10 ms·

On Living and Thinking in Two Languages at Once

125 points by skadamou 9y ago

ahakki 9y ago
I have a similar experiance. German is my mother tongue, but I learned English from an early age at bilingual primary school. I «think» in both as well, but depending on the situation it might also be just one or the other. I have started to observe when I think in one over the other and found it comes down to subject matter. American politics is english only as almost all media I consume on the subject is english. Law (my field of study) is German, since I am studing in German. For other things it seems more random. Similarly I find that when writing (just for myself and can thus choose the language) I tend to use English very differently and in different situations from German. I also sometimes choose one for stylistic reasons. A manifesto for instance sounds a lot better in German (not that I have writen a manifesto). I also found that for many words the literal translation doesn't always capture the same nuances. English seems like the more "frivolous" language to german. Maybe thats because german is my second language, but I doubt it. Big words don't seem as big when spoken in English as compared to German. On my fathers side of the family there are a number of en/de bilingual speakers, so we also speak a wild mix of the two picking and choosing what fits best (or just popped into my head first). This experiance has made me very interested in learning French as well. I speak it a bit at it's mandatory to learn french in school here, but I am still far from being at the stage where I don't have to mentally translate everything in my head and just think in the language. I am moving to the french speaking part of the country soon for that reason (among others).
- roflc0ptic 9y ago
  A friendly pedantic note - it's spelled "experience."
- otoburb 9y ago
  Do you technically know more than one flavour of German (e.g. switzerdeutsch vs. High German)? Are they much different in terms of practical day-to-day speaking to allow for different thought patterns?
  - anarazel 9y ago
    I used to be able to speak schweizerdeutsch, but unlearned speaking it sometime in my youth due to disuse. I can't remember switching to it in my head, but it might just have been my age. I definitely do a fair amount of thinking in English (not when cooking and cleaning ;)).
  - lordnacho 9y ago
    They certainly sound different. You'll easily find a German in Switzerland who will tell you they don't understand it. From what I can tell they aren't all that different structurally and in term of vocabulary though.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Interestingly, Swiss German might not be context-free: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...
ad404b8a372f2b9 9y ago
I relate to most of the things she talks about, except I think exclusively in English, to the point I'm losing my French even though I live in France. English is convenient and quick. And everything feels less severe, I feel like a completely different person when I use it, more confident and light-hearted. Another thing I've noticed is that I'm much more prone to swearing, the worst swears in English seem light and cute compared to French for some reason. It'd be interesting to figure out whether these differences stem from culture, context of use, or inherent properties of the languages.
- luckydata 9y ago
  Me too. Everyone tells me how much I swear in english, I barely register it. I like to refer to that feeling as "I know the words but I can't hear the music".
- rocqua 9y ago
  I shouted 'fuck' my first time in an airplane taking off. It was a surprising G-force and the surprise made me swear. Thing is, we were on a flight to Ireland. It was not appreciated. I think this is basically how you were raised. My parents didn't consider it a horrible word, so I didn't either. I kinda learned that day, but it still carries much less weight than 'godverdomme'.
  - dghf 9y ago
    Next time you find yourself in that situation, try shouting "feck" instead, which is regarded as a fairly mild swearword (indeed, barely a swearword at all). Not being Irish, I'd never heard of it until I first saw Father Ted [0], and was initially shocked at the characters uttering what I assumed was a dialectical variant of "fuck" every five minutes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted
    - gerdesj 9y ago
      Good advice and I was going to suggest it myself. To anyone wishing to swear in English (as a second language), "feck" is a very good choice to try and make as your instinctive choice. It really is not offensive - I suspect it might be based on the word feckless, rather than fuck but then I'm English and not Irish and have no idea. Perhaps it is an Anglicization of a Gaelic word.
luckydata 9y ago
I speak almost exclusively my non native language (English) and over time it has become a second nature but while everyone around me congratulates me for my fluency and vocabulary, I KNOW I'm not as nimble and witty in English as in my second language. Having an intellectual argument is exhausting in the same way swimming with a tshirt on is harder than just swimming naked. Words come from a different place in my brain, I can just feel it, and connections sometimes are made that I cannot fully express. Seems like cause-effect logic is able to form itself in my mind but then gets lost as I try to translate it to English. It's very frustrating and I feel that has partly affected my ability to be convincing.