5 ms·

I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaki

I use my third language, Spanish, every day, and my second, English, for work. On top of that, my partner is a native Portuguese speaker, so I'm passively soaking up a fourth. (I usually reply to her in Spanish, but we watch everything in Portuguese—though this month it's been all Italian, just for fun). To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English. I think it's because even though I moved to Spain over seven years ago, I never fully immersed myself in the culture. I'm pretty sure I haven't read a single book in Spanish. I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. Anyway, I can attest that grappling with a language you haven't quite mastered is a daily mini-puzzle that definitely keeps the brain working a bit harder than it otherwise would. On a side note, I love that LLMs can handle so many languages now. After 17 years of living abroad, I still feel most at ease speaking my native language, Russian, even though my vocabulary is a bit lacking these days for more complex topics. It makes me completely understand why people prefer to receive medical care in their native tongue.

timr 1y ago
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle. Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.
- afiodorov 1y ago
  There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place. P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
  - xvilka 1y ago
    With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
    - timr 1y ago
      Yeah. That's a level beyond -- You're "fluent" enough that you can break the rules -- but that's partially not about language, but about being perceived to be native. Changing the cultural presumption, so to speak, so that people give you the benefit of the doubt when you're saying something non-standard. I think anyone who attempts humor in a foreign language runs into this wall, hard. The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear. I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
      - afiodorov 1y ago
        When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through. For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says: "uh the European Union uh that's not a US creation that's a you guys creation so don't ex..[abandoned word] the strength of the west [abandoned sentence] and the west is a really I don't know what" For a moment, she struggles to express herself. Yet, there's a qualitative difference between not knowing what to say because a thought is not fully formed, and knowing what you want to say but realizing you've forgotten the specific word you need. For instance, you might be about to say "cherry," only to find you've forgotten the word and instead say something more general, like "forest fruit (fruta de bosque)," which is still correct but less precise. [^1]: https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787 https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        > I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word. When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems: 1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past. 2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
- ajuc 1y ago
  > Isn't that a thing everyone does? It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly. Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with. Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong. It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  Often, looking for word mid-sentence generally is a manifestation of people not thinking in the language they are speaking which for me is the threshold at which you can be considered fluent. Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.
celeryd 1y ago
Do you find there's a similarity between Spanish and Russian? In my limited experience, Russians who speak Spanish also seem to speak it quite well.
- afiodorov 1y ago
  The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
  - madaxe_again 1y ago
    Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim, galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood. My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am. German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
    - afiodorov 1y ago
      European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
      - kjellsbells 1y ago
        (This is not intended as an adversial question.) I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly. I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?
_zoltan_ 1y ago
German is my third language and this has been exactly my experience - I find it more challenging than English, my second language. I feel like my brain is at 100% when I want to speak German. however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual. I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?
hintymad 1y ago
> To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples: You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd! Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
  - hintymad 1y ago
    Most likely not. That said, I could at least understand enough to enjoy the show. Not sure why understanding Spanish conversation has been so much harder.
Akronymus 1y ago
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.
- Zufriedenheit 1y ago
  Same here. English seems to be a very invasive language for the mind.
cryptonector 1y ago
> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.
- Klaster_1 1y ago
  So much this! During my 20s, English took over a significant chunk of communication. Years later, I mess up noun genders in my native language all the time and developed a strong distaste for formal forms of you/nouns - so much so, that I still dislike these in Greek that I'm currently learning. Although, sometimes it is a fun challenge when you use the wrong gender and scramble to find a matching noun/verb, making my speech kinda weird.

timr 1y ago

> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. Isn't that a thing everyone does? I don't have as many languages as you, but when I finally got to the point where I could reliably do what you're describing in Japanese, I felt like I had actually achieved a baseline level of fluency for the first time. The flywheel became self-perpetuating vs. my French, where every sentence is a struggle. Not asking to be argumentative, btw -- just wondering what's on the other side.

afiodorov 1y ago
There's another level after fluency (C1), which is near-native fluency (C2). At the level of such mastery you don't feel the need to simplify just to be understood, your utterances now define the language itself as you've achieved the level of the crowd whom the language belongs to in the first place. P.S. I've typed this out in English after having achieved such unlock.
- xvilka 1y ago
  With a certain level of language skill, you start to experiment more with it, create new words, change grammar intentionally to accent your point, and simply stop caring about the correctness of what you say or write.
  - timr 1y ago
    Yeah. That's a level beyond -- You're "fluent" enough that you can break the rules -- but that's partially not about language, but about being perceived to be native. Changing the cultural presumption, so to speak, so that people give you the benefit of the doubt when you're saying something non-standard. I think anyone who attempts humor in a foreign language runs into this wall, hard. The C1/C2 divide does seem to mix up that concept and the idea of "looking for the right word". I sort of understand what it's getting at, but it's unclear. I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word.
    - afiodorov 1y ago
      When you spend some time transcribing live, impromptu speech, you'll notice that it often doesn't follow the rules of written grammar; speakers frequently abandon sentences midway through. For example, in the linked clip[^1], the speaker says: "uh the European Union uh that's not a US creation that's a you guys creation so don't ex..[abandoned word] the strength of the west [abandoned sentence] and the west is a really I don't know what" For a moment, she struggles to express herself. Yet, there's a qualitative difference between not knowing what to say because a thought is not fully formed, and knowing what you want to say but realizing you've forgotten the specific word you need. For instance, you might be about to say "cherry," only to find you've forgotten the word and instead say something more general, like "forest fruit (fruta de bosque)," which is still correct but less precise. [^1]: https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787 https://youtu.be/_hBd8w-Hlm4?si=7-kvpUoeYo5ODPiI&t=787
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word. When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems: 1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past. 2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with.
ajuc 1y ago
> Isn't that a thing everyone does? It's much more common when you're multilingual, because you think in combination of all the languages you know and you only realize you're missing the specific word when you get to them trying to express the thoughts on the fly. Sometimes it's not because you're not fluent - it's simply because the concept isn't expressible in the target language with that particular sentence structure you started with. Typical example is English "I like him" vs Russian "on mne nravitsya" (+- he for me is desirable). If you start saying "I" you're already wrong. It even happens within one language in highly inflected languages - because you wanted to say one thing, then changed the word to a better - but the sentence structure doesn't work with that new word, so you have to go back mid-sentence or make a grammatical mistake).
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Often, looking for word mid-sentence generally is a manifestation of people not thinking in the language they are speaking which for me is the threshold at which you can be considered fluent. Fluency is a very high level to reach. Most people are merely conversational in the foreign languages they speak and that’s more than enough for most interactions.

