Re: Language Fluency

Christophe wrote:


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.
>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! ;)

It may be a question of "most recent vs. earlier acquisition".  Spanish,
which I learned first and best, has never interfered with any following
language, in particular Italian and most recent Indonesian.  But after a
period when I didn't speak Spanish, and had been immersed in Indonesian, I
found that Indonesian was interfering with my spoken Spanish (more in
grammar than vocabulary, however-- I kept forgetting to use the past tenses,
instead substituting _ya_ + present, in imitation of Indo. _sudah_ 'already
~past/perfect')