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Frankly when I first moved to the UK (~7 years ago) I tried to stay way closer to the classical archetypes of the society that are implied from the literature/movies I had seen; than I do now (let's call them the "visible" traits). I then realised that while some of the stylistic mistakes I make when I try to be more "myself" in the language are a function of my own personality and not the lack of knowledge of the language (for example, I would be making the same stylistic mistake in Russian just as much as I would be making the same one in English). Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language. Later on you find people that could have found a way better recognition in your own country than you yourself if they were to move there. So I would not go as far as saying that it's "more frustrating" to not speak your own language. Culture is quite a non-linear concept imo. BTW: I was born in Lithuania to Russian parents. So to be frank the definition of the culture I belong to has always been quite vague for me.
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    "Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language." Fair enough but you do have to also allow for the fact that there are many strata to any language. There is no such thing as a regular en_GB. I'm English as in I live in England but I make use of a weird amalgam of dialects as well as regular "English". Perhaps that is the thing - a regular bedrock, which when deviated from marks out a non native speaker. When I say bedrock, I mean shared knowledge about the way things are done in a particular place. For example you should be familiar with how to deal with weather conversations. Britons are not really fixated about the weather (OK we are!) but it is an easy way to spark up a conversation with a stranger or break the ice when conversation is faltering. The rules are very simple: mention the weather eg "will this rain ever stop" or "lovely morning" and then wait for the response and follow the formula. It is quite acceptable to respond with something like "yes", "typical", "t" and simply move on but friendly contact has been made. However if you have time to kill or whatever you will follow the formula. Now the full formula is quite involved but is known by every single Briton, without exception. It also works in Ireland (Eire) in its entirety (tested by me). The weather thing is quite well known about but there are quite a few other cultural oddities around here that you might be oblivious to. Does this mean anything to you: "fork handles"/"four candles"? Good skills on moving a fair few 100 miles from home, taking on a foreign language and integrating into a foreign culture. Are you really frank? He owes me £20.
CodeMage 9y ago
The best way to find out what your brain does with languages is to try to pay attention to your dreams. It's hard to do that, but the few times I managed that (not on purpose), I realized that I would switch languages multiple times within the same sentence and it all "made sense", because my brain was picking the language that has the best fit for the concept it was trying to express. Of course, waking life is more structured than that, but I find myself struggling with the same problem there: I want to express something that's best said in one language, but unfortunately I'm speaking to someone in another language and now I have to pause to look up the best translation. Some things do seem to be subconsciously fixed, though. I find that when I have to count, I almost always do that in Serbian, my native language. Cussing, on the other hand, is something that I tend to do mostly in English, even when it's only in my head. That's probably because of my temperament, which makes me mentally cuss a lot. When I'm in need of serious cussing power, I switch to Spanish.
BurningFrog 9y ago
I sometimes think in English and sometimes in Swedish. But I think I mostly don't think in a language but more in the underlying concepts. I might be wrong about that, it's hard to observe yourself think...
williamdclt 9y ago
Do anyone think in a language? Do constructed sentences travel in your head? It doesn't make any sense to me and do not correspond to my experience of thinking... If I'd try to describe my thinking, it would be about making connections, groking concepts, it'd be more graphical than verbal (but is neither). But I very much doubt I'm any special snowflake, am I wrong thinking humans do not think in a specific language?
- vitalique 9y ago
  How many languages do you speak more or less fluently?
  - williamdclt 9y ago
    2 fluently (French and English), and a barbarism of italian
- jfaucett 9y ago
  > Do anyone think in a language? I speak 3 languages, 2 natively and the third for my entire adult life. I can get by in a couple more to the point where most people would probably claim they could speak them, and I agree with you, I rarely if ever think in language. I mean I can even remember a few times where I was thinking in some language and I quit because I noticed it was slowing me down having to actually put words on the concepts. Usually, the only time I think in language is when I have to be very precise with how I'm communicating to someone i.e. giving a presentation or negotiating some important matter and I need internal feedback on how the sentence or phrase is going to sound and work in the context I'm about to use it in. For instance, let's take an example like studying some result in a dataset. Let's say its a property like price of an item. I will not be thinking in language X when I'm studying this and its relation to say "weekday", its usually some kind of vague geometric movement or something associated with my innate concepts of "price" and "weekday". I suspect most people are actually like this, they just don't notice it as much because whenever they do switch to language mode its either a much more diliberate process (second language learners) or transparent (monolinguals).