celeryd 1y ago

Do you find there's a similarity between Spanish and Russian? In my limited experience, Russians who speak Spanish also seem to speak it quite well.

afiodorov 1y ago
The phonetic similarity between Russian and Spanish is a huge relief. As a Russian speaker, pronouncing English has always felt like a workout for my mouth; the sounds are completely alien. Spanish, on the other hand, is effortless. It just flows, since I'm using the same phonetic toolkit I grew up with.
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  Yeah, I have the opposite problem, being a native English speaker living in Portugal - to my ear, I’ll say something perfectly coherent and pronounced exactly as the locals do - and they won’t understand a bloody word. It isn’t just the phonemes, it’s the cadence - syllabic vs rhythmic stress. I’ll be like “um galão” and they’ll be like “galão?”, “sim, um galão”, “um… que? Galão?”, “sim, galão”, “ahhh, um galão!” and I just can’t seem to be understood. My wife is a native Russian speaker, and despite making numerous grammatical errors is far better understood than I am. German, I have no such problem despite being far weaker at the language imo.
  - afiodorov 1y ago
    European Portuguese sounds very Slavic; I'm sure Russians have a blast with it. English is a phonetically isolated language, largely due to the Great Vowel Shift. Unlike English, most languages have a closer linguistic relative. This makes English challenging for most people to learn, and it also makes it difficult for native English speakers to learn a foreign language without a heavy accent.
    - kjellsbells 1y ago
      (This is not intended as an adversial question.) I've always been curious about how the non-English world feels about hearing their language spoken with a strong "English" accent. Dont they just get on with it? As a native English speaker I'm totally unfazed by strongly accented English: Indian accents, Chinese accents, Italian etc. For example Italians rarely pronounce the H in house (presumably because H is silent in Italian). Even twists like unusual word stress patterns or prnounciations are easily figured out on the fly. I know that Parisians are supposed to be one exception: infamously snooty about visitors speaking French absolutely perfectly. But fpr everyone else, it's 2025 and we live in a world of mass tourism and mass migration. Are the non-English still fazed by English accents and insistent on audible correctness?

_zoltan_ 1y ago

German is my third language and this has been exactly my experience - I find it more challenging than English, my second language. I feel like my brain is at 100% when I want to speak German. however, my kids are soaking up languages like a sponge. we speak Hungarian at home, English and Hungarian with our friends, and they speak both Swiss German and German at school, so they are already trilingual. I know several families where the parents brings their own language, they speak English as a common language at home and the kids learn German/Swiss German at school, so that makes them... quadlingial?

hintymad 1y ago

> To this day, I still find Spanish a bit more challenging than my native language or even English I feel the same, albeit on a much lower level. Somehow Spanish just feels strange to me. For instance, a subject in Spanish often gets placed after the verb in a sentence, so I constantly have to figure out where the subject is: is it before the verb? after the verb? Or there's no subject and the conjugation of the verb implies the subject? I guess it's just a matter of time to get familiar with the verbs and it takes time. Also, listening comprehension is a huge problem for me. Even discerning words from conversations is very challenging. When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. However, I can read simple novels like El Alquimista now, yet I could only understand what was said in Extra at best with a super focus. In contrast, listening to Japanese is much easier for some reason, even though my level of Japanese is way below N5 (equivalent to Spanish's A1).

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> When I was learning English as a second language, I could understand most of what was said in an action movie or a simple sitcom like Friends after I could read simple novels like Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. Friends does some interesting linguistic things. One of my favorite examples: You told me to go out and be a caterer, so I went! I be'd! Monica isn't making a mistake there. But I would be very surprised if someone who was just learning the language understood that joke.
- hintymad 1y ago
  Most likely not. That said, I could at least understand enough to enjoy the show. Not sure why understanding Spanish conversation has been so much harder.

Akronymus 1y ago

> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. That happens to me more with my bative language (german) than secondary (english) nowadays.

Zufriedenheit 1y ago
Same here. English seems to be a very invasive language for the mind.

cryptonector 1y ago

> I still do that classic thing non-fluent speakers do: I'll get halfway through a sentence, realize I don't know a specific word, and have to rephrase my thought more simply. To be clear, I'm far from a beginner, just not yet fluent. This happens to me even when I speak my native language(s). Once you become multilingual, this is a fact of life.

Klaster_1 1y ago
So much this! During my 20s, English took over a significant chunk of communication. Years later, I mess up noun genders in my native language all the time and developed a strong distaste for formal forms of you/nouns - so much so, that I still dislike these in Greek that I'm currently learning. Although, sometimes it is a fun challenge when you use the wrong gender and scramble to find a matching noun/verb, making my speech kinda weird.