Re: I'm back, sort of

On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 04:30:08PM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
> 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.)
Definitely... ever since I moved to Canada, my grasp on Mandarin and
Hokkien (my L1) has diminished. I've lost a large part of my Malay
vocabulary, and what I still retain, I only recall when I see it in print.

Now here's an interesting observation for you chomskians and
anti-chomskians: although I've largely lost vocabulary of languages that I
don't have a chance to use frequently, I still more-or-less retain a good
grasp of the grammar. Every time I struggle to find a word, it seems like
the grammatical structure is already correctly formed in my mind; only the
word-slots are left empty while I grope for the words themselves.

<ObConlang> And having not touched Ebisedian for at least half a year
before this month, I found that I'm rapidly losing track of what's in the
lexicon and what isn't; but the grammatical constructs still come with
very little effort. </ObConlang>

<ObConlang2> In other news, I started writing a story about a visitor to
Ferochromon, the Ebisedian con-world, and I suddenly found inspiration to
work out the details of Ferochromon vegetation, which I've had such a hard
time with previously. (The story is unfortunately not yet fit for general
consumption... I'm not a particularly good writer. :-/)  </ObConlang2>


T

--
Shin: (n.) A device for finding furniture in the dark.

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