- StavrosK 9y ago
rocqua 9y ago
I had one day where I was thinking in 4 languages. That's all languages I could possibly claim to speak: Dutch, english, french and german. Dutch is my native tongue, so I think in that. I also think in English, part of this is the internet. Part of it is due to understanding most of CS and math in english terms. I was alone on vacation in France, I learned some french in high-school. That combined with basically only speaking french to people there made me think in french a bit. Finally on that day, I had met a group of German scouts. I learned even less German in high-school, but it's closer to dutch. So there I was, thinking in four languages. I recall at one point thinking of some English phrase and then thinking 'comment je le dire en allemande' which is my french attempt at 'how do I say this in German'.
- davedx 9y ago
  Hah! I also learned French in High School, but then much later in life I learned Dutch. Now whenever I go to France and try to speak French, Dutch words push out the French words in my head, sometimes too fast for me to stop from actually saying them in the middle of an already dubious French sentence. It's quite infuriating. Usually I do still know the word in French, but the Dutch words are always so much closer to the surface. I love living in Europe :)
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    I get the same thing, try to recall a German word and a French word pops up. Interestingly it also happens with BSL (a sign language), I try and recall a word and the sign pops up; I'm not that accomplished in any language other than English, perhaps that's related but it struck me that words with the same/similar meanings across languages must get stored "together" (spatially, logically, whatever) some how.
  - avip 9y ago
    Same experience. I've basically forgotten all my (basic) Arabic by studying (equally basic) French. I've practically lost 100% of my vocabulary because trying to fetch a word in Arabic from my brain always yields the French term, of which I can't get rid thereafter. Never encountered such a clear demo of how limited and bucket-like my brain is.
pmoriarty 9y ago
Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2] An excerpt from the Introduction: "...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ... "On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti [2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/dp/1451628250/ https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...
- Todd 9y ago
  Another great polyglot was Sir Richard Francis Burton [1]. Not only did he speak more than 20 languages, but he led an incredible life. Edward Rice wrote a great biography [2] (although I read the earlier edition). Burton himself wrote a great deal as well [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton [2] https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton/dp/030681028X https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton/dp... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliog...
chillacy 9y ago
> He feels that the words, once translated into German, have less power. They have to travel through a surface that delays true reception of their meaning. I guess it’s the same for me when I write in English. The delay between writing in English and wondering how the same would translate into French makes me able to say things I might not have dared to say in French directly There is an interesting effect where we tend to be more rational and less emotional in our second language: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094842 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... > In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.
ww520 9y ago
The easiest way to live and think in multiple languages is swearing in them.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
Jugurtha 9y ago
I kind of switch between five languages. But that's nothing to brag about here because so does everyone here. I work at a small ML startup (5 Engineers). Communication on Slack is mostly in French. Everything related to code (documentation, comments, commit messages, architecture diagrams) in English. Conversations go like this: "On prendra une journée pour refactoriser le code.. take care of all code smells, hakda bach ki nebdaou l'application lokhra ykoun koullech ouadjed". That's French, English, and Algerian. Then I go home and speak Kabyle (most of my coworkers are Kabyle but we don't use it). Since I've learned English, all my notes are taken in English as is most of my reading (it was in French when I was younger; raised on classics). Job interviews are conducted in the three languages (although we test for English because it's important). I joke often that bilingualism here starts with your sixth language. I yearn for bragging rights. When it comes to thoughts, however.. mine have no language. It's just a "vvvvvvvv vvvvvvvvv", as if I were underwater or in a womb. Images through which I can jump, become part of, and play with. Becoming so small as to go inside the fuel tank, follow the fuel to the pump, pass through the dirty filter, get inside the cylinders to be compressed by pistons and stay there for the boom.
- VeejayRampay 9y ago
  Grew up in the suburbs of Paris, surrounded by people mostly born here but generally from parents who immigrated from Maghreb, that French / dialectal Arabic mix is the BEST, I just love not understanding what's going on in a sentence and suddenly "tilifoun" "pain au chocolat" pop up in there, MAGIC.
  - Jugurtha 9y ago
