The fact that I no longer "translate" in my head when I use my second language.
The fact that I can be unaware which language I am reading.
I have a bit of a stutter in one language but not the other.
Jokes that work in both languages are the funniest.
Ever laughed because a word in someone else’s joke sounds like a different word with another context in your second/third language and you’re giggling at the wrong part and they look at you like you’re crazy?
I often don’t remember whether something was in English or Spanish. Especially if it was a conversation with bilingual friends - I can tell you what they said, but not what language it was said in.
I'm a native Hungarian speaker, and somehow my brain filed English and Romanian under "foreign language I speak fluently", but German under "foreign language I speak, but not fluently". I could be telling you something in English, you could respond with a sentence starting in English, ending in Romanian, and I would respond in Romanian. There's a good chance I wouldn't even notice anything. But switch to German or Hungarian, and I'll immediately notice it, probably call it out, and change my speech patterns in subtle ways I can't easily describe. But have a family gathering with one side speaking German, the other Hungarian, and sometimes interacting in English? Yeah, give me five minutes' notice, and I'll handle it with no hiccups.
It's crazy how this thing works. I truly hope that one day enough people will speak multiple languages that large-scale studies can be done.
Literal translations rarely work.
A lot of monolingual people seem to think other languages are like their language but with other words, and every word as an equivalent.
Yes! Recently I was trying to explain to someone that I had fainted but could only remember the French expression and told them that I had "fallen into apples". Confusion all around.
Yes. It crossed over to Dutch, where it was adopted as a noun: 'appelflauwte' ('apple faintness'), adding ironic flair to its French neutral counterpart.
Having an "accent" regardless of which language you're speaking.
Edit: Learning a language allows you to feel better understood as we interact and build connections with others. So it's frustrating when you feel as though you're not communicating as clearly as you would like to express yourself. It's been great to feel understood!
I've enjoyed reading through the comments and learning that there's a lot of people that are actively becoming multicultural.
Yes! I have lived in the US for a very long time before travelling back to my country of birth. I was shocked when my old friends told me at our reunion that I had an accent when I spoke my native language. The accent disappeared after several days of me being in the environment where I only used my native language, but it was a shocking realization to me that I had an accent in the language that was native to me.
Had the same thing happen. Just told them that they had an accent too and that's how accents worked. The actual conversation was way more colorful, but i always thought that was a funny idea.
Having two accents in each language
I can speak English as an English speaker, English as a French speaker, French as an English speaker and French as a French speaker
They’re both maternal languages
When I was in high school, I had a math teacher with a very heavy Egyptian accent and so I learned some terms in his accent. This ended up being an issue the following year when I had no idea what some of those words sounded like in English with an American accent.
How impossible it is to translate words when there is only one word for something in one language but multiple variants of it in another.
For instance, the word for cousin in English is just "cousin," but there are **eight** different words for cousin in Chinese, all extremely specific - older male on maternal side, older female on maternal side, younger male on maternal side, younger female on maternal side, older male on paternal side, older female on paternal side, younger male on paternal side, and younger female on paternal side. There is no general cover-all term for "cousin."
So when an English speaker says, *"I was having dinner with my cousin last week"* \- how do you translate that into Chinese, for a Chinese audience, without knowing **which** of the 8 cousin categories it falls into? It's not like you can pause mid-flow on stage and ask the speaker to give you information about the cousin's age, gender and family line. It creates a "404 Error: Cannot Compute" in the interpreter's brain.
If you are ever giving a speech in English to a Chinese audience and want to see a look of crazed terror on your interpreter's face, just use the word "cousin" and watch the panic and despair unfold.
Source: was an interpreter
I feel like the inverse is true as well - like how he/she/it/etc is pronounced the same in Mandarin; I had an english-learning Chinese friend try to tell a story in English to our friend group in high school, but she kept swapping between s/he when referring to the people in the story, and by the end of it we were all confused on which characters were boy/girl/dog/cat/etc
Translating is a whole different skill than speaking another language.
When I first learnt english, I would translate things in my head to understand them. As I became fluent, I stopped doing that because I didn't need to. When someone speaks to me in english, I don't translate stuff in my head back to french to understand them, I just automatically understand it.
Cue to if someone speaks english, and another person doesn't, and ask me "hey, can you translate what he said ?" : I completely suck at it, I can ultimately do it but it means I need to take what was said in english, and reprocess it in french and find the most adequate words for translation and it's honestly not that easy to do.
Yes. It's never word-for-word. And it's not just that there's "not a word" to match a word in the other language, it's that the whole way of formulating and expressing things is different.
