Re: I'm back, sort of

En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>PS Hanging on to this list is going to fulfill one very practical purpose for
>me during this year - saving my English! I'm amazed and dismayed to see that
>after only one week of speaking mostly German, it's an mental effort to switch
>to English. Has anyone else going to a foreign country experienced anything
>similar? (My Swedish is unaffected, FYI.)
I have exactly the same phenomenon, although my English is pretty untouched 
(it's the language I use most everyday anyway - it's the language Jan and I 
speak together -). In my case, it's Dutch which is slowly taking over the 
place which was taken by Spanish. Before moving to the Netherlands, I still 
could make simple conversations in Spanish. But a few months ago we had a 
Colombian guy at home, and as much as I tried speaking Spanish to him, only 
Dutch words came out of my mouth! A most distressing experience. Jan is 
also often telling me how his German is suffering from our English-speaking 
life :)) .

Strangely enough, my Esperanto is unchanged. My level is not extraordinary, 
but hasn't got worse.

And as for Teoh who says that his problems are with the lexicon while he 
has still a good memory of the grammar, it's exactly the same with me. What 
I've lost of Spanish is "only" a lot of lexicon: I can't find my words. But 
I still have a good command over the grammar itself. I still can read a 
Spanish text without problems. It seems that I haven't so much forgotten 
the words than put them in a place where I cannot reach them. But when I 
have them in front of my eyes, I remember them immediately.

The more worrying part is that I feel my French begins to undergo the same 
phenomenon. I have more and more problems finding my words when speaking 
French...

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.