    That's interesting you like it. Speakers always make fun of it as a duct-tape language (Arabic, Berber, French, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian). Interestingly, as a student of Hebrew, Algerian is much closer to Hebrew than to Arabic MSA. Arabic suffixes a word with one or two letters for possessive, for example "House[letter that communicates subject]", whereas Hebrew and Algerian create a structure that goes like "The house of mine/his". Learning Hebrew, Arabic makes it easier for a lot of words but Algerian structure makes me "get it".
iagooar 9y ago
I speak 5 languages and have caught myself counting in 3-4 of them at a time. E.g one-two-trzy-cztery-fünf-... I'm not even consistent, sometimes a number will be in one language, other times a different one. Right now I feel that I kind of stopped caring too much and just pick and choose whichever is easier at the moment.
SeoxyS 9y ago
Can definitely relate with the author, as I'm also a native French speaker who's mostly entirely switched to English. I find myself doing everything in English in my daily life and thinking in English. I'm starting to run into issues when expressing myself in French, losing less common vocabulary. French being my native language, the idea of losing it bothers me quite a bit. I take every opportunity I get to practice by conversing in French when I can. But already, I sound like a foreigner in my own country… I also used to speak Standard German, Swiss German, Russian, and Spanish fluently, and a bit of Japanese. Those are mostly lost; at best I can say very few transactional things, and understand the rough context of conversations around me. Forgetting languages is a real downer…
acangiano 9y ago
Something amusing happened to me the other day. I'm Italian but at this point, I think and speak in English 99.99% of the time. When I first moved to an English speaking country, I went to McDonald's and didn't know the word for "napkin", so I gestured my way out of it. (I also asked for mayo for my fries, but that's another story.) The other day it took me a few seconds to remember the Italian word "tovagliolo" which translates to, you guessed it, napkin. It had a certain "things have come full circle" feel to it. :)
garyclarke27 9y ago
When visiting Gibraltar, I find it fascinating listening to the locals switching effortlessly between English and Spanish mid sentance. If you ask them why they change, they can't explain why, they just do it naturally.
scraft 9y ago
As a somewhat beginner in French (basically no formal education, but completed the English -> French DuoLingo course and daily reader of childrens news in French from 1jour1acu.com) one thing that intrigues me is how much easier it is to say emotional things to a stranger another language, for example, saying "tu es très séduisant" to someone (you are very seductive/attractive) feels very easy/natural, where as saying similarly the same phrase in English, to someone from England, would feel hard for me to do. I'm not sure if that is partly because there is a sort of disconnect, or whether it is because you know there is a language barrier that absorbs any potential embarassment.
futurix 9y ago
The subject of mental activity and thinking in languages is deeply fascinating to me. 12 years ago, at the age of 24 I moved to the UK (after being born and living in Russia until I was 21, and then spending 3 years in Germany - in English-centric environment though) and my language journey to English has started. Quite consciously I have decided to try to fully integrate and not get stuck in a diaspora (the impetus for my move was to experience British culture first-hand and not anything money or family related). The mental conversion to English went in the order of: reading -> fast reading -> general speech -> fast speech -> counting in normal circumstances -> dreams -> sex -> swearing under pressure -> counting under pressure (gym reps) Nowadays I almost exclusively think in English, except for when I talk to my parents for extended periods of time or start thinking of something in my childhood back in USSR. Funny enough, I do not switch to Russian if I'm reading text in Russian, or hear shorter quips of Russian in the street. My English is fairly good, and it took on all the characteristics of my older Russian - I tend to use a lot of archaic words and somewhat obscure expressions (the type you'd find in 19th century literature). I'm rather bookish, always was ;-) Most of the things I learned after the move, I can only talk about in English. I just don't have the relevant domain knowledge in Russian (for programming, general IT, pop culture, travelling, finance, love, sex, etc). In fact some subjects like sex or love are a complete no-go in Russian, as relevant Russian terminology makes it sound extremely rude and unpleasant to me (probably because I'm gay and while in Russia I had to completely repress that part of myself). Remaining language annoyances after all these years: 1. My accent is still thick, and it would appear there's nothing I can do about it. My best attempts at disguising it make me sound somewhat Portuguese, but generally most people guess that I'm from somewhere in Eastern Europea. 2. I get to understand just how crap Russian language of villains in American movies is. Atomic Blonde, I'm looking at you! I mean, they shot that movie in the EU, which has millions of native Russian speakers - could they not get some extras from the Baltics?? 3. Living in London, I get to understand all the crap Russian tourists say about the city and its inhabitants. It is an annoyingly common occurrence to hear them commenting about all the faggots, whores, etc... lovely people they all are.

