Having a "bad language day"
Since childhood, I've found that if I devote a certain amount of concentrated effort thinking in one language, there is a transitory period where trying to speak another language is frustratingly difficult. The worst experience I had of this was a few years ago. After a few weeks of only working, reading and dreaming in English, I bumped into a Japanese faculty member at DCU. I sincerely hope she doesn't remember the incident, as it was painfully humiliating for me: practically no Japanese issued from me at the time, but stubborn pride kept me from switching to English. The fact it was a chance encounter definitely exacerbated the situation, but I was no stranger to this phenomenon.
When I entered the Canadian school system, I'd had practically no prior exposure to English. This meant that for a few years initially, I'd answer questions posed to me at school in Japanese, and at home it would take about an hour before I'd revert to Japanese with my parents. Saturday morning language school was never an issue as I'd had the opportunity to transit to the correct mode over Friday evening.
Much to my vexation, I still have trouble once in a while with speaking in teleconferences, if I'd been silent for too long and especially if I'd been reading or hearing a foreign language. Some mental preparation to speak seems necessary to facilitate the mode shift. I also make the effort to cycle through different language content, although lately I've truly let my French lapse: when first arriving in Vienna my stop words (conjunctions mainly, adpositions too) would instinctively come from the French, even when I attempted to use German - now I'd say the reverse is true. It's clearly time to start reading and watching more content in French. However, I keep second-guessing noun genders in German because my knowledge of French genders often - but not always - contradicts the Deutsch. Furthermore, it doesn't help that my manager alerted me to the fact that in some cases, National and Austrian German have contradictory genders.
Actually, the conflation of French and German in my head stems from my high school experience: in tenth grade, I took my one year of National German from a Hamburgian native who also happened to teach French. Due to scheduling, our classes were held consecutively, in the same classroom and same seating arrangements, with only the textbook switching. Come to think of it, there was one more difference, in terms of teaching methods. Our teacher also took diabolical delight in taking my "Compact" dictionary from Langenscheidt, to select lengthy compound terms for random students to attempt to spell out on the chalkboard. She didn't do this en Français.
The struggle to retain languages whilst acquiring new ones will, of course, be life-long.
I wish I could gain fluency in even ONE language beyond my native American English. I've taken classes in school (German) and studied a bit on my own (Japanese), but I've never been able to speak conversationally, much less think, in another language. I truly believe that the skill to learn new languages needs to be developed very young. By the time I was exposed to other languages, I was probably too old to effectively learn them. It won't stop me from trying, but I doubt I'll ever gain fluency without long-term immersion. You have my respect for your language skills!
ReplyDeleteI still believe a significant part of my difficulty in learning Japanese came from my inability to prevent myself from thinking in Spanish (even though English is my first language) while trying to speak and write in class. To this day I still don't know why my stubborn brain refused to think in anything but Spanish at that time, I never had the issue when I learned French (though the influence of the Romance language would have been welcome).
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mick. I agree that the earlier and consistent the exposure to different languages is the easier and more persistently they can be acquired. In fact, there's at least one pair of Chinese sounds that I can't distinguish between because I didn't hear them before the age of 8 months.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, immersion should work on us all regardless of age, and the effort alone is worth the cerebral exercise, in my opinion.
Moose, thanks for your comment. I too seem to have allocated a smaller, jumbled space in my head for French and German. That is, my "native" mode is Japanese as that's what I heard in utero and until I started Junior Kindergarten, and then English was acquired intensively - but French, Latin and German for me were treated as abstract school subjects rather than lifestyles.
It seems in your case, Spanish and Japanese were stored in some shared "academic" lobe of Broca's area as my non-intensively learned tongues were. Is it safe to guess that you learned English, French, Spanish and Japanese in that order? Or, perhaps the sounds were closer between the latter two than with either English or French? My post about Japanese pronunciation touches upon the vowel overlap between it and Italian.