Re: Similar (was: 'useful') languages

Jonathan Knibb wrote:
>
>Clint Jackson Baker wrote:
> >>>
>[...] I'm better at
>French, but I think that's because I've known it so
>much longer, and French and Spanish are similar enough
>that when I try to speak Spanish I tend to pidgin the
>two (easy for an English speaker, who has more vocab
>in common with French than with Spanish).
><<<
>
>Is this a common problem?  I had a similar experience a couple of years
>ago,
>when I was learning Swedish.  I've had semi-reasonable German since I
>learned it in school at fourteen (so twelve years ago), and although I was
>conscious of the similarities between Ger. and Sw. while I was learning the
>latter, I wasn't aware that they could interfere with each other until I
>tried speaking German just after a Swedish lesson.  Result: acute total
>German-aphasia.  Two years on, I can once again speak decent German, but
>only as long as I don't think about Swedish at the same time!
>
>Has anyone else come across this phenomenon?
>
When I speak German, my brain is likely to try to fill in holes in my
grammar and vocab with the corresponding English constructions and words.
What makes this all the more annoying is that using the corresponding
Swedish construction/word is more often than not a better solution (Swedish
being my native language).

                                                   Andreas

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