125 points by skadamou 9y ago

I have a similar experiance. German is my mother tongue, but I learned English from an early age at bilingual primary school. I «think» in both as well, but depending on the situation it might also be just one or the other. I have started to observe when I think in one over the other and found it comes down to subject matter. American politics is english only as almost all media I consume on the subject is english. Law (my field of study) is German, since I am studing in German. For other things it seems more random. Similarly I find that when writing (just for myself and can thus choose the language) I tend to use English very differently and in different situations from German. I also sometimes choose one for stylistic reasons. A manifesto for instance sounds a lot better in German (not that I have writen a manifesto). I also found that for many words the literal translation doesn't always capture the same nuances. English seems like the more "frivolous" language to german. Maybe thats because german is my second language, but I doubt it. Big words don't seem as big when spoken in English as compared to German. On my fathers side of the family there are a number of en/de bilingual speakers, so we also speak a wild mix of the two picking and choosing what fits best (or just popped into my head first). This experiance has made me very interested in learning French as well. I speak it a bit at it's mandatory to learn french in school here, but I am still far from being at the stage where I don't have to mentally translate everything in my head and just think in the language. I am moving to the french speaking part of the country soon for that reason (among others).

roflc0ptic 9y ago
A friendly pedantic note - it's spelled "experience."
otoburb 9y ago
Do you technically know more than one flavour of German (e.g. switzerdeutsch vs. High German)? Are they much different in terms of practical day-to-day speaking to allow for different thought patterns?
- anarazel 9y ago
  I used to be able to speak schweizerdeutsch, but unlearned speaking it sometime in my youth due to disuse. I can't remember switching to it in my head, but it might just have been my age. I definitely do a fair amount of thinking in English (not when cooking and cleaning ;)).
- lordnacho 9y ago
  They certainly sound different. You'll easily find a German in Switzerland who will tell you they don't understand it. From what I can tell they aren't all that different structurally and in term of vocabulary though.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Interestingly, Swiss German might not be context-free: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85.pdf http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/shieber85...

ad404b8a372f2b9 9y ago

I relate to most of the things she talks about, except I think exclusively in English, to the point I'm losing my French even though I live in France. English is convenient and quick. And everything feels less severe, I feel like a completely different person when I use it, more confident and light-hearted. Another thing I've noticed is that I'm much more prone to swearing, the worst swears in English seem light and cute compared to French for some reason. It'd be interesting to figure out whether these differences stem from culture, context of use, or inherent properties of the languages.

luckydata 9y ago
Me too. Everyone tells me how much I swear in english, I barely register it. I like to refer to that feeling as "I know the words but I can't hear the music".
rocqua 9y ago
I shouted 'fuck' my first time in an airplane taking off. It was a surprising G-force and the surprise made me swear. Thing is, we were on a flight to Ireland. It was not appreciated. I think this is basically how you were raised. My parents didn't consider it a horrible word, so I didn't either. I kinda learned that day, but it still carries much less weight than 'godverdomme'.
- dghf 9y ago
  Next time you find yourself in that situation, try shouting "feck" instead, which is regarded as a fairly mild swearword (indeed, barely a swearword at all). Not being Irish, I'd never heard of it until I first saw Father Ted [0], and was initially shocked at the characters uttering what I assumed was a dialectical variant of "fuck" every five minutes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    Good advice and I was going to suggest it myself. To anyone wishing to swear in English (as a second language), "feck" is a very good choice to try and make as your instinctive choice. It really is not offensive - I suspect it might be based on the word feckless, rather than fuck but then I'm English and not Irish and have no idea. Perhaps it is an Anglicization of a Gaelic word.

luckydata 9y ago

I speak almost exclusively my non native language (English) and over time it has become a second nature but while everyone around me congratulates me for my fluency and vocabulary, I KNOW I'm not as nimble and witty in English as in my second language. Having an intellectual argument is exhausting in the same way swimming with a tshirt on is harder than just swimming naked. Words come from a different place in my brain, I can just feel it, and connections sometimes are made that I cannot fully express. Seems like cause-effect logic is able to form itself in my mind but then gets lost as I try to translate it to English. It's very frustrating and I feel that has partly affected my ability to be convincing.

