You can imagine each language as a painters’ pallete. Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all. Some colours (le

You can imagine each language as a painters’ pallete. Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all. Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”. To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home. If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary. This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.