I’m a Dutch native speaker, and I speak reasonably fluent English, a bit of German and a few words in French. I have no talent for languages whatsoever - the only reason I started learning those three, is that I had to learn them in high-school. English stuck because most movies on TV are in English here (subtitled), and because I have always been very interested in computer programming, and most good computer books I could find here were/are either in English or (earlier; late 80s/early 90s) German - I also used to live near the German border, and the local (Dutch) accent there was pretty similar to the German accent just accross the border
Only when I get stuck in a sentence. (Which is 90% of the time, if I’m trying to speak French).
In English, yes. I talk to myself in English if I’m annoyed. :eek:
Hardly ever - I have a hard time learning the vocabulary, but I can usually “fake” the word-order and sounds pretty easily. Listening to native speakers (TV/movies) helps a lot, there.
If I couldn’t speak at least one of those languages reasonably well, I couldn’t finish highschool. I hated highschool.
Seriously, though; listening to native speakers (combined with a basic course) helps a lot to get a basic grip on what the language sounds like. After some time, you’ll “feel” when your word-order or grammar sounds wrong. Watch lots of foreign TV.
This is something else I wanted to respond to… one day a couple of years ago I had just exited the local Esperanto-club meeting, and I was walking along with my friends and speaking in Esperanto, and I fell down the stairs in the subway… and yelled, “Mia genuo!” (“My knee!”) and swore in Esperanto . I’m not sure that swearing itself is the test… I think it might be more what do you do when you’re at the end of your rope emotionally: tired and under stress, for example. I’ve heard of enough people ‘losing their English’ under stress.
Hmm… Arabic and/or Russian. I’m afraid I’ve just failed some sort of test…
Oh, and another thing. At the age of 16 (i.e., too long ago :() I participated in a study relating to Language Comprehension. Some Monolinguals (in both English and in Hebrew) and some Bilinguals (among them Yours Truly) were given a bunch of short texts to read and then answer a few question, after the texts were removed. Some of the texts were in English, some in Hebrew. All three groups did, on average, about as well on the comprehension questions… but one of the questions was: “in what language was the text?”
The Monolinguals, by and large, had no problem remembering. The Bilinguals scored around 50% (or what you’d expect from guessing!) – the upshot being that comprehension is not of material “in Language X” but of material “in My Language” or “not in My Language.”
That’s interesting. There’s been more than one instance where I followed a link and ploughed into something and was more than three paragraphs in before I noticed what language it was in. I wonder whether it relates to the whole ‘thinking in pictures’ thing. Is the ground of our thinking not in words? What of the people I know who claim that they do, in fact, think in words?
I am bilingual in Japanese/English but the Japanese was learned as an adult, and I have only been speaking it for about 15 years.
NOW, I do think in whatever language I am using at the time.
I don’t translate as I go along unless it is some topic full of words that I don’t know well.
I do dream in both languages, mostly English. One interesting aspect of my dreams is that if I am dreaming of a Japanese situation, I can hear all the Japanese being spoken around me in my dream but I only understand some of it, just like in real life. I WISH I could get a recording of my dream so that I could check if the other person was actually speaking proper, correct Japanese, or if my brain has subsituted some gobbeldygook noises to stand for “Japanese she doesn’t know”! (When I was a kid I would often dream me using words I didn’t know I knew, but when I woke and checked them in a dictionary, I had used them right. It was like I was practicing in my subconscious. One word I remember was “putrefy” when I was about 7 years old!)
The word order thing is a good question. In Japanese the verb comes at the end, and even though they are mostly regular, I could not change them easily for the longest time. So I would start a sentence and as I approached the end, and the verb, would realise that I couldn’t say the verb I wanted, so I’d change direction slightly and try to find another one I could use. This might happen two or three times in some sentences, which got longer and more garbled! These days I have the verbs down, and there’s not much rearrangement going on in my head.
And something else I do, which drives me mad, so it must irritate my listeners is talk too much. I can say what I want to say perfectly fine, but the sentences I come out with often only convey about 90% of the information that I wanted to, or miss some nuance. So I find myself repeating the information in yet another way, hoping to cover the bit that got missed in the first sentence. You can see people thinking, “yes, yes, get ON with it!”
My children, who are perfectly balanced bilinguals, have none of these problems. I know for a fact that they dream in both languages because they both talk in their sleep!
My husband, who is also bilingual Japanese/English, with Japanese being his native language, occasionally wakes up in the wrong mode. This doesn’t matter if he is in Japanese mode when he wakes up at home, but it has caused a number of laughs at his expense when he’s been at work and woken up barking orders in English!!
I still can’t help but be proud of my *written * Hindi, though. I learned to read & write in my teens, and I still finish a letter and think “Wow, I wrote all that.” And I still read like a kid, sounding each word out, although at least I can relate words now.
Technically, Polish is the first language I learned, only getting into English through television and school. Nowadays, my English is far, far ahead of my Polish, but my Polish is conversationally fluent. I just can’t talk technical in Polish without a lot of description and talking around the subject. I also speak several other languages (Hungarian, French, German, Croatian) with varying degrees of difficulty.
Nope. Even with languages I don’t speak well, I try to think in that language. It only makes things much more difficult if you actively try to translate English constructions into other languages. Hungarian, for example, is notoriously difficult for English speakers. When learning a language like that, especially, it only slows down the learning process if you try to translate word-for-word from English into the target language. English is not Hungarian. It does not follow Hungarian grammar. You’ll only frustrate yourself trying to transliterate your sentences.
