Ok, the Hardest language to learn thread made me think of this. I speak a good deal of German, took Spanish in high school(and am working on re-learning it as it may be-a refresher course) and some Gaelic-but only a very little bit. What I know of all of these came solely from classes-not from actually spending time in the country.
My problems is, if am trying to carry on a conversation in German, Spanish words “slip out”. Same thing happens trying to converse in Spanish-here comes the German. I have found that I can translate better between Spanish and German than with either into English-which is my native language. I mean, I am trying to say something in spanish to my co-workers(more difficult phrases in particular), and find myself taking the English phrase, translating in my head to German, and from there into Spanish-and when they talk to me I go from Spanish to German to English, if I have to think about what they said. And every once in a while a darn bit of Gaelic will pop out. Just randomly, here comes “Ciamar a tha thu?” instead of “Como estas?”.
Anyone else have this problem, or any suggestions as to why this happens, of how I can get over it. It gets amusing, yes, but frustrating as using Spanish is becoming a larger part of my job almost daily.
I’m a Dane in German-speaking workplace. My English is better than most Germans’, so whenever there’s a need for spoken or written English, I take over. To complicate matters, we’re owned by a Danish company. meaning that I quite often speak all three languages in the course of a day. I’ve reached the point more than once where I honestly have to think carefully to even realize what language I’m currently speaking. (It gets embarrassing when you forward e-mails that the recipient has no chance of reading).
The only good news: It improves with practice. Stress probably makes it esier to slip into a familiar and well-known language, so as you get more comfortable with the language you’re currently speaking, the gaffes will become rarer and rarer.
S. Norman - who can now translate Monty Python quotes into German and have people recognize them…
My wife, who is fluent in French and Norwegian as well as English, took a German language course with me and had an almost impossible time because of stress. The teacher we had was one of those sorts of people who could make you nervous just by looking at you, and my wife would sometimes translate whole sentences into Norwegian instead of German (as you can imagine, this caused a lot of confusion, and the teacher did seem annoyed by it). Eventually, she and the teacher talked about it and the teacher assured her that he wouldn’t get upset if she made that sort of error. That seemed to do the trick, and now my wife is quite adept at German.
So perhaps, Lsara, it may be helpful for you to mention your problem to your co-workers. Hopefully, they’ll be OK about the situation, and it will be easier for you to deal with the problem. And as Spiny Norman says, it will get better with time.
I’ve had that happen to me too. Curiously, it almost never happens when I’m speaking one of my second languages.
When I’m speaking English, though, I’ll have French (or Spanish, or Esperanto, or even ASL!!!) idioms pop into my mouth (or hands), that I then have to stop and consciously translate before I can say anything. I think this is very odd, since English is my first language!
I confuse Gaelic and French phrases all the time.
And yet as a translation reference point for my Finnish studies I find French more useful than English.
I dont know why this is but I think that when conversing or reading in a 3rd language you may find it useful to establish the “not my first language” mindset.
Damned if I know, but I do it too. German is my strongest foreign language (which isn’t saying much) and I find that if I go to another country, I want to speak to everyone in German. Oddly enough, it’s much better German than I speak at home…
Another problem is that I get Spainish and French words mixed up all the time. It’s like Uno, Dos, Trois, Quatre, Cinco…arghhhh!
I do find that a lot of German words slip into my English, and I have this annoying habit of capitalizing nouns even when I’m writing English.
At least I’m doing better than MisterTot, when he speaks English to a foreigner, he does it with a goofy accent. Ja, having him say “Vat vay to zee train ztation?” is going to help them understand him better.
i’m nit-picking here (i don’t have an answer for your question other than to say that i mix french german and irish in my head all the time - it’s coz i don’t use them much at all and it’s been 4 years since learning them)… back to my nit-picking - if it’s Irish you’re typing there should it not be ‘Conas atá tú’ - i ain’t saying my iriash is great (13 years of it in school didn’t rub off much)
i learned 4 languages at a time when i was young. three before kindergarten. then because we had a kinder in our class from spain, spanish was added to our lessons. i have some very strange black holes in each language. for example i know how to say hot and cold in spanish and english, i only know the word for cold in russian. so if i was in russian class i would sub. the spanish word.
i now use a sort of zen approach to languages, if your speaking to me in russian i won’t translate russian to english to russian, i’ll just blank out my mind and let what ever words “pop in” come out. 9 times out of 10 i answer correctly. if i think about it and translate out i’ll mess up somewhere along the line.
I am shaky on the details (so if this were GQ I wouldn’t post), but I think I remember reading that languages learned after puberty are actually processed in a different part of the brain than languages learned earlier. Hormones during puberty seem to somehow close off the area of the brain that processes speech to new learning. That is why if a language is not learned fluently before that time, the speaker will not be able to speak with the accent of a native–or, in other words, will retain their native accent. To me, this explains why mistakes usually occur between two non-native languages, rather than with the native language. For example, when I tried to learn Kiswahili, the interference I experienced was with German, which I learned mostly as an adolescent/adult, rather than English, my native tongue.
This is, of course, why it is so stupid that we teach languages in the US after puberty, in high school. But no one listens to me.
I find it’s very difficult to keep track of what language I’m reading. Just the other day, I was reading a French-language newspaper article (I read French, but not very well). I came across a whole sentence or two I could read more easily than I have any right to. It was a while before I realized it was a quotation in English (my native language).
They did a Candid Camera sequence about this phenomenon a year or two ago. They went to a Hispanic neighborhood and tried to get bilingual passers-by to translate between a Spanish-speaker and and English-speaker. But after a few sentences, they switched it around so the passer-by was “translaing” from English to English. They didn’t catch on that anything unusual was happening, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have either.