heavenlyblue 9y ago
Frankly when I first moved to the UK (~7 years ago) I tried to stay way closer to the classical archetypes of the society that are implied from the literature/movies I had seen; than I do now (let's call them the "visible" traits). I then realised that while some of the stylistic mistakes I make when I try to be more "myself" in the language are a function of my own personality and not the lack of knowledge of the language (for example, I would be making the same stylistic mistake in Russian just as much as I would be making the same one in English). Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language. Later on you find people that could have found a way better recognition in your own country than you yourself if they were to move there. So I would not go as far as saying that it's "more frustrating" to not speak your own language. Culture is quite a non-linear concept imo. BTW: I was born in Lithuania to Russian parents. So to be frank the definition of the culture I belong to has always been quite vague for me.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  "Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language." Fair enough but you do have to also allow for the fact that there are many strata to any language. There is no such thing as a regular en_GB. I'm English as in I live in England but I make use of a weird amalgam of dialects as well as regular "English". Perhaps that is the thing - a regular bedrock, which when deviated from marks out a non native speaker. When I say bedrock, I mean shared knowledge about the way things are done in a particular place. For example you should be familiar with how to deal with weather conversations. Britons are not really fixated about the weather (OK we are!) but it is an easy way to spark up a conversation with a stranger or break the ice when conversation is faltering. The rules are very simple: mention the weather eg "will this rain ever stop" or "lovely morning" and then wait for the response and follow the formula. It is quite acceptable to respond with something like "yes", "typical", "t" and simply move on but friendly contact has been made. However if you have time to kill or whatever you will follow the formula. Now the full formula is quite involved but is known by every single Briton, without exception. It also works in Ireland (Eire) in its entirety (tested by me). The weather thing is quite well known about but there are quite a few other cultural oddities around here that you might be oblivious to. Does this mean anything to you: "fork handles"/"four candles"? Good skills on moving a fair few 100 miles from home, taking on a foreign language and integrating into a foreign culture. Are you really frank? He owes me £20.

CodeMage 9y ago

The best way to find out what your brain does with languages is to try to pay attention to your dreams. It's hard to do that, but the few times I managed that (not on purpose), I realized that I would switch languages multiple times within the same sentence and it all "made sense", because my brain was picking the language that has the best fit for the concept it was trying to express. Of course, waking life is more structured than that, but I find myself struggling with the same problem there: I want to express something that's best said in one language, but unfortunately I'm speaking to someone in another language and now I have to pause to look up the best translation. Some things do seem to be subconsciously fixed, though. I find that when I have to count, I almost always do that in Serbian, my native language. Cussing, on the other hand, is something that I tend to do mostly in English, even when it's only in my head. That's probably because of my temperament, which makes me mentally cuss a lot. When I'm in need of serious cussing power, I switch to Spanish.

BurningFrog 9y ago

I sometimes think in English and sometimes in Swedish. But I think I mostly don't think in a language but more in the underlying concepts. I might be wrong about that, it's hard to observe yourself think...

williamdclt 9y ago

Do anyone think in a language? Do constructed sentences travel in your head? It doesn't make any sense to me and do not correspond to my experience of thinking... If I'd try to describe my thinking, it would be about making connections, groking concepts, it'd be more graphical than verbal (but is neither). But I very much doubt I'm any special snowflake, am I wrong thinking humans do not think in a specific language?

vitalique 9y ago
How many languages do you speak more or less fluently?
- williamdclt 9y ago
  2 fluently (French and English), and a barbarism of italian
jfaucett 9y ago
> Do anyone think in a language? I speak 3 languages, 2 natively and the third for my entire adult life. I can get by in a couple more to the point where most people would probably claim they could speak them, and I agree with you, I rarely if ever think in language. I mean I can even remember a few times where I was thinking in some language and I quit because I noticed it was slowing me down having to actually put words on the concepts. Usually, the only time I think in language is when I have to be very precise with how I'm communicating to someone i.e. giving a presentation or negotiating some important matter and I need internal feedback on how the sentence or phrase is going to sound and work in the context I'm about to use it in. For instance, let's take an example like studying some result in a dataset. Let's say its a property like price of an item. I will not be thinking in language X when I'm studying this and its relation to say "weekday", its usually some kind of vague geometric movement or something associated with my innate concepts of "price" and "weekday". I suspect most people are actually like this, they just don't notice it as much because whenever they do switch to language mode its either a much more diliberate process (second language learners) or transparent (monolinguals).
StavrosK 9y ago