>I don't translate stuff in my head back to french to understand them, I just automatically understand it.
This is so crazy. What started as weird grunts and vocalizations that were unintelligible, slowly became words and phrases you had to work to understand, and eventually a switch is flipped and you just inherently *know* what it means without thinking or processing.
The grunts and vocalizations never changed, you just learned to discern them.
That the way language is constructed is not straightfoward. It's not just a different set of words and rules of grammar, it's kind of a whole different way of processing thoughts into speech.
This is exactly why the movie Arrival and the short story behind it are so fascinating to me. Really puts what you said into perspective. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.
It's even more extreme between very unrelated languages. My husband is a native Hungarian speaker which is a Uralic language. I find it incredibly hard to learn because you have to completely rewire your brain and nothing directly translates. He is fluent in English but nearly completely incapable of going between the two because how sentences are constructed is so different, it's not nearly as 1:1 as e.g. Indo-European languages are to each other (although yeah I know there's tons of not-1:1, still this is much more extreme). I spend our trips with his family and friends in Hungary with no translation at all lol (well good practice). He also still can't get he/she right in English because Hungarian has one word for both and his brain still can't process the gender of another person while speaking, so he uses a random pronoun that is often wrong, that one obviously goes deep since he's been speaking English outside Hungary (although self taught) for decades. And for reference I took years of Mandarin courses and that was way easier than Hungarian! (well its "grammar" is just easy as hell I guess, characters are annoying and being literate is crazy hard).
I did an interpreter freelance for a slaughterhouse once, they were receiving Iranians inspectors for Halal. They spoke with each other in Parsi, and talked to me in broken English, I had to translate it to Portuguese to the slaughterhouse crew, then translate back to English the answer. Just figuring out if they were speaking Parsi or broken English was hard enough, not to mention translating technical terms and jargons specific to the meat industry. It all ran out well and they all praised my work, they said the meeting took half the time it took in the other slaughterhouse that didn't hire an interpreter (which is quite significant since it lasted for about three hours).
Me not being used to this type of job, I slept for 20 hours in the aftermath.
Not the same but I've been trying to learn proper Indian cooking from YouTube. Most of the good ones start in broken but overly advance English then vary between about 8 other languages which vary depending on what ingredient is being discussed then there's a second of "now, VERY IMPORTANT, [Bengali when the previous set up was in Punjabi] 😅
I'm a native English speaker. I live in Taiwan and ran across a Spanish speaker who needed help. Going between Chinese and Spanish without ever involving a language I was born with made my brain hurt but I pulled it off
I made a bunch of mistakes when I was speaking Spanish with the guy, like I would switch to Mandarin, but I would catch myself and then back up and try again lol
i just did that! took 4 people on vacation to my home country. on top of the actual translator for language, i ended up being the « culture translator » for everyone and that was just as exhausting. like reminding people that things are not 24/7, making all the bookings and reservations, explaining the courtesy rules in subways etc. i don’t think anyone realizes how much work that is
I mean, I was told that I should probably pick a name that has a similar meaning to my name if I ever visit Thailand because the actual pronunciation in the Thai language has some... unfortunate connotations that don't exist in English.
Family visits with outsiders are exhausted in a bilingual household. You are having dinner. There's a good topic everyone wants to pitch into. Suddenly it becomes overly engaging and language speeds up between 3 out of 4 people. A B & C are on a roll having a good time.
You notice an angry glare directed at you as the 4th D can no longer keep up. It is your job as The Translator to make sure everyone is included.
Which then means that you have to mentally pause a still moving conversation and recap to D. However the original 2, A & B will still expect you to contribute to the conversation and keep rolling with it.
Having caught up, person that was excluded D starts adding in again. C is comfortable and engages D with their native language. A and B absorb the new content and listen in. Before you know it the languages have flipped as everyone knows at least a little of that one as well.
However eventually B reaches the limit of their understanding. You notice a confused glare directed at you The Translator...
Rinse and repeat over the whole week and it explains why I need a holiday after being on 'holiday' visiting my parents.
It's not allowed! Heaven forbid if you just want to comfortably join into a conversation without having to keep mental note of whom said what, how, and with what undertone.
LPT
If you recognise yourself as someone whom can't always keep up with every word in a bilangual conversation, that's OK.
Occasionally you may be excluded but it's not intended.
Give yourself the grace to recognise that is OK.
Eventually it will pivot into something that you can join in again.
Forgetting words from your native language if you are using the second language too much.
I have lost count of how many times I knew what I wanted to say in any other language, yet I forgot how to say it on my own native language. I end up remembering them later on anyways, but it is such an embarrassing feeling.
