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Comment by makz | Hacker News Reader

Probably related, I’m not an native English speaker, and I have noticed that sometimes I don’t understand what someone is telling me in this language , just one or two words, and it kind of gets saved on a buffer in my mind and they keep talking and after a few seconds what was in the buffer gets “processed” and I understand it at the same time that whatever is being said to me currently. It feels weird.

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I'm a native English speaker and I have the same thing, where someone will say something I don't understand, and then in the middle of asking what they mean, I realise what they were trying to say (The processing just took longer than I expected)

I think i know the buffer you are talking about and there are at least two insights I’ve learned from it. 1) it can contain any sound, and it de-coheres when you attempt to make meaning out of the sound. 2) you can train yourself to expand the length if the buffer, to the point of recalling sounds that have occurred several minutes ago, without focusing on them, like rewinding a tape that runs despite your awareness.

You’ve trained yourself already, to an extent, so that your tape rolls as far as it takes for a full sentence to fit and error-correct for the parts you don’t know. Notice the boundary of meaning and non-meaning you have to tread on when experiencing speech you’re not completely familiar with.

I’m also bilingual so perhaps learning a language is one of many ways to deconstruct our perceptions.

From my experience with learning languages I'd say that's perfectly normal when you have a conversation in a language that you haven't mastered yet. (Though your English seems fine.) The brain simply needs more time to process the input, whether it's because you're not familiar with a word, or haven't yet gotten used to the speaker's pronunciation or their intonation/melody.

I’ve had this happen in places were multiple languages are spoken.

Hearing something in Language B, but not realizing, so the brain processes it in Language A. Then not being able to understand for a few seconds until the brain realizes that what I heard is actually Language B, and suddenly the first seconds of the speech make sense.

I had this years later from The Simpsons of all things. In "Who Shot Mr. Burns (Part 2)" Tito Puente has a musical number "Señor Burns"[0] where the singer calls Burns "el diablo con dinero" which I remembered the sound of but not the meaning until I learned some Spanish like 10 years later.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9kdDet7G14

I have an oddly similar sensation when becoming aware of a sound that woke me.

Even as a native English speaker I experience this from time to time.

I'll idly hear someone speaking - usually at quite some distance - but their words are very indistinct, I'm unable to make out what they're saying. I'll think to myself "what language are they speaking?", but after a second or two, there's some kind of frequency tuner in my brain that settles on the correct band and suddenly everything falls into place and I can understand them perfectly.

This is something that also happens as you age - even if your hearing remains decent, Central Auditory Processing Disorder becomes an issue. I imagine it will be more pronounced with a second language, so you have to look forward to.

https://www.rehab.research.va.gov/jour/05/42/4suppl2/martin....

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