rocqua 9y ago

I had one day where I was thinking in 4 languages. That's all languages I could possibly claim to speak: Dutch, english, french and german. Dutch is my native tongue, so I think in that. I also think in English, part of this is the internet. Part of it is due to understanding most of CS and math in english terms. I was alone on vacation in France, I learned some french in high-school. That combined with basically only speaking french to people there made me think in french a bit. Finally on that day, I had met a group of German scouts. I learned even less German in high-school, but it's closer to dutch. So there I was, thinking in four languages. I recall at one point thinking of some English phrase and then thinking 'comment je le dire en allemande' which is my french attempt at 'how do I say this in German'.

davedx 9y ago
Hah! I also learned French in High School, but then much later in life I learned Dutch. Now whenever I go to France and try to speak French, Dutch words push out the French words in my head, sometimes too fast for me to stop from actually saying them in the middle of an already dubious French sentence. It's quite infuriating. Usually I do still know the word in French, but the Dutch words are always so much closer to the surface. I love living in Europe :)
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  I get the same thing, try to recall a German word and a French word pops up. Interestingly it also happens with BSL (a sign language), I try and recall a word and the sign pops up; I'm not that accomplished in any language other than English, perhaps that's related but it struck me that words with the same/similar meanings across languages must get stored "together" (spatially, logically, whatever) some how.
- avip 9y ago
  Same experience. I've basically forgotten all my (basic) Arabic by studying (equally basic) French. I've practically lost 100% of my vocabulary because trying to fetch a word in Arabic from my brain always yields the French term, of which I can't get rid thereafter. Never encountered such a clear demo of how limited and bucket-like my brain is.

pmoriarty 9y ago

Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2] An excerpt from the Introduction: "...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ... "On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezzofanti [2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/dp/1451628250/ https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...

Todd 9y ago
Another great polyglot was Sir Richard Francis Burton [1]. Not only did he speak more than 20 languages, but he led an incredible life. Edward Rice wrote a great biography [2] (although I read the earlier edition). Burton himself wrote a great deal as well [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton [2] https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton/dp/030681028X https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton/dp... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliog...

chillacy 9y ago

> He feels that the words, once translated into German, have less power. They have to travel through a surface that delays true reception of their meaning. I guess it’s the same for me when I write in English. The delay between writing in English and wondering how the same would translate into French makes me able to say things I might not have dared to say in French directly There is an interesting effect where we tend to be more rational and less emotional in our second language: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094842 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... > In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.

ww520 9y ago

The easiest way to live and think in multiple languages is swearing in them.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

Jugurtha 9y ago

I kind of switch between five languages. But that's nothing to brag about here because so does everyone here. I work at a small ML startup (5 Engineers). Communication on Slack is mostly in French. Everything related to code (documentation, comments, commit messages, architecture diagrams) in English. Conversations go like this: "On prendra une journée pour refactoriser le code.. take care of all code smells, hakda bach ki nebdaou l'application lokhra ykoun koullech ouadjed". That's French, English, and Algerian. Then I go home and speak Kabyle (most of my coworkers are Kabyle but we don't use it). Since I've learned English, all my notes are taken in English as is most of my reading (it was in French when I was younger; raised on classics). Job interviews are conducted in the three languages (although we test for English because it's important). I joke often that bilingualism here starts with your sixth language. I yearn for bragging rights. When it comes to thoughts, however.. mine have no language. It's just a "vvvvvvvv vvvvvvvvv", as if I were underwater or in a womb. Images through which I can jump, become part of, and play with. Becoming so small as to go inside the fuel tank, follow the fuel to the pump, pass through the dirty filter, get inside the cylinders to be compressed by pistons and stay there for the boom.

VeejayRampay 9y ago
Grew up in the suburbs of Paris, surrounded by people mostly born here but generally from parents who immigrated from Maghreb, that French / dialectal Arabic mix is the BEST, I just love not understanding what's going on in a sentence and suddenly "tilifoun" "pain au chocolat" pop up in there, MAGIC.
- Jugurtha 9y ago
  That's interesting you like it. Speakers always make fun of it as a duct-tape language (Arabic, Berber, French, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian). Interestingly, as a student of Hebrew, Algerian is much closer to Hebrew than to Arabic MSA. Arabic suffixes a word with one or two letters for possessive, for example "House[letter that communicates subject]", whereas Hebrew and Algerian create a structure that goes like "The house of mine/his". Learning Hebrew, Arabic makes it easier for a lot of words but Algerian structure makes me "get it".

iagooar 9y ago

I speak 5 languages and have caught myself counting in 3-4 of them at a time. E.g one-two-trzy-cztery-fünf-... I'm not even consistent, sometimes a number will be in one language, other times a different one. Right now I feel that I kind of stopped caring too much and just pick and choose whichever is easier at the moment.