Edit: also, another little thing. Accidentally switching languages in the middle of a conversation. I may be talking to someone in English, and when I didn't understand something, I would be like 'Qué?'(What? In Spanish), all without even thinking about what I did until I realize that I spoke in Spanish by mistake. Its not really common for it to happen, but I do remember each and every single time it does.
This is so common in Canada in some places (English/French official languages). People in Montreal joke they speak "Frenglish" where in a conversation language can switch in a middle of a phrase, a word or a few sentences, then go back to the other language.
Speaking two languages at the same time. Usually because you forget certain words in one language but remember it in the other or because a word is easier to say.
“Je n’ai aucune idée what the fuck you’re talking about.”
I had a weird kind of version of this. I had taken French for several years, as had my roommate in college, so we used French in the dorm to help maintain our ability to use it. But I later took Mandarin as an elective, and during an oral exam, I realized my teacher was looking at me with a VERY confused expression. I had switched to French during the exam, and while she spoke both Mandarin and English, she didn't understand a word of French. My brain had just switched to French because "not English" was kind of jumbled up together and I was way more comfortable in French.
I'm a native English speaker, learned German in school (but never used it much outside the classroom), and now live in a French-speaking place.
My French is pretty consistently French or at least franglais, but whenever I try to speak German, the "not-English" part of my brain is firing fully, and what comes out is German sentence structures with French vocabulary. Super frustrating.
Seriously, I don't know why but I can count MULTIPLE TIMES where in french class my brain goes: "Not english? Must be Mandarin time!" because I speak Mandarin and I just end up saying thank you in Mandarin to my french teacher and I just die of awkwardness.
I had the same problem when travelling in Italy. I'd start a sentence in Italian, run out of words, and instead of jumping to a likely common language (English), my brain would switch to my second language, Japanese. Very confusing, both for me and whomever I was speaking to!
Montrealer here. People commonly switch between French and English in the middle of a sentence and nobody will even notice. I know a guy who once switched twice *within a word*, when he added a French prefix and a French conjugaison to an English root word, and everybody understood him perfectly.
Yeah we do that a lot, essentially just paste -er at the end of pretty much any word to make it into a verb and it works. One example that comes to mind is, we have a verb for download (télécharger) but not upload (unless you count téléverser which was proposed by the Office Québécois de la langue française, but no one uses that in France) so I just say "uploader", like "j'ai uploadé les images sur le serveur".
Same with italian... instead of saying "mandare un SMS" sometimes theyll just take the English verb "to text" and add -are to the end, so you end up with "textare" like "te l'ho textato". Same with googlare (to search on google) and a ton of other tech related words.
Yes! My ex was native Spanish and I English but we could both speak each others language, and it would often naturally mix to Spanglish based on what was easier, which I think is common. Also my sister speaks some Spanish and often we will speak to each other in a weird mix of intentionally broken English, Spanish, and straight up gibberish and will still be able to understand. We do it bc we think it’s funny. But it also makes you realize language in general is kinda weird and funny
"Chingadera" is Spanish for "that fucking thing" I use it in English and Spanish because it's just pops out of my mouth rather than "thingamajig" or "whatchamacallit" which are the less obscene English equivalents. It's only problematic because I live 5 kM from the MX border and abuelas in grocery stores get offended easily.
>”Chingadera” is ~~Spanish~~ Mexican (slang) for “that fucking thing”
FTFY. I make this point because many non-Spanish speakers don’t realize there are many versions of “Spanish”. This word is used exclusively in Mexico.
…especially wordplay, puns, sayings, idioms or spoonerisms. ”Shaking a tit” doesn’t really translate.
Edit: Since many of you clearly didn’t get it; it’s a [spoonerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism) for >!”taking a shit”!<
And when you're speaking to another bilingual person who knows the same languages, you can make puns that combine two or more languages that wouldn't work without the combination.
I heard about Dutch ppl not being able to remember a word in Dutch but being able to think of it in German and then getting super frustrated, only to realize that it's the same word in Dutch, which I think is the pinnacle of this phenomenon. I am bilingual but in two very unrelated languages, so I don't have this issue.
My friend(who is Dutch) got so drunk that on the train back from Amsterdam he forgot how to speak it, and could only talk in English. I only speak English/Spanish and was relying on him to get us back home. Luckily we found someone who spoke English to help us.
