Re: Language Fluency

En réponse à Mark P. Line :


>Interference is a phenomenon that occurs during a certain window along the
>course of a person's acquisition trajectory for a particular L2. If you
>grew up bilingual in Spanish and Portuguese, neither one was ever an L2
>for you. If you learned one (or both) of them as an L2, then you probably
>did have a stage where there was some interference between them and/or
>your L1.
Interference can sometimes work in strange ways, and without reference to 
how close the languages are. When I learned English, I didn't get 
interference from French. When I took on Spanish, I didn't get interference 
from English or French either. And when I learned Dutch, none of the 
previous languages interfered. However, interference has appeared now and 
works *backwards*: Dutch keeps interefering with my French and my English 
(although I control that without much trouble), and interferes so much with 
my Spanish that I basically am unable to throw a single full sentence in 
Spanish anymore (Dutch words keep coming instead). I've had this experience 
various times when for some reason I had to speak Spanish. It can be very 
frightening ;) .

Note that before I learned Dutch, my Esperanto was already interfering with 
my Spanish. But in that case, there was *some* similarity that could 
explain it. The similarity between Dutch and Spanish is far too small to 
explain the interference! ;)

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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