What with all the German I’ve been listening to and reading I’ve been doing, and even a little bit of posting on message boards, this now seems to be happening to me. A week or so ago I was having a conversation, and in the context of a joking remark I mentioned someone wanting to be “inconspicuous”. The trouble was, the German word unauffällig is what came to mind first, and I had to grope for the English word! The groping process took a second or two, which was more than long enough to lose the thread of what I was saying. Then earlier today, I was solving a crossword, and one of the answers happened to be “wool”. Of course I only figured that out after a few seconds of wondering why the letters W-O-L-L, from Wolle wouldn’t work with the adjacent crosswise clues. Since I know that “WOLL” is one letter short of the correct German spelling, I suspect that I was trying to use the German spelling to write the English word. Thankfully, I caught myself before I actually wrote anything down.
I only use German to maintain my skills in the language, and not for any work related reasons like having to correspond with German speaking people at a job. I listen to as many English podcasts if not more, and I see far more American TV than German. So I don’t think I’m overexposing myself to German, but this does concern me a little. Do I have to back off a bit from the German podcasts, online news, and messageboards? Has anyone else experienced anything like this, other than in the context of actually spending a year or so in the foreign country?
Yes, of course. Mixing up words from another language or having a word pop up in the “wrong” language when it won’t come to you in the one you’re speaking is very common, even among people who do not speak more than one language. The language you’re mixing in doesn’t even need to be foreign, either.
It’s how words get borrowed: someone used a word from another language, someone else picked it up, etc. and eventually it becomes a loanword which doesn’t follow the original language’s rules any more.
It happens to everybody who uses 2 languages, and it’s perfectly normal.And it can be a little irritating when you get stuck awkwardly looking for a word that you know you used last week with no effort.
It happens even to mono-lingual people.
We all speak differently at different times. You have slang words you use with your friends that you don’t use with your grandmother. Think of teenagers talking among themselves, vs how they talk in a more formal situation…and see how they have to suddenly slow down and grope for different words. Just like you and your German.
Sometimes the word just sounds more evocative in the other language. I frequently use French words just because they sound better.
I take your point that your native language may fail you at times but I actually found learning another language helped me understand my own better. Because things aren’t always a direct translation, you often have to think about how your own language functions in order to figure out how best to express the same thought in another .
I’m not sure it’s possible to be truly multilingual - by which I mean people can of course be fluent in more than one language, but they don’t speak each to the level of monolingual speakers.
I noticed this while living in HK. None of the western-born bilingual Chinese - who had generally grown up speaking Cantonese at home and English elsewhere - had truly native-level English. Their vocabularies and syntax patterns seemed quite limited to me.
There could be all sorts of biases going on here, what with many minority children growing up poor and a reduced emphasis on English-language literature and speech. Still, I wonder if anyone else has had the same thought?
Of course it’s possible to be truly multilingual. Just have each parent speak a different language and you will be fully competent in both. I know someone who grew up speaking four languages. His father’s native language was German and his mother’s Spanish and each spoke only his/her native language at home and he grew up with that. In addition, they sent him to a bilingual English/French school and he is at least fluent in both. I can judge only his English, but I could not tell it, either in fluency or accent, that it was not his native language. For a while he worked in Argentina (his mother’s native country), but now he is living and working in Italy and so presumably is fluent in that.
The only time I ran into anything like that was while teaching at an Orthodox Jewish private school. One of the students had a very disrupted home life. Her parents spoke Hebrew at home but were always traveling and would leave her with close friends and family. Some of them spoke Hebrew and some spoke English. This had been going on since she was a baby, and there were some big gaping holes in her psyche. On top of that, though, she’d never been in one environment long enough or been socialized enough to really master that language. Consequently, she had a basic grasp of both Hebrew and English, but wasn’t really fluent in either, and by the fifth grade, it was really starting to show.
Sorry, this is absolutely wrong. Multilingualism is very common and has been extensively studied. I was raised bilingually myself and my mother and SO both work in research into early language acquisition. I can assure you my Dutch and English are both excellent. I don’t even have an accent.
