My first language is English. A few years ago I was doing a lot of hardcore studying of Japanese. At school I spoke it to friends and it was pretty much the burden of my schoolwork. I wouldn’t have called myself fluent necessarily, but I was definitely at a conversation level.
Then I had to get knocked out for some oral surgery. I woke up in the recovery room part of the clinic, in the usual fog. A nurse was at a desk some ways away doing paperwork, but other than that I was at home. I attempted to call out to her to tell her that I was awake, and I realized that I could only think and speak in Japanese. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. The nurse looked up and I remember a look of shock and terror–probably of the possible litigations this could involve–as I yelled that I couldn’t speak English. In Japanese.
On the way home, I have vague recollections of informing my mother that I couldn’t speak English (in Japanese). Of course this disturbed her a little bit but she was used to me speaking Japanese to my friends and felt it not totally out of the ordinary. My English gradually returned and I was back to normal about an hour later.
It was a very strange thing…Japanese was suddenly so much easier than it ever was when I was awake, and I have no doubt that what I was saying was grammatically correct and all.
I’m moving to Germany in a few months and will no doubt have to get quite quickly acquainted with German. Should be interesting to see how that goes.
My native language is Swiss German, school language was high German, then French, Italian and English. I tend to switch my internal language depending on context. Everyday stuff - Swiss German, teaching - High German or English, depending on the language in which the class is held. Science and computers - mostly English. In conversations, I automatically switch to the language the other is using, sometimes without even noticing. For example, at a conference in France where some of the talks were heal in English, but most in French, I unintentionally started off in French, probably because the talk before mine was given in French.
This happened to me when my second child was born. He was an emergency c section and it all happened rather fast, so all I knew when I came to in the recovery room was that there had been a big problem which had hurt even more than labor hurts, I was no longer pregnant, and there was no evidence of a baby. So a nurse came over and I said “Where’s the baby?” (I thought). She immediately looked worried and turned away, speaking to my husband in hushed tones.
That was when I knew the baby was dead.
She came back with my husband and I asked him what had happened to the baby. He began to laugh. (It was good that I was immobile or I would have killed him right then and there would be no punch line.)
He turned to the nurse and said, “It’s Dutch, she’s speaking Dutch”. Then he told me the baby was fine and in baby ICU for observation.
I´m raised bilingual and know English and German pretty well aswell… so I pretty much think in the language I´m surrounded by at the moment. Don´t have any real problems with switching between them either (even in the middle of a sentence).
But this one time… as an exchange student in Germany; I was speaking with my parents on the phone (Icelandic) and had a mixture of swedes, germans and americans around me. So when I hung up the phone and got a question (in either english or swedish) I just naturally replied in Icelandic.
Everybody just looked at eachother with this weird “this must be something that you are supposed to understand”-look and it took me a few seconds to realise what I´d said.
So most of the time - no probs. And same with the thinking (it just flips). But give me all my languages at the same time and I flip to “basic mode”
I switch back and forth between Swedish and English. Sometimes one language fits whatever I’m thinking better, sometimes the other. Sometimes I don’t know what language I’m thinking or speaking unless I make the effort to listen to myself, if that makes sense. On occasion, I have long conversations in English with a Swedish friend of mine without either of us realizing we’re speaking English.
It’s amazing how quickly this happens with other languages. I barely speak enough Spanish to handle common everyday occurrences, but after only a day in Spain (over ten years after last studying Spanish) I found myself constructing Spanish sentences in my head.
The ability to talk without thinking is what really defines fluent.
I work with two people from Europe on from the Netherlands and one form Belgium. They both speak English, Dutch and French.
But the girl, Petra, you never see her slow down when she speaks English but Neil the man, every once in a while you can see him slow down and (almost) literally see the wheels turning in his head. He obviously is translating from Dutch to English.
Or I work with several Mexicans born in Texas and they basically speak in English and then if they get stuck you can see them slide into Spanish then out of it, rather than try to translate. (Spanish was their home tongue, but they both speak English)
I spent my junior year abroad in Germany, and before that I had taken about six years’ worth of high school and college German and German lit classes, so I knew the language fairly well. But it wasn’t until a few months into the year that I found myself dreaming and thinking in German.
I’ve been speaking Spanish for about 9 years now. Daily. I don’t have to translate at all in normal conversation. It’s still only very, very rare that I’ll find myself dreaming in Spanish, and then it’s situation dependent (like, if it’s someone I would speak Spanish with when awake). Thinking in Spanish is sometimes easier than in English, depending on the elegance of what my mind is trying to express.
