logical to read in English more and more. That would now be at least 10h per week. Then slowly I got fluent and even got BA from British university and wrote a book in English in my late thirties.

As per language switching it is as simple as that. While writing this post I am thinking in English. Otherwise not. Even while reading in English I believe I subliminally translate thoughts in my native (brain) language. I can not even realize when text changes from one language to another. But I do dream occasionally in English.

19

I wish I had learned another language when I was at school. We had a taster course of German, and I took to that pretty well, but it was never followed up on.

My brother can speak English and Maori. He learned it when he was in his 20s, so he may not be strictly fluent, but he speaks in it often for his job, so it’s near-as-dammit.

20

I remember hearing years ago that while learning a second language is difficult (unless you’re a child), learning a third language is what’s really hard and that the brain isn’t in fact very good at keeping the two foreign languages from getting mixed up.

I thought this sounded silly at the time, but when I was living in Japan I often found myself struggling to repress the German I’d studied in school. My brain would often come up with these part-Japanese, part-German sentences, even when I knew the right word in Japanese. For example, “Watashi wa Englisch Lehrerin desu”. Maybe this would have been less of a problem if I’d been fluent in either German or Japanese, but I’m not. My other American coworker, who was nearly fluent in Japanese, told me he didn’t have this problem because after four years of Japanese in college and two years living in Japan he’d almost completely forgotten the Spanish he’d studied K-12.

I don’t know anything about the psychology/neurology involved, but it seemed to me like my brain kept my native language in one place and all foreign language knowledge in another place and that content in the foreign “bin” tended to get mixed up.