As much as I possibly can, yes. With Polish, there is no effort whatsoever. I can, and do, go from Polish to English back to Polish without any problems. I can do that with Hungarian, as well, to some degree.
Nope. As mentioned before, this will only serve to frustrate you. You have to internalize the grammar of your target language. It’s not (necessarily) as difficult as it sounds. Often, it just involves a lot of repetition until you are comfortable with the way a language constructs its sentences.
The best way to learn is if you simply have no choice. Like I said, I’m not an expert in any of the languages I speak outside English. I have a friend who moved from England to Hajdunanas in Eastern Hungary, not knowing a single word in Hungarian and having no proficiency in any foreign language. He started out absolutely monolingual. He found a job there as an English teacher, but there were no native English speakers in the area, and he basically had no choice but to learn Hungarian if he wanted to communicate. Within two years, he became fluent to the point that native Hungarians were mistaking him for a local. Total immersion is the best way to learn any language.
I started learning to speak spanish when I was three or four years old and I definitely think in spanish when speaking it. My friends and I will use whatever words fit the situation best, switching back and forth between languages mid-sentence. We’ll often switch several times in a sentence actually, and even combine both languages in the same word. I sometimes think in spanish while speaking english, but never the reverse.
When I’m speaking with someone who’s not bilingual, I will sometimes sneak in a word of spanish, but again, for some reason never the reverse.
When I took classes to learn french, I just barely got to thinking a few phrases in french, but it was mostly english to french translation. What drove me nuts was my tendency to muddle french and spanish while speaking but thinking in english at the same time.
I can’t for the life of me remember speaking, in any language, while dreaming. Hunh.
I first learned Japanese 20+ years ago :eek: , so I’ve been at it for a while. I don’t necessarily have any special talents for learning the verbal language, but I picked up kanji easier than some of my friends.
In my experience, you don’t really do a word-for-word translation in your head once you get past the very begining stages. Maybe you could in a language closer to English then Japanese is, but since there really isn’t a word-for-word correspondence then trying to translate takes up CPU time and interferes with listening. For example, when I’m talking with my customers and taking notes, I have to take notes in Japanese since adding translating to listening carefully and writing causes me to fall behind. It’s easy enough to just take notes in Japanese. (But since I don’t write kanji that well, I do it in hiragana. )
This is my experience. I will remember the context of a conservation, but will not remember if the conversation was in English or Japanese. I’ll have met some Japanese woman and talked to her, and then afterwards completely forgotten which language we used.
Memorized information is different. Like scr4, I usually memorize phone numbers in one language, although the which language depends on the use. I first remembered my company’s phone number in Japanese, since I tell it to more people in Japanese than in English, but all US phone numbers I know are stored in my native tounge. “Translating” memorized information is difficult. I used tried mentally translating my SS no., which required mental effort. Now it’s translated into my short term memory, then reciting it in Japanese is easier. (Just don’t ask me tomorrow, though!) If you were to ask for non-memorized information (such as asking me what sports I like, or discussing politics) then there isn’t this mental translation process.
I’ve been told that when I talk in my sleep that I speak Japanese. I dream in both languages and have found myself talking to myself in Japanese at times. Some things are easier to say in that language.
I speak English mostly, although I am fluent in French after living in France for several years.
I don’t translate between the two. I think both in French and English, depending on the situation. I don’t really use French much these days, but when I’m really upset, I find myself thinking in French, rather than English. Listening to French radio on the Internet actually helps calm me down when I’m really in a bad mood, too.
I do often have problems recognizing when I’m using one or the other. Sometimes I’ll just start talking and everyone around me is staring at me like they don’t understand anything I’m saying. Then I realize that for some inexplicable reason, I’m speaking French.
I also speak some German, and I visited Germany several times when I was living in France. When I was in Germany, I thought in German, without any real translation from French or English. Same with Italian when I was in Italy. I have never studied Italian, but between taking Latin in high school and speaking French, I didn’t have any problems picking up Italian and using it when I was in Italy.
Spanish is a whole 'nother story. I have tried for years to learn Spanish, including taking classes, watching Spanish TV, listening to Spanish radio, etc. I just don’t get it. The vocabulary isn’t hard. The grammar isn’t hard. But I just can’t understand it. When I try to speak Spanish, it all comes out in French or Italian.
My last year in college, I took a course in French (my major), a course in German, a course in Ancient Greek, and an English Lit course. About halfway through the term, I had this nightmare about not being able to tell the languages apart anymore, and not knowing even what language I was actually speaking.
English, German, and Spanish here. I spoke Spanish first, but I’m now most comfortable in English. Like others, I don’t translate. In fact, I’m not a good translator or interpreter; I tend to get stuck in one language and not be able to jump back to the second one. For years, it was especially difficult for me to switch from Spanish to German and vice versa. If I was speaking one a lot, I’d almost forget the other for a bit.
I dream in multiple languages as well. The oddest aspect is that I’ll sometimes have dreams where people speak the “wrong” language. People I know speak only English will show up in a dream speaking Spanish or German, for example.
My German and Spanish definitely suffer when I’m tired.
I swear in whatever language happens to come to mind. It alternates among the three and doesn’t necessarily match my surroundings. (I’m mostly surrounded by English, but tend to swear more in German or Spanish…)
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