I speak (and write, I hope) English fluently, but it is my second language. For several years I’ve found myself thinking in English, formulating sentences in English before speaking them in my native Swedish and so forth. When I write in Swedish, English sentence structures and expressions often creep into the text so that it sounds like a translation from English, forcing me to go Anglicism-hunting. I assume that this is because I use English so damn much, what with TV and movies and the Dope and everything.
Those of you whose native language is English but speak one or more other languages fluently, do you find that the same things happen to you? Do your second languages invade your first? If so, is it because you use your second language very much (say, by living in a country where it is spoken)? Anyone who lives in an English-speaking country and still finds other languages encroaching upon their English?
Yes. English speaker living in Spanish-speaking country, who also speaks Spanish, Hebrew and some French.
Depending on the context, phrases, sayings or even words from the other two languages that I speak well pop into my head. In some cases there are sayings or idioms that express an idea better than in English, or words that are untranslatable. Also, some professional jargon or terminology come to my lips in Spanish first, and I have to grapple for the English word. Even when I lived in England, this would happen because some of my work was conducted in Spanish.
I’m a native english speaker who works as a military interpreter (Russian and Spanish) and yes, I do catch myself thinking in other languages. Although I speak pretty well (borderline 3 for those who are familiar with the terminology) and can get around Russia perfectly fine and interpret for most situations, I’m not native-fluent.
Even so, at times I find myself stuck for english words for everyday objects or concepts sometimes. My wife only speaks english and it amuses the heck out of her when I have to stop and ask, “What do you call that thing? You know, that you use to cook meat outside? They use gas or charcoal?” or “What’s a good word for when somebody only tells the truth? In Russian it would be…”
It happens when I’ve been using one of my languages a lot, either during schooling or coming home from a trip.
Heh. I’m a native English speaker who’s fluent in Spanish and reasonably well versed in French.
When I’m using my Spanish a lot (e.g. at work or when I’m reading a book in Spanish), I’ll start to bypass the whole “think - translate - communicate” process and start thinking in Spanish. When I had been living in South America for a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish. The funny part of that was that people - my dad, for example - who didn’t speak Spanish in real life could speak it perfectly in my dreams. And as an occasional lucid dreamer, I would realize this oddity and point it out to the offending people.
My French isn’t very good at all (wasn’t good to begin with, and I don’t get to use it really) and I’ll catch myself thinking in French sometimes. It gets really confusing sometimes where I took French Immersion in high school, so occasionally the french word will come to mind for something because I’ve used it more than the english counterpart.
Yes, this happens to me. My native language is English, I speak fluent Esperanto, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of French. I can read it fairly well (with dictionary on hand), but listening is questionable and I definitely can’t speak it well. (We call this “cereal-box French”, because it’s basically being able to read the French side of Canada’s bilingual packaging.)
I have been at work, giving a presentation, when my brain seized up and I couldn’t remember the English word for those things that hang down from the top of the windows on the programs on your computer, you know, where you choose things from? All I could remember was the Esperanto word: menuo. I armwaved my way around the missing word and went on.
This week, I have been wanting to use the word ‘freneza’ instead of ‘crazy’. Not only that, but I’ve been adding an English adjectival ending to make it ‘frenezic’.
I’ve described this one before: one day about a year ago, I was coming back from the Esperanto club, and reading a French comic (bédé, BD, bande desinée). I exited the subway and got on the bus and noticed a woman reading a paper in an unfamiliar language that appeared to be a weird and awkward mutant version of Dutch, with not as many vowels and a lot of D’s and T’s and H’s.
I had no idea what it meant. Suddenly something clicked in my brain, and I realised I was looking at the front page of the Toronto Sun newspaper… which is in English. But my brain had been operating in total non-English mode, and I saw the language as it appeared from outside. Quite an interesting experience.
Online and at the weekly meetings of the Toronto Esperanto club. I’ve also gone to Esperanto-speaking events in other cities and even overseas.
I discovered Esperanto on the net one day in about 1998 and started to learn it bacause it was in interesting thing and I’ve always wanted to learn another language and French was difficult, dammit. Ironically, learning Esperanto seems to have made French easier.
Also, I met our own matt_mcl through Esperanto and he introduced me to the wonderful world of the Dopefest.
Definitely yes, when I lived in Germany for a year to spend my junior year in Goettingen. I found myself thinking and even dreaming in German, and my English got a bit sticky at times. I had studied German for years, but there is nothing like complete immersion for learning all the little details of a language. For instance, on my daily bus ride into town I passed a wholesale house that advertised “Verkauf an Jedermann” (Sales to Everybody), and that helped reinforce the point that the verb “verkaufen” takes the preposition “an”, in the sense of selling something to somebody. I lost my obviously American accent, and German lost all “foreignness” to me.
In linquistics there is a term metathesis which simply means two phonemes switching place. The German word is Metathese, which looks very similar but is pronounced quite differently. So when I first came across the term back in America, I had to translate the pronunciation from German to English. Mentally, I still have to do that, not that “metathesis” comes up very frequently in conversation.