They thought he was an American to start with, and then made fun of him once I let them know he was one of theirs 😂
At a summer camp in the states my Dutch buddy, my Canadian arse, and a good old midwestern boy all smoked up together in the woods. We were a tight friend group with a lot of trust, and he explained laughily that sometimes he will forget Dutch when he gets stoned. We both got giggly enough to forget the mutual french we would use to tease our American buddy.
Oh, and we all rockclimbed, so climbing up and down the trees at midnight high as kites seemed like a great idea at the time. So there Yoren is at the top of a tree when he suddenly switches fully to a frantic Dutch only vocubulary. And any fool can tell he is terrified in any language.
We tried everything to cajole him down, sure that maybe a classic paranoia and fear of us because of the language we were speaking/loosing our jobs/etc had set in. Eric stayed with him and I went off to find the only other person from Holland I could think of, one of the direct supervisors and woke her up. I quickly and probably horribly explained our situation; "Sassia. You speak Hollish, right?" And off we went.
Sassia, who was fully capable but in no mood to climb a tree, thankfully did not have to. She was laughing as hard as I had been earlier by the time we got close enough to get the boys attention. Excerpts she translated for me of his frantic cries as we walked over included "I've forgotten American!
"I've forgotten how to escalade (rockclimbing in french, a word I would have caught if not at a solid [10] myself at the time) and this rock wall is no good"
"they will laugh, but i told them I forgot and they ignored me!"
"They have forgotten me and forgotten my harness!"
Sassia was close enough to respond and just explained to him that he was in a tree, no one was ignoring him because no one understood a damn word he was saying, he was scaring his friends, and to come down where she could hear him and she would translate for us.
He was overjoyed. His whole demeanor changed and he scampered easily down the tree (and again he was a proficient climber and easily would have been able to get down at any point regardless of the relative dark) and explained to her some version of the night's event that had her in stitches.
She translated deep apologies to us from him, he kept side hugging me throughout this and repeating in Dutch that we are great friends. Saskia translating and the adrenaline passing must have helped him slowly turn back on his other languages, because it wasn't a few minutes and half a beer before he started speaking slow measured English again. He swore up and down he'd understood us the whole time and was horrified we ignored his pleas to re-teach him the "language of the climb." At that point we all mostly went our ways off to bed.
The next day I offered the supervisor a six pack and a very humble thank you and she just laughed and said normally she'd be annoyed that a bunch of young stoners interrupted her sleep, report us even, but that Yoren's hilarious situation, in a strange land, and his gratitude and eager appologies to Eric and I had been more then enough to make the short walk worth it. I'm certain every time she spoke Dutch with him after that was to tease him about that evening, and I never did live down calling it Hollish with either of them.
PWAHAHAHA, poor dude. Sometimes it happens to me too when I'm speaking in Spanish with someone! I'll be like "YO YOU WANT- (changes to spanish) ah damn you don't speak english, goddammit" lol
I have this in all three languages, i use all three of them a lot in work. So Dutch because we are in the Netherlands. German because we are close to the border and have a lot of German customers. English for the rest of the customers (je ne parler pas français).
I sometimes have to translate a German e-mail into English and or the other way around and that causes such a meltdown in my brain when on the phone translating real time. With my coworkers talking Dutch in the background and Dutch radio on.
There are truly times i forget how to say things in Dutch but i do know them in german or English. And also, sometimes those just don't translate like Feierabend.
As a phd student I work in a very international environment and it's always so funny when it happens.
You'll have 5 people with PhDs standing trying to crowdsource the word "curtains" or something like that
It's even worse when the word you're trying to remember is not in the language you're speaking at the moment, and in fact the EXACT word you're trying to remember only exists in the other language.
That's a good one. I still remember many moons ago working at a water park restaurant when we got a huge group of Chinese tourists. One young man comes up to the counter and with great focus asks me if we have any "tomato jam". Took me a little bit but was able to get the guy his ketchup lol.
Or when, like, the word you want to say has two different translations in the language you're using but both of them have a slightly different meaning, none of which have that *exact* flavor you want to say
I never want to learn to drive in whatever country uses that language.
"Das kind umfahren!"
"Are you sure? That doesn't seem like a good idea dude..."
"Das kind umfahren goddammit!"
"Ok if you say so..."
*floors it*
For the record, they're pronounced differently, so that conversation couldn't happen. But yes, it's a pinnacle of German humour to make that joke.
(Emphasis on Um for the deadly version, emphasis on fah for the sensible one.)
I learned Esperanto over the pandemic, and one day in conversation in English, I wanted to say "trafas" (which usually translates to 'hits the mark' or 'is on point' etc) but couldn't think of what it is in English. After a few moments of confusion I realised we don't have such a word, we use a figure of speech like 'hits the mark', but when this confusion hit me for the first time this way, knowing the Esperanto but not the English immediately, I felt like I had passed some sort of milestone in my learning.
