On Living and Thinking in Two Languages at Once
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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.
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.
But it's quite a vague predictor for whether you're going to build a good business together; or whether your jokes about other cultures or sex would be perceived as racist, ironic or simply a matter of pragmatism; or what is acceptable as part of your personal life.
Honestly I find the perceived notion of having a shared culture is detrimental to actually realising that you disagree on many deeper important issues.
For example, many of my current middle-class co-workers were quite surprised by the results of the Brexit referendum, while it wasn't that clear to me as I've spend a fair amount of time in Leeds hanging out with the working class or working for a few supposedly full of middle-class media agencies. They didn't tend to be too humble to share what they actually thought of being a part of the EU, while they were quite humble at sharing this with their friends (shy tories, etc.?).
Besides, I would never agree I know British culture in it's full depth. It's funny you mentioned "fork handles"/"four candles" - which is exactly the thing a friend of mine said this weekend. I just Googled it. A culture enthusiast would follow this up with a binge of the show.
But this still does not make a foreign speaker seem more genuine if he suddenly starts speaking northern accent, uses common grammatical variations (I was/I were) or borrows from a local vocabulary. Neither does it do any good for someone northern to come to London and try to negotiate a contract with someone of South African descent without any appreciation for a more common pronunciation or cultural grounds (although well - aren't they both practically British?).
More recently, I've been taking a foreign language, and it feels much the same only more extreme. Since I've actually lived in the country where thins language is spoken, my words come at a reasonable speed now and feel automatic. The gap between thought and words is larger than ever. (2 years into the foreign language vs. a lifetime with my native should do that though)
I wonder if people living with Asperger's or similar disorders that delay development of language result in every language being your second. :P
More seriously though: I get along. I can talk and apart from having a different accent than everyone around me (because over here, _everyone_ has a special accent) there's not a huge problem.
But I feel clumsy. Restricted. I wonder if this will slowly become less of a problem in the future, but so far I feel like a dim-witted version of me in most conversations. For me, two languages are hard. I envy everyone that grew up learning more than one language or generally feeling comfortable using more than a single language in general.
She often tells me she can't really express herself or joke with me. Not the way she would or could in her native language.
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'.
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 :)
Never encountered such a clear demo of how limited and bucket-like my brain is.
When I am in the company of people who don't have English as their first language, or perhaps don't speak English at all, I sometimes have an almost irresistible urge to speak Norwegian to them. It's as though my brain does something like: they speak a foreign language, Norwegian is a foreign language, so Norwegian will do.
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.
As a non native speaker, you just don't have those strong emotional connections to words that a native speaker would have.
Studies show that a foreign language uses more of the thinking brain rather than the feeling brain (they showed this by asking personal / sexual questions in different languages to multilingual people.)
I never swear in my second language. Since I don't have anything close to an understanding of how the words should be used, it's unlikely that I'd be understood as I intended.
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'.
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.
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.
It also doesn't help that swearwords seem to be the first thing people learn in other languages. I can't actually speak French, Spanish, or Italian, but I have a good handle on swearing in all of them.
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?
I realize now that the thoughts are happening anyway, and that narrating them was just a way for my brain to be kept busy (ie the narration doesn't really matter). I was trying to explore this the other day, and managed to think complex thoughts related to solving a work problem entirely without language, while listening to an audiobook. Listening to the book probably helped, as my brain was half too busy understanding it to form its own speech.
Maybe this explains in part why, while I'm a very slow plain-English reader, I actually read/parse code faster than average.
The author of the book explained it that we do complex and sequential actions all the time without the need to tell ourselves what we are doing and what to do next.
It made sense to me so I went with it to try and speed up my reading. I would catch myself every time I started to sub-vocalize and try not to do it. Eventually I did the same when talking to myself. I would internally say to myself "why did you need to tell yourself that?", eventually it just went away.
Maybe talking to yourself could be an artifact left behind from the time you first start learning how to read and were told to practice reading by reading to yourself.
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).
Not that much. I wouldn't be surprised if the invention of human language enabled us to use an improved way of thinking, by serialising thoughts more efficiently or some other kind of mechanism.
I don't think I use language most of the time (unless thinking about a discussion specifically, and then it's not always in the same language the discussion will be/was carried in, by the way) but I do write things down when I need to really think about them precisely and it helps a lot.
Personally it's a mix. I use sentences but also some kind of bricks that fit into each other (that's also how I do basic arithmetic). It can also be a mix of both.
"I do have the ‘milk voice’—that flat, inner monologue that has no texture or sound, which we use to tell ourselves: “Remember to pick up milk.”"
I don't have such a voice, I think about the concept of remembering to pick up milk. There's no verbalization, and it seems really weird to imagine it: when beginning your inner sentence, you already know what you'll be "telling", so why continue to "tell" it to yourself?
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
I'm definitely one to "think before speaking", often to the degree where I'm unable (or maybe just unwilling) to contribute to fast-paced group conversations since I feel like I need to think about what I'll say first.
Once I start speaking my "milk voice" can continue ahead of my speech but it usually doesn't. When it does, it can sometimes feel like what I can only describe as an out-of-body experience... where I'll be speaking, but my milk voice will just be making an observation about what I'm saying and the reactions of those I'm speaking to, all while I'm fully aware this is happening.
Recently, I was in a meeting and was speaking, while internally I was making "milk voice" observations of others' attention and posture, and then observed my own crossed arms (which to many business execs communicates a lack of confidence), so I then uncrossed them and sat up taller.
Not sure if I'm an outlier here or not, though.
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.
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. :)
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.
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".
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....
> 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.
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…
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
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary-Language/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis-Burton/dp...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliog...
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).
From what I can tell they aren't all that different structurally and in term of vocabulary though.
Right now I feel that I kind of stopped caring too much and just pick and choose whichever is easier at the moment.
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.
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...