Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: I'm back, sort of

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 23, 2003, 4:09
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.

Reply

BP Jonsson <bpj@...>