- Wait, what words were used to say that?
The weirdest experience I’ve had with language mixups so far is that my brain apparently seems to conflate anything not English. English is my first language, and I used to be able to speak German pretty well — not fluently, but well enough to hold a fairly natural conversation. I have unfortunately let it slip away now. I’m now learning a different language and for some reason whenever I don’t know a word for something but I do remember the German one, my brain just picks the German one. It’s quite frustrating.
Same. If somebody speaks to me in Spanish, half the time I react by speaking German.
Yeah, I have that too. It feels like in my brain there’s a big box for my native tongue, and a smaller box all the foreign languages I don’t really use that much.
Weirdly that sounds identical to many of the hallucinations that newer LLMs are making.
Ja, ich liebe when I’m busy talking in one language aber words von the other language ich know keep sneaking in.
That’s herkenbaar!
Personally I think it’s only much of a problem when it’s two languages from a language branch other than my native language.
So, for example, as my native language is Portuguese (from the Romance branch) I have no trouble telling French from Portuguese, Italian or Spanish (even when words are the same the accent is different) and whilst I might on occasion mix Spanish words into Italian or vice-versa when speaking, it’s unsual, but when I learned German after having learned Dutch it was very confusing and almost felt like the German language knowledge was eating up the Dutch language knowledge in my mind, because one so often polluted the other one (more in the thinking and talking in that language, rather than spotting if the language spoken was Dutch or German, since the accents still give it away, to the point that I can tell Swiss German from that from Germany even though my German language knowledge is still pretty basic).
Meanwhile back when I first I learned French after having learned English I never confused one with the other.
I think that if you’re intimately familiar with a language branch you know enough to spot even small differences and know which is which or at least it’s a lot easier (hence I might confuse Spanish words with Italian ones - both foreign languages to me - but it’s unusual) but in a totally different language branch the “distance” from what is familiar is a lot larger and words from multiple languages from that branch which you’re not sure of just sound like they might be from any of those languages (or even multiple of them, which they sometimes are).
Hard disagree. Some languages are so wildly different that it would be really hard to confuse them like that. Like where the grammar structure is different so it’s not like you’re just substituting a word in one language for a word in another.
Yup. My partner’s dad speaks Spanish, German and English. As he gets older, he’s increasingly unsure which one he’s speaking.
I’m a native English speaker, speak ok German, and only a bit of Spanish. Communication is kinda tough.
I speak 3 languages daily and as for my case it’s only when i speak it’s tough to remember the word of that language i want if the code switch isn’t quite “right” so sometimes a word or two from another language will seep through. Never get confuse on what language is spoken by others though
That is a genuine new thought for me, I only speak one language but it never occurred to me that if you are fluent in two or more that they might start to merge in your head into a single language, forcing you to work to isolate one as you speak it. All languages are a mix of others but I can’t imagine having to differentiate the root of each word before it is used to ensure its applicability.
It works like a switch in your head. You consciously flip the switch to whatever language you want to use, but then afterwards you don’t really think about it. It can lead to situations where you forget to switch the language back to a common language before speaking to someone
If you’re really fluent.
I lived in Germany for a few years after graduating college with several years of French study under my belt, and there was a point as I was learning German where I would genuinely struggle remembering the right word for things. I’d reach for the German word, and my brain would give me the French word.
Worse was returning to the US. There would be times when I’d be talking and want to say a common word, like “trash can” and I could not for the life of me remember how to say it in English. All I’d get was the German word. I mean, I spent the first 18 years of my life being mono-lingual, and three years in a foreign country and I started forgetting my native tongue.
But the strangest is that now – after 20 years back in the US, when I can practically no longer speak German – it still sometimes happens to me that I’ll reach for a word and get the German one, and can’t remember the English word.
I only speak German and have only ever communicated in any medium in that language so it is difficult for me to place myself in the situation of being unsure which language I had used to say something.
I have a doubt.
I had been fighting a valiant fight to not make that joke since I first replied to this post and sadly lost.
Something felt wrong about this comment but it took a while to figure out what. It’s in English. I guess you meant you only communicate orally in German but it kinda confirms the original post.
Sorry, it’s a stupid joke on the topic of the post.
I’m fully bilingual (learned both languages at the same time) and that is not my experience at all. For me it is 100% subconscious. I just automatically speak the appropriate language for the situation I’m in without thinking about it.
In fact if I try to consciously speak the “wrong” language for the situation I’m in it feels very weird and it takes a lot of effort to not mix up the pronunciation.
Dreaming/inner thoughts work the same way. The language is always automatic based on context.
The inner thought part is also the case for me. For example, when browsing lemmy, my thoughts go to English and revert back only when I read/talk my normal language.
It’s fun sometimes. We’ll talk and then stop “hey wait a minute, which language did you say that in?”
I suppose that is what fluency means, that it becomes native to the brain and used instinctively without conscious filtration. A lot of modes of thought become mixed at the point of fluency, at a certain level scientific problems can be difficult to define whether they are chemistry or biology or mathematics.
Depends on the language? I mean, Portuguese and English are wildly different, so it’s very easy to tell them apart. Now, if it was Portuguese and Spanish, I think telling the two apart could be harder more often
I know some Japanese, and I can usually recognize Korean because it sounds kinda like Japanese but I can’t understand anything.
I think the way they talk and pronounce the word is different and that’s how i differentiate them even when i don’t know a word from both language.
I speak English and japanese on a daily basis and don’t think I could ever confuse the two. The grammar and phonology are extremely different.
Even with German and french thrown in (neither of which I remember well enough to do more than travel with), I don’t see this problem. Maybe closely-related language in the same family (I’ve. Italian and Spanish in the romance family)?
I definitely do not have a problem differentiating English from Japanese.
Now, this might actually be the case for languages like Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. They are so similar, you could sometimes just infer what a word in one language is if you know it in another (heck, I can do this with a lot of languages I don’t know just because they all have the same root language, so many words are just a letter or two in difference). Where I live, Spanish and Portuguese speakers are pretty common, and they can usually talk to each other not even knowing the other’s language because they’re so similar.
My native French speaking mom will occasionally address my non-french speaking husband in French without realizing unless I tell her and even then she only knows because I’ve told her.
Usually it’s easy, but when I role played that I don’t know one language and I know the other. It was super hard.
I was making a game for kids where they need to use some english (second language) to progress the game, and I slipped and reacted to the native language.
