Re: I'm back, sort of

Date:         Mon, 22 Sep 2003 09:18:14 -0700
From:         Costentin Cornomorus <elemtilas@...>
Subject:      Re: I'm back, sort of

>--- Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>> 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?
Do you mean you can keep languages from blocking each other, when *not* in
a foreign country? I usually need a few days to change my "default" foreign
language.

A year ago in summer my family and I did a trip through Sweden and Denmark
to Germany and Austria, and I since I was fluent in German when leaving from
Finland, I tried hard not to switch to Swedish, in which I IIRC succeeded
until the very last day in Denmark. :´(

Nowadays I seem to be able to support a bearable fluency in English and Swedish
simultaneously, but I haven't much used German after that, which means I'll
soon have to re-learn it. Concluding from what happened when I tried that
last time, this will inevitably cause my English and Swedish to collapse
together.

Speaking three different Germanic languages seems to have created all kinds
of unhelpful software in my brain. The Germanic Cognate Finder keeps telling
me that the English for 'to write' is _to scribe_, and the really annoying
one was suggesting _commune_ for _municipality_ (Sw. _kommun_)...


An unlike some others, during the year I didn't practice German and Spanish,
I did not only lose the lexicon - big parts of the grammar seems to be gone
too, unfortunately. I can still read them, though.

>Yes. I find myself at times making errors typical
>of Spanish speakers in English.
I once caught myself writing something like "It is difficult that know...",
which more than surprised me. It turned out to be because the English _that_
in some cases corresponds to the same Finnish word as the Swedish _att_,
which on the other hand is also the particle that would be used before infinitive
in sentences like this. And the association had been fully unconscious, because
I needed to do some brainwork to discover the Finnish and Swedish words.
(By the time I had explained this to myself, I had forgotten how the sentence
was supposed to continue.)

Sometimes similar things even happen to me in Finnish. I may be halfway through
a sentence when it suddenly dawns on me that the word I want next actually
isn't a verb in Finnish, and need to reform the whole structure, but I never
know what exactly was the word I was thinking, and in what language.


Date:         Mon, 22 Sep 2003 13:07:14 -0400
From:         Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>
Subject:      Re: I'm back, sort of

>I'm only bilingual (English and Danish, and it might be stretching it to
>call me truly bilingual in Danish, especially these days), not trilingual,
>but I did have some interesting things happen while I was learning
>Danish.  The first one was that when did not know or could not think of
the
>Danish word for something, my mind would start to put the Latin word into
>the sentence.  (I had just finished taking 3 yearsof Latin and one year
of
>French prior to going to Denmark.)  When I didn't have the word, something
>in my mind seemed to be saying, "No, no, *not* you L1!  Use something
>else."  So it tried to, with rather amusing results.  (Though I don't think
>I ever actually put a Latin word into the middle of a Danish sentence, I
>just wanted to.)
That's something I've been wondering.
Does it disturb you when Danes use English loanwords in Danish? Because I
used to jump every time I heard a Finnish loanword in any other language,
but I thought it might be different for speakers of languages that get borrowed
more often.


- M. Astrand
"Neeba." - "Teeba?" - "Qeesvefar la:lka." - "Djo:ly."
"Guess what?" - "What?" - "I've learned how to speak." - "Great."

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