SeoxyS 9y ago

Can definitely relate with the author, as I'm also a native French speaker who's mostly entirely switched to English. I find myself doing everything in English in my daily life and thinking in English. I'm starting to run into issues when expressing myself in French, losing less common vocabulary. French being my native language, the idea of losing it bothers me quite a bit. I take every opportunity I get to practice by conversing in French when I can. But already, I sound like a foreigner in my own country… I also used to speak Standard German, Swiss German, Russian, and Spanish fluently, and a bit of Japanese. Those are mostly lost; at best I can say very few transactional things, and understand the rough context of conversations around me. Forgetting languages is a real downer…

acangiano 9y ago

Something amusing happened to me the other day. I'm Italian but at this point, I think and speak in English 99.99% of the time. When I first moved to an English speaking country, I went to McDonald's and didn't know the word for "napkin", so I gestured my way out of it. (I also asked for mayo for my fries, but that's another story.) The other day it took me a few seconds to remember the Italian word "tovagliolo" which translates to, you guessed it, napkin. It had a certain "things have come full circle" feel to it. :)

garyclarke27 9y ago

When visiting Gibraltar, I find it fascinating listening to the locals switching effortlessly between English and Spanish mid sentance. If you ask them why they change, they can't explain why, they just do it naturally.

scraft 9y ago

As a somewhat beginner in French (basically no formal education, but completed the English -> French DuoLingo course and daily reader of childrens news in French from 1jour1acu.com) one thing that intrigues me is how much easier it is to say emotional things to a stranger another language, for example, saying "tu es très séduisant" to someone (you are very seductive/attractive) feels very easy/natural, where as saying similarly the same phrase in English, to someone from England, would feel hard for me to do. I'm not sure if that is partly because there is a sort of disconnect, or whether it is because you know there is a language barrier that absorbs any potential embarassment.

futurix 9y ago

The subject of mental activity and thinking in languages is deeply fascinating to me. 12 years ago, at the age of 24 I moved to the UK (after being born and living in Russia until I was 21, and then spending 3 years in Germany - in English-centric environment though) and my language journey to English has started. Quite consciously I have decided to try to fully integrate and not get stuck in a diaspora (the impetus for my move was to experience British culture first-hand and not anything money or family related). The mental conversion to English went in the order of: reading -> fast reading -> general speech -> fast speech -> counting in normal circumstances -> dreams -> sex -> swearing under pressure -> counting under pressure (gym reps) Nowadays I almost exclusively think in English, except for when I talk to my parents for extended periods of time or start thinking of something in my childhood back in USSR. Funny enough, I do not switch to Russian if I'm reading text in Russian, or hear shorter quips of Russian in the street. My English is fairly good, and it took on all the characteristics of my older Russian - I tend to use a lot of archaic words and somewhat obscure expressions (the type you'd find in 19th century literature). I'm rather bookish, always was ;-) Most of the things I learned after the move, I can only talk about in English. I just don't have the relevant domain knowledge in Russian (for programming, general IT, pop culture, travelling, finance, love, sex, etc). In fact some subjects like sex or love are a complete no-go in Russian, as relevant Russian terminology makes it sound extremely rude and unpleasant to me (probably because I'm gay and while in Russia I had to completely repress that part of myself). Remaining language annoyances after all these years: 1. My accent is still thick, and it would appear there's nothing I can do about it. My best attempts at disguising it make me sound somewhat Portuguese, but generally most people guess that I'm from somewhere in Eastern Europea. 2. I get to understand just how crap Russian language of villains in American movies is. Atomic Blonde, I'm looking at you! I mean, they shot that movie in the EU, which has millions of native Russian speakers - could they not get some extras from the Baltics?? 3. Living in London, I get to understand all the crap Russian tourists say about the city and its inhabitants. It is an annoyingly common occurrence to hear them commenting about all the faggots, whores, etc... lovely people they all are.