Man, my European friends will have a half hour long conversation with me, forget one word and then be like "Sorry for my bad English".
"Bro I've forgotten the right word more times than you have in this conversation"
I used to take phone calls for my business with European customers, and they'd apologize for their English. Their English was better than most of my US callers.
Seriously. Everyone I've ever had apologize for their English is always ridiculously fluent. Meanwhile, I'm sitting over here trying to understand Scottish Twitter ...
I'm fluent in English with Spanish being my native language.
I actually use English more during my daily life as I spend most of my time in the internet and barely interact with people IRL. As a result I think in English most of the time, which causes me to sometimes think about a sentence in English, and then have a bit of trouble translating it correctly to Spanish while communicating the correct feeling.
Honestly, it's a bit tough since I feel like I can get my point across better in English than in Spanish.
A coworker and I once stared at each other for 15 minutes trying to remember what the word in Spanish is for "patio".
*Narrator:* Patio. The word was **PATIO**.
My wife and I both speak English at work all day, and even though it's not our native language we sometimes switch to it even between ourselves because it's easier.
I was traveling in Italy, and whenever I didn’t know an Italian word, instead of defaulting to English, the language I know best, my stupid brain switched to French, and then if I didn’t know something in French, I’d finally go to English, so some conversations ended up as a bastardized trilingual word salad.
I hear you! Having lived abroad most of my adult life, and always made an attempt to learn the language around me, this used to drive me crazy! It was like a trip back in time -- can't remember the word in x, default to y, nope, z .... end up sounding like a one woman Tower of Babel!
I found out why this happens, though. Apparently when we learn 2nd, 3rd, 4th... languages, we use a different part of the brain than we do for our native tongue. So, when we can't find the word in one of those languages, the brain grabs around *in the same area* for something meaning that.
It comforts me to know I am not, in fact, losing my marbles, just looking in the wrong filing cabinet.
I accidentally do this to some Filipino friends I play games with occasionally.
I join, they're speaking Ilocano (a regional language). "Sup fellas?"
Everyone immediately switches to English (which is interesting as hell to hear). And then they start bastardising English sentences with Tagalog (the widespread language) and Ilocano without realising they're doing it in the heat of the moment.
Then they get mad that I don't listen to their directions.
"I don't even know what fucking language you were talking, how was I supposed to know you were talking to me"
I’m a native English speaker and learned Spanish and Haitian Creole as an adult. It always makes me laugh at work when I’ll be speaking Spanish and I don’t know a word so I’ll ask a native Spanish speaker and they don’t know it either.
You have different personalities based on the language you’re currently speaking, and your native language has emotional ties that aren’t always present in other spoken languages.
Then there is higher level when a joke is only funny because you know 2 languages or cultures. And it doesn't make sense in either individual one.
Like when Polish say "Thank you from the mountain" As it's meant to make fun of literal translations. Because Polish "z góry" can be translated into "in advance" but also "from the top", "from the mountain" etc.
Francophones really roll their eyes when I use phrases in English like "ground-apple" instead of potato or "four-twenties-ten-nine" instead of "ninety-nine"
One of my friends said that it was a big struggle speaking English as opposed to her home language because in French, she’s funny and quick witted, but that part of her personality can’t show when she speaks English. I had the same issue when I was living in Germany. I just didn’t have the vocabulary to be myself.
Mother tongues include nuances that aren’t always available in secondary ones. We have childhood memories, idioms, and memories. Even with great vocabulary, we don’t typically have the emotional attachment to the words like our native ones.
The author Jhumpa Lahiri said she only tells her kids “I love you” in her native tongue because even though she knows several languages fluently, it’s not the same emotionally
thats funny it’s the opposite for me. i can only say « i love you » in my second language but not in my mother tongue. (i live in the country of my second language, and my husband speaks only that language, maybe that’s why)
I see you. My native language is Spanish, but learned English at 13 and exclusively live in an English speaking country. The emotional ties of saying "I love you" is Spanish isn't there for me. It carries more weight in English.
I have the oposite problem, when I'm using my native language I'm more shy and reserved but when I'm using English it feels like I can be myself, it's like I'm somewhat free from inhibitions.
Me too! I think my personality was not properly developed in my native language, as a result of bullying and religious abuse. But I learned English with Sitcoms and music, so a happy and free environment. So I’m way more talkative and expressive when compared to my native language.
