I’m not sure how else to describe this phenomenon but I am wondering how it happens, and why.
I am currently studying my fifth language (L5), and I continue to have an issue with substituting the language I’ve spoken the second longest (L2) when I’m trying to speak L5.
For instance, suppose I am trying to ask for something in L5- instead, I will unintentionally state what I am asking in L2.
My first language (L1) is the only one I use on a day-to-day basis right now and I’m not having an issue with L1 substituting in.
Has anyone else experienced this? And does anyone understand why it happens?
I don’t have an explanation for it, but it happens to me and based on my experience with other linguists, it’s pretty common. Your brain says “foreign word goes here.” Even if it’s not the right language.
Another anecdote: Yes, I’ve experienced the same thing. Over the course of my life I have attempted at times to learn both German and French. Unsuccessfully, I might add, so congratulations on your achievement!
But yes, if I was trying to stammer out a sentence in German, and was unsure of the word in that language, but knew the word in both English and French, I noticed I would insert the French word first.
Yeah, it’s a well-known phenomenon. My armchair suspicion is that it has to do with the fact that your brain creates new Broca’s and Werneke’s Areas for languages you learn post-childhood language acquisition.
I’m pretty sure this is not what you’re asking about, but in high school Spanish when we were to try to carry on conversations among ourselves and with the teacher, a common expression we all used was “como se dice” <some English word> so as to get around either not knowing or forgetting the Spanish word for whatever. We all knew such cheats were not acceptable for going to a Spanish-speaking area, but for classwork it was all we had. It was preferable (we thought) to just using “cosa” or similar words when we didn’t know the right one.
It’s like the guy at work who was always saying he would “take and thing” something he didn’t know the right words for. He used that a lot!
I don’t think you even need to be speak either language fluently. In my college Spanish class, I would occasionally want to use a French word, as I was taught that language in elementary school. I don’t know how many times I responded to “Gracias” with “De rien,” or would throw in a French number while counting.
I noticed this when taking an Uyghur language class. My Turkish colleague expected that it would be easy for her, because Turkish and Uyghur are related languages. So in class, when we did question and answer practice in Uyghur, whenever she didn’t know the Uyghur word for something (which was most of the time, as we were beginners), she would substitute the Turkish word. This only worked once in a while, because a lot of the words are different. I did better at that because I knew I didn’t know the words offhand, so I worked harder at learning them. I could speak Turkish too, but I realized it didn’t work so well as a fallback vocabulary source. My colleague was consciously substituting Turkish words, though the OP is asking about unintentional substitution. It works either way, I guess.
When I was in Paris visiting my Italian-American cousin, who lived there and worked for Elle magazine, we wound up conversing in a crazy mixture of French, English, and Italian.
That’s what I read on the topic in an article years ago. Languages learnt up to about age 5 go in one section of the brain; languages learnt after that time go in a different area of the brain’s language area. So if you’re stumbling over a word on a later learnt language, you’re not using the same area of your brain as your first learnt language is stored in, so you’ll find yourself coming out with a different layer learnt language.
I dunno - Spanish was my first foreign language, and Russian was my 3rd (I had some French in the middle there). Spanish and French are much more closely related to each other than Spanish and Russian, and yet the Russian words pop up where Spanish is supposed to be much more often than French. Maybe it’s because the phonetics of Spanish and Russian are much more similar than French phonetics are to either, maybe it’s because I just about never have the chance to speak French, while I use Spanish all the damn time and Russian on occasion, who knows?
Happened to me when I was studying Chinese too. Now that I live in Japan, I’m as likely as not to toss out a canned phrase in the wrong language when talking to my Japanese co-workers.
“See you later!”
“Adios! Er… Sayonara!”
My wife is just happy that I’ve stopped greeting people with “Ni hao!”
Seems perfectly normal to me. I speak a couple languages fairly fluently, and a few languages shittily but enough to be understood. When I try to speak in one of the “shittily” languages, I constantly want to substitute in whatever language I’m currently concentrating on. For example, I took four years of French in high school, and then, one day, I was on a train in Amsterdam with a French couple asking me for directions and, while I understood them, I was learning German at the time, so my brain constantly was reverting to German in my speech to them. I would start a sentence in French, and hiccup every second word through it, as I was trying to throw in German.
In my experience, it only happens with similar languages. I was in Italy and lapsing into French. And I was in Spain and lapsing into Italian. And when In France I lapsed into Spanish. And in all three countries, I kept confusing “si” and “oui.” At no time did I lapse into English or Hebrew or German.
In my experience it only happens with languages I’ve struggled with recently. For instance I know German very well as a foreign language, and I have never once accidentally dropped it into a sentence. However Japanese kicked my ass and it makes regular appearances when I’m trying to speak Portuguese (which I’m also not so great at).
My second language was French. Many years later I started to learn Gaeilge from a teacher who was fluent in French. Even though she became a dear friend, I had to switch teachers, because when I accidentally inserted a French word or phrase she tended not to notice. The sentence made perfect sense to both of us and we just continued merrily along!
This happens to me fairly often. The only language I speak fluently is English, but I know two other languages pretty well. I think my brain is divided into “English” and “not English.” If I’m reaching for a word in one of the other languages, I’m more likely to say the word in the other language than in English.
I’ve had it a number of times. I learned just a bit of German in high school, and when I was Japanese, then I would tend to think first of the German term.
After getting back from Japan, when I would go to communicate with my deaf and mute grandmother, my mind would think in Japanese. I guess it was thinking, she can’t understand spoken English, let’s try something else. :smack:
Now I’m in Taiwan, Japanese words will sometimes come out when I try to talk to people. Same thing, I guess.
I often accidentally say a spanish or Japanese word when I mean to use a tagalog one and I’m not 100% sure of the tagalog one…you get lucky sometimes if it’s the same in Spanish. I’m not sure how you’d remedy something like that though.
I basically get languages confused sometime and go “insert foreign word here”, since I don’t think in any language but English.
This. And all the other posts. Unless I’m in a real code-switching zone, I reach into the one junk-drawer full of words. Spanish-Italian was the worst, but I’ll still conjugate a Hebrew word with perfect German grammar at (the wrong) times. It’s interesting which will win temporarily, the grammar or semantic recall.
Don’t get me started on the manifold and novel ways one can get things weird in American Sign Language. OK, one: using ASL signs while speaking English, fully aware that the English grammar you are leading with is wrong in ASL, and for a student you don’t want to feed the brain with one set of (correct) signs, while using them incorrectly.
And something else I just thought of: isn’t movement memory in a different area of the brain than speech processing? If true, it’s both a hotsy-totsy excuse when necessary, and a truly fascinating bit of cognitive jungle to explore.
ETA: You sign and speak simultaneously when a deaf and hearing person is in the group.