Children pick up whatever is offered. If you don’t offer a “rich” language the child will learn the limited version of the language on offer. That goes for any language, incl. for monolingually raised children.
Multilingualism has also been shown to increase understanding of language in general, to increase the ability to learn new languages at a later age and children learning a different language improve their skills in the original language.
To the OP:
Yes, absolutely normal. I get it all the time. Drives me nuts sometimes. I speak 7 languages, and can get confused any number of ways. Sometimes you’re looking for a word only to finally remember that that word doesn’t exist at all in the other language.
I suspect this is a matter of definition. If true multilingualism, with respect to one’s native language and a second language acquired later, is defined as virtual equivalence of active vocabulary, passive vocabulary, and the ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words–if it’s all those things plus flawless listening comprehension and pronunciation, then I suspect Virgil’s statement might be nearly correct, except for…
…the case of children, who seem to be able to learn foreign languages effortlessly by osmosis. Of course, as you say, how parents, schoolmates, and teachers use the language is critically important.
I haven’t been around any children who were raised bilingually, but I think there may be some truth in a scene early in the Knute Rockne biopic. He’s shown as a small boy with his parents when his father says something in Norwegian. Knute responds by saying now that they’re in America they should be speaking like Americans. To a small kid, a foreign language isn’t a difficult school subject with thousands and thousands of vocabulary words, grammatical rules, and exceptions all to be learned by rote. Instead, it’s just “the way that people talk” in the other country, another custom like the way they cook and eat.
I have a friend who was born and grew up in the US but moved to Germany for several years and speaks fairly good German. She’s back in the US and occasionally will be talking in English when her mind slips and she switches to German and has to apologize.
Your point is that only children can learn to be fully multilingual. This was long accepted as true, but is something that is still being looked into. For a long time researchers were trying to pin down an exact age when the brain stopped learning language “by osmosis”, as you say. For a while it was 8 years old. That was it, you’d never learn to 100% fluent after that. It turns out, as with all things brain related, that there isn’t an exact age, and some people apparently become fully bilingual later in life. My father learned English when he was 13, and you would never know. His English is flawless, perfect accent and far better spelling and grammar than the average speaker.
The jury isn’t out on that one and I see every day in the work of my SO and mother that there is so much we don’t understand yet about our brains and the way we learn languages.
I know that Portuguese will never be to me what Dutch and English are. Even though I can effortlessly think and dream in Portuguese, it’s not the same. I’ll never be 100%. I guess for my brain, I learned a little too late
I’m not sure what you mean by Western-born , but I know a lot of people who grew up speaking Cantonese at home, and varying degrees of English elsewhere and all but one of them speak English with native fluency and no accent. That one lived in an ethnic neighborhood, went to school with other Cantonese speaking kids , shopped in stores with Cantonese speaking employees etc. He mostly used English in class and at the bowling alley when he took up bowling.
I’m not fluent in any language other than English, but I was at one point conversational in a few different languages. These days, the stray bits of vocabulary I still have will invade if my brain associates it with the best conceptual fit for that particular idea/object/etc.
They were British-, Canadian- and Australian-born Chinese who had lived in their countries of birth until their early twenties. They were fluent, of course, but their English abilities were slightly lacking somehow.
I’m only basing this on perhaps 10 individuals, so it’s hardly a large sample. However, we all taught English together so discussed language all the time. They weren’t very good at writing non-ambiguous grammar or vocab exercises and seemed weak at creative writing. The Western-born Chinese who learned Cantonese as a second language (or not at all) didn’t seem to have these limitations.
It’s probably nothing, but it did leave me with the impression that truly multilingual people are non-existent, or very rare.
My daughter is truly multi-lingual. At 7 she speaks, reads and writes English, Spanish and Danish above her peers. It helps that we’ve provided her with plenty stimulation, travel, visits from relatives and a multi-lingual education (English/Spanish school, home-schooled in Danish).
What language dominates depends on how much time she spends with me (English), her dad (Danish) or friends (Spanish). I asked her when she was 5, and again recently. If she spends a lot of time with her dad she’ll think (or talk to herself, as she put it) in Danish. If dad is on a trip she’ll revert to English.
