I’m working on a project in the kitchen and Mrs Piper is watching a show in the next room
For the life of me, I can’t tell if it’s English or French. Sometimes it sounds English, sometimes it sounds French.
One of the puzzles of bilingualism, I guess.
Any others ever have trouble distinguishing a language like that?
I remember one time I was reading, and I was three paragraphs into something before I realized it was in French… ��
Another time, and I’ve mentioned this before, I was coming home from Esperanto club. I came up out of the subway and got on the bus and pulled out a book of Mœbius cartoons, to read in French.
I was surrounded by people speaking a dozen languages (this was a bus route where one driver used to yell at passengers in Ukrainian). So my thoughts were far from English.
I looked up at some noise or other, and noticed someone reading a newspaper in a language I didn’t recognize. It looked like a mutant version of Dutch, with a lot of T’s, H’s, and S’s. I wondered what it was for a moment.
Then something clicked in my mind, and I realised the person was reading a copy of the Toronto Sun. The language was English.
For a time, I had been outside of my native language, and i’d looked at it with the eyes of a stranger. A fascinating experience.
I’m studying Spanish online, and my most common error is to produce a translation that is a bastardization of Spanish and English: “I want una tortilla”.
When I lived in Texas, people commonly inserted Spanish words into English, and no one thought twice. The practice was referred as speaking Tex-Mex.
I think I’ve heard that’s very common among children who are growing up bilingual, or using one language at home and another at school.
I’ve had trouble picking out which version of English is spoken, usually after a large binge on BBC stuff. It’s like I stop hearing the accent at all. It was weird when I heard Stephen Fry (on QI) without an accent for a bit. It’s like I had to manually listen for certain sounds (like the lack of rhoticity [Rs]) to hear it.
Similarly, while I don’t speak any other languages, there are a few I can identify automatically, even if I can’t hear them all that clearly. But that sometimes shuts off, too. I again have to listen for specific sounds.
I wonder if you might have to specifically listen for specific sounds (possibly put together in specific words) to figure it out. Or if your bilingual brain just works completely differently than my monolingual one.
It doesn’t happen to me often, because my skills in my second language (Indonesian) are much weaker than in my first. But for simple things, I can somtimes lose track of what language I’m in. I’ve had the odd experience of reading bilingual signs and thinking, “That’s weird, why did they repeat themselves?” Only then do I realize they weren’t being repetitive, they were stating the same thing in two languages.
I took beginning Russian and advanced French in first year university. (Note that I’d been taking French for nine years by this point.)
Every now and then, I’d get them confused. I developed the unfortunate habit of speaking French in Russian class, and Russian in French class. Although I passed each class, I did not get outstanding grades in either.
I eventually learned enough Russian to get to the point where I could converse, and my French served me well in Europe, many years ago. But perhaps because of that early confusion, and my chagrin as a result, I’ve always been careful, and can distinguish English from both French and Russian.
My brain doesn’t care about remembering double/single letter differences between French and English. For example, “marriage” vs “mariage”, “address” vs “adresse”, “apartment” vs “appartement”. My mind seems to think: “They refer to the same thing, have the same root, are nearly spelled the same way, so, why?” I can’t get it to stick in my long-term memory. I know those right now because of autocorrect and looking them up but 5 minutes from now I’ll have forgotten them.
Once in a while I seem to understand some film/TV show dialogue in Dutch; it’s usually when I’m distracted by the visuals and forget to read the subtitles.
My grandmother was Dutch and apparently spoke to me almost exclusively in Dutch when I was a baby. So, miraculous recall of the language, or does Dutch just have some commonalities with English? (It’s obviously the second reason, though I like the “Rosetta Stone baby” theory better :D).
This reminds me of the character who beats Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the presidency in VEEP. Laurrrrrrrrra Montezzzzz is a WASP married to a Latino, but throws in elaborately rrrroooollllled Spanish words as a pander to voting blocs.
At very low volumes, I have trouble distinguishing French from Russian. I think the consonant distribution or stress patterns must be similar.
Also, I live in a German-speaking region. Most English-language films here are dubbed. I prefer to watch the versions with original audio, but when they’re not playing, I’ll settle for a German dub. Within days or weeks of watching the movie, though, I will have forgotten which version I saw. I know I saw the last Star Wars here, but damned if I can tell you if the characters were speaking German or English. Does anyone else experience this phenomenon?
Up in my neck of the woods we call that “Spanglish”
I, too, am studying languages on line (refreshing my French and studying Spanish) and sometimes when asked to “write what you hear” in the foreign language I write it in English instead and things like that. And sometimes when addressed in Spanish I find myself responding in French and vice versa. Disconcerting. I’m assuming with more practice my brain will get better at sorting these things out. I’m not up to bilingual standards but I do sometimes have problems with code-shifting.
No, it actually could be some of both - exposure to a language as an infant/toddler does have an effect.
There are some commonalities for sure. A Dutch TV show or movie will occasionally have a few words or a sentence that sounds fairly interchangeable with English, and vice versa. Or maybe it just sounds interchangeable to me because I understand some Dutch. But other than Frisian, I believe Dutch is the closest language to English.
I’m in the same boat with Spanish. I don’t know a whole heck of a lot, but occasionally bilingual signs (or back when my sister was little, bilingual kid’s programs) are so simple and their vocabulary so well integrated into my brain that I wonder why they are repeating themselves.
Huh, interesting 
I (think) I’ve read that German is the closest relative to English, but Dutch and Danish seem much closer to my earballs.
I can readily tell French from English. In fact, I can tell by looking. The lips just do different things, although I can’t tell which.
For the opposite experience, I will tell the story of my (late, alas) Swiss friend. Although from Zurich and therefore German speaking, he was the only professor of math at the bilingual University of Fribourg who was fluent in French and therefore always would up teaching the French section of calculus. One day a student asked him a question in German. He answered the question in German and then went on lecturing in German for a half hour before he realized he wasn’t speaking French any more.
Dutch is usually considered the closest major language to English. Afrikaans, too (but that’s to be expected, given its relationship to Dutch.) But English is kind of weird because it’s a Germanic language with significant Romance language influence. As a kid, I actually found reading French to be easier than reading German.
I had the same confusion with French and German classes.
Many years later, I read an article that says it related to the way the brain processes different languages.
Up to about age 7 or so, it’s very easy to pick up new languages, so kids in a bilingual household can soak up different languages easily.
After that point, the brain isn’t as quick to learn new languages, and new languages after that point are “stored” differently than early languages.
That means that if you’re fumbling for a word on a later-learnt language, the brain might give you an option from another later-learnt language, rather than an early one.