Re: I'm back, sort of

Andreas Johansson wrote:
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?
Similar but different, involving L2-L3 interference. Although I probably
knew (and used to speak) Spanish better than Indonesian, in 1974 the
Indonesian was much fresher and more prevalent in my mind. I had the unusual
opportunity then to spend a weekend in Monterrey, Mexico, giving TESOL
students a quickie contrastive analysis of the two (in Spanish, with
occasional resort to English). (It's a long story, but there was a
possibility the school was going to have to teach Spanish to a bunch of
Indonesians.).  Every time I came to a past or perfect tense in Spanish, I
wanted to stick in _ya_ 'already', based on Indonesian _sudah_ 'already',
which corresponds to those tenses.

What always amazed me about that whole episode-- when the request for
someone reasonably fluent in both languages came to our Dept. at U.Mich--
there were TWO of us who qualified.

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