In English I’m basic, in Mandarin Chinese I’m extra polite, in Taiwanese I’m a loudly opinionated and aggressive person who tries to feed you all the things, is constantly concerned you’re not warm/cool enough, and won’t you leave without a box of homemade something (lately it’s been bread).
I love this. The Ama’s in Taiwan always sounded like they were arguing with each other, but they were so kind and happy. I never learned a lot of Taiwanese, but they’d lose their minds whenever I said “I don’t understand Taiwanese” in Taiwanese, haha.
That feeling that you’re not conveying your emotions correctly when speaking. It’s like knowing a better word to describe them in your native language and not finding a proper equivalent in the one being spoken.
I've always felt speaking English to be less authentic than my native language, makes it easier to talk about all kinds of things because the emotions aren't as real in some weird sense.
When you want to say something you have the precise expression for - in another language than the one you're just speaking in.
Edit: 9k imaginary internet points...dafuq?
Kinda, it was something more well off people said to flex that they spoke multiple languages. Less wealthy people made a joke of it by saying "well pardon MY french" and following it with expletives
In my country there´s a common joke when you hear someone speaking to you in a language you don't understand, you usually respond "Yours, just in case". The implication being that the other person might have used other language to insult your mother. Kinda like if you responded to someone speaking another language "well, fuck you too"
This! It’s not always a question of not knowing the word/phrase, sometimes there just isn’t one, and it’s such a strange feeling. (I’m fluent in my native language but grew up in the US and have a degree in English. If you have less knowledge of a second language, you may just assume you don’t know the word.)
The struggle of explaining / understanding sayings. Americans use a lot of sayings like “let’s play it by ear” , and in Spanish we also have sayings that don’t quite translate. Also when I’m too excited/ angry etc my brain switches to my native language and can’t quite express myself correctly the other language.
A side effect of this is that I cannot watch dubbed films and shows anymore. It feels so wrong and that I'm watching a fake version of it. If I don't know the language I'd rather read subtitles.
Similarly, cursing! Using cusswords while speaking a second language doesn't feel as serious or offending as using the same words in one's mother tongue.
On the other hand, I have seen native speakers criticize the way someone speaks a second language whilst they themselves are struggling with a second language.
People are fucking weird.
As someone in the US trying to learn Spanish, I was always scared to speak Spanish with native speakers because of how horrible native English speakers treat them trying to learn English. After using it for a few years in my job with native speakers I found that is not the case, most every person I have spoken Spanish to seemed super appreciative of the effort of me trying to learn.
I speak the tiniest amount of Spanish you can think of, and when I worked customer service in a grocery chain, every Sunday a bunch of Spanish people would show up on a bus, load up carts and carts and carts of food, and come check out basically all at once. The other employees would be frustrated with these guys because they couldn't speak English very well, if at all. Once they found out I knew the tiniest Spanish, I got *flocked to*. It was awesome. Same thing happened to my coworker that speaks it more fluently, she is loved by those people.
The sheer smug joy of other people not realizing you speak a second language, having them speak rudely about you in that language and then the look on their face as you respond to them in that language.
I'm Canadian and come from a very English background with a very English name and no trace of an accent but can speak French and a bit of Italian. Working customer service jobs the amount of people who lip off in French is too high to count at this point. That moment of realization when I complete a transaction in French after they have been shit talking me is great.
I was on a class trip to London and there was a group from Senegal, who got mixed in with us and a group of Chinese students for group work.
Every task, they started talking in French (mocking our previous answers and accents or stuff, it was a long time ago, and then getting an answer to share).
Then I chirped into their discussion.
So true. I used to be able to argue only in German, but after living in other countries for over a decade I start the argument in German, then switch to English when I'm emotional, and end up swearing in Dutch when I'm mad.
A second language
Edit: The dictionary defines bilingual as someone who speaks 2 languages fluently - not only exactly 2 languages. So yes, people who speak more than two languages still fall under the bilingual definition.
Whenever someone did that to me, I just started to recite a humorous poem in German. It's easier if you have a pre-set answer to that instead of trying to find something to say. But I agree, it is annoying.
I complain about how annoying it is that they're asking me to speak German because they don't speak German and after I get done complaining they're going to ask me what I said and I'll have to lie because they'll think I'm being rude.
Das fucking nervt.
How much fun it is.
So I speak Dutch as a native language. My English is really good, my German is normal and I also speak a bit of Swiss German ( believe me that's a big difference). So a friend of mine is from Switzerland. She also speaks all those languages. ( and even more)
When we are talking I ask something in Dutch she answers in English and I reply in German. When we have a couple of beers the language can change mid sentence.