My husband and I are also multi-lingual. We share two languages.
It happens to me all the time. What makes it so infuriating is that it isn’t the complex words that I forget, but sometimes I will stop mid-sentence trying to remember how to say tie/corbata/cravate. Stupid brain. Luckily my French is now so rusty that my English and my Spanish have more space to fight it out.
As for the lack of accent, we all have one. My daughter has accents, but she sounds like a native speaker. I have accents (I am bilingual from childhood), but people can’t figure out where I am from judging from my accent. I get some ridiculous guesses from people all the time (Spanish: Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela. English: New Zealand, Caribbean somewhere). I joke that if I could just pick an accent I’d sound like Blanche Deveraux.
Good job teaching your daughter! As you know, it’s such a bonus to grow up with extra languages. Did you get any pediatricians advising against multilingualism? I think it’s mainly a thing of the past, but parents had a tough time with it in the '80s.
Hey, I was fluent in Danish until I was about 4. I had a Danish nanny. My parents actually looked for another Danish nanny to see if I could keep it up, but couldn’t find one. So I forgot. Except “ost”. I remember ost.
You’re right about accents, of course, we do all have an accent. I’ve always wondered if I’m good at putting on accents because of being bilingual. It would make sense, because it trains your ear for a wider variety of sounds, and trains the muscles you use for speaking for more sounds as well. Anyway, what I meant to say is: I don’t speak with a foreign accent.
Just to add to the OP: I realised I didn’t really say that you’re not actually damaging your native language. You’re most likely actually improving it, as your knowledge and understanding of language in general expands. You just can’t come up with the word for a second, but it’s nothing to worry about. It would take a long time to forget your native language, and even then you should be able to get back into the swing of things with time. Barring brain damage.
My mum has a bilingual friend, who suffered some form of brain damage. Now he can only speak a mix of both languages. It’s actually really difficult to understand him until you get used to it, even though we speak Dinglish (Dutch/English) at home. Brains are so weird.
It varies pretty heavily from non-native speaker to non-native speaker. My mom’s third language was English, and she was pretty fluent [with the occasional humorous flub when using idioms*]. Part of that was that she spoke almost exclusively in English for work and at home** and 80% of what she read in her leisure time was in English. The more you exercise the language in your brain and in use of the language, the more fluent you’re going to become.
*Usually it’d be something that she didn’t use or hear frequently, and occasionally she’d be 85% correct with usage, with that other 15% coming in as an Icelandic language interpretation of how the idiom would be used. Ex: “Holy rolly Christians” instead of “holy rollers” happened once in a long discussion of religious solicitors. I think that “Hey, English speakers use the rhyming scheme in other parts! Maybe it works here too?” was the main reasoning.
**See comment by gracer re: 1980s “don’t make them multilingual!” advocacy, as it’s common in my experience. This was also a reaction to the first child having some issues with situation-inappropriate code switching during his elementary years. The consensus these days seems to be “it’s fine to raise kids to be multilingual, but context must always be there so that children don’t get confused about when it’s a good time to use which language.”
Having grown up in a bilingual area, attended for a short while the foreign-language-immersion “high class girls’ school” in my home town (we moved, thus for a short while) and being the daughter of a woman from another bilingual area, the notion of pediatricians saying “oh no, you mustn’t teach more than one language to your kid!” made me laugh out loud. Sadly it’s no laughing matter, but boy am I glad that particular bit of stupidity got better.
You seem to confuse linguistic skill and creativity, they’re two different animals. Also, if you compared my descriptions pre-Frobisher with post-Frobisher, you wouldn’t think they were from the same person. Who is Frobisher, you ask? The British computer programmer who taught me how to write descriptions, something that over 15 years’ worth of Spanish Language teachers hadn’t been able to (my native language is Spanish).
And it sounds to me like the “non-native” learners may have been native-level, which IMNSHO is what should count.
I joke that if I could just pick an accent I’d sound like Blanche Deveraux.
Except “ost”. I remember ost.