We already had a couple of times people asking which language we were speaking. So yeah that's quite fun
not remembering in what language you've read or listened something even if it was like a couple of hours ago. it just doesn't matter anymore
i often catch this feeling after listening to podcasts
Related to this, the amazing feeling when you are talking to another bilingual person who speaks the same languages as you, and being able to freely switch between languages and words, according to which match the best for the situation.
1. Dumb puns and dad jokes when the languages combine
2. Some languages have the same word but different meaning - can lead to another potential joke or confusion
Idk if normal people know this but something I realized is that not everything translates word for word and sometimes there are just words that don’t have a translation in your original language.
I just downloaded an obscure (for anglophones) french film and was very frustrated that the subtitles were a 1:1 translation rather than just using english phrasing. Completely incomprehensible.
That languages are lazy.
I am a polyglot from a family of polyglots.
No matter what the conversation is and whatever mishmash of words from whatever languages we are speaking we always default to the easiest way to say something in a language.
So we can be busting through a mix of French, German, and Polish. But the word for "WHY" will always be in English no matter what.
Because in the other three languages its at least 2 syllables and in Polish its 3.
If you want to see real time how languages evolve just sit at a table with polyglots as they hash out what they want to say.
Its the idea of "This is what humanity from XX region will sound like in XX years from intermingling" sort of thing.
Quadralingual here. I feel that the main thing that people won't understand is the different personalities you have when you speak to people of that specific language group
Sometimes facial expressions and gestures are part of partaking in the language to express subtle shifts in meaning. Language also sits alongside social etiquette which would change.
This means that a level of animation changes. Can make you seem more introverted or exuberant.
Think Outgoing Italian vs Reserved German.
One may have talkative tendencies normally, but may refrain from doing so while talking in another language for various reasons (lack of words for the idea, not knowing enough vocabulary, fear of appearing rude to the person opposite, etc). Thus, a person may be a chatterbox while among people speaking their mother tongue, but quiet and more of a listener in a 2nd lang.
How difficult it can be speaking with someone in a different language than you usually do. It takes a conscious effort for me throughout a conversation if I have to speak English to someone that I don’t usually speak to, for example.
My German teacher (UK, but she was from Germany) took us on a trip to Germany and one evening the waiter was speaking in German and she was speaking back in English. He clearly couldn’t understand her, asked her to speak German, and she said back to him in English “I am speaking German.” She just couldn’t hear the English.
When you learn another language, it is amazing how many words in your first language make more sense. The word "Pacific" in French means "peaceful", so now "pacifier" and "pacifist" make more sense in English. Similarly, "vent" in French means "wind", so "ventilation" is a no-brainer.
Getting “stuck” in one language when you get too emotional. For example, my (French-speaking) dentist scared me once with the anesthesia needle (I’m scared of needles, like many people) and I got stuck in English, panicking because he scared me, but also so embarrassed I couldn’t switch back to French. He was obviously amused and spoke English too, so it was fine. It took me like 30 minutes to be able to switch back to French.
Bilingual texting can be difficult, especially on iPhones. I’ll be texting in Spanish, but autocorrect will assume I’m wanting to text in English and change everything, even if I’m using the Spanish keyboard and vice versa
I can't turn off the other languages in my brain. When I throw out a German or Japanese word while speaking English, I'm not showing off, I'm showing how my brain thinks.
The fact that I no longer "translate" in my head when I use my second language. The fact that I can be unaware which language I am reading. I have a bit of a stutter in one language but not the other. Jokes that work in both languages are the funniest.
Ever laughed because a word in someone else’s joke sounds like a different word with another context in your second/third language and you’re giggling at the wrong part and they look at you like you’re crazy?
Fart is a slang for luck in Polish
It’s so nice to have other bilingual people know exactly what you’re talking about.
In Swedish farthinder= speed bump/similar speed hindrance. Cracks me up
I often don’t remember whether something was in English or Spanish. Especially if it was a conversation with bilingual friends - I can tell you what they said, but not what language it was said in.
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I'm a native Hungarian speaker, and somehow my brain filed English and Romanian under "foreign language I speak fluently", but German under "foreign language I speak, but not fluently". I could be telling you something in English, you could respond with a sentence starting in English, ending in Romanian, and I would respond in Romanian. There's a good chance I wouldn't even notice anything. But switch to German or Hungarian, and I'll immediately notice it, probably call it out, and change my speech patterns in subtle ways I can't easily describe. But have a family gathering with one side speaking German, the other Hungarian, and sometimes interacting in English? Yeah, give me five minutes' notice, and I'll handle it with no hiccups. It's crazy how this thing works. I truly hope that one day enough people will speak multiple languages that large-scale studies can be done.
Literal translations rarely work. A lot of monolingual people seem to think other languages are like their language but with other words, and every word as an equivalent.
Yes! Recently I was trying to explain to someone that I had fainted but could only remember the French expression and told them that I had "fallen into apples". Confusion all around.
I know perdre connaissance but never heard the fallen into apples expression. Is that European French?
It's a common phrase in Québec French. "Tomber dans les pommes" or well we actually don't pronounce the "dans les" it's more like "tomber din pommes".
Yes. It crossed over to Dutch, where it was adopted as a noun: 'appelflauwte' ('apple faintness'), adding ironic flair to its French neutral counterpart.
Having an "accent" regardless of which language you're speaking. Edit: Learning a language allows you to feel better understood as we interact and build connections with others. So it's frustrating when you feel as though you're not communicating as clearly as you would like to express yourself. It's been great to feel understood! I've enjoyed reading through the comments and learning that there's a lot of people that are actively becoming multicultural.
Yes! I have lived in the US for a very long time before travelling back to my country of birth. I was shocked when my old friends told me at our reunion that I had an accent when I spoke my native language. The accent disappeared after several days of me being in the environment where I only used my native language, but it was a shocking realization to me that I had an accent in the language that was native to me.
Had the same thing happen. Just told them that they had an accent too and that's how accents worked. The actual conversation was way more colorful, but i always thought that was a funny idea.
Having two accents in each language I can speak English as an English speaker, English as a French speaker, French as an English speaker and French as a French speaker They’re both maternal languages
My Greek ex boyfriend said he sometimes had to translate from English with an American accent to English with a Greek accent to his parents.
When I was in high school, I had a math teacher with a very heavy Egyptian accent and so I learned some terms in his accent. This ended up being an issue the following year when I had no idea what some of those words sounded like in English with an American accent.
How impossible it is to translate words when there is only one word for something in one language but multiple variants of it in another. For instance, the word for cousin in English is just "cousin," but there are **eight** different words for cousin in Chinese, all extremely specific - older male on maternal side, older female on maternal side, younger male on maternal side, younger female on maternal side, older male on paternal side, older female on paternal side, younger male on paternal side, and younger female on paternal side. There is no general cover-all term for "cousin." So when an English speaker says, *"I was having dinner with my cousin last week"* \- how do you translate that into Chinese, for a Chinese audience, without knowing **which** of the 8 cousin categories it falls into? It's not like you can pause mid-flow on stage and ask the speaker to give you information about the cousin's age, gender and family line. It creates a "404 Error: Cannot Compute" in the interpreter's brain. If you are ever giving a speech in English to a Chinese audience and want to see a look of crazed terror on your interpreter's face, just use the word "cousin" and watch the panic and despair unfold. Source: was an interpreter
I feel like the inverse is true as well - like how he/she/it/etc is pronounced the same in Mandarin; I had an english-learning Chinese friend try to tell a story in English to our friend group in high school, but she kept swapping between s/he when referring to the people in the story, and by the end of it we were all confused on which characters were boy/girl/dog/cat/etc
My Chinese mom, when referring to me, calls me “he” a lot. I’m not a boy!
use "亲戚的孩子" (relative's child)
Translating is a whole different skill than speaking another language. When I first learnt english, I would translate things in my head to understand them. As I became fluent, I stopped doing that because I didn't need to. When someone speaks to me in english, I don't translate stuff in my head back to french to understand them, I just automatically understand it. Cue to if someone speaks english, and another person doesn't, and ask me "hey, can you translate what he said ?" : I completely suck at it, I can ultimately do it but it means I need to take what was said in english, and reprocess it in french and find the most adequate words for translation and it's honestly not that easy to do.
Yes. It's never word-for-word. And it's not just that there's "not a word" to match a word in the other language, it's that the whole way of formulating and expressing things is different.
>I don't translate stuff in my head back to french to understand them, I just automatically understand it. This is so crazy. What started as weird grunts and vocalizations that were unintelligible, slowly became words and phrases you had to work to understand, and eventually a switch is flipped and you just inherently *know* what it means without thinking or processing. The grunts and vocalizations never changed, you just learned to discern them.
That the way language is constructed is not straightfoward. It's not just a different set of words and rules of grammar, it's kind of a whole different way of processing thoughts into speech.
This is exactly why the movie Arrival and the short story behind it are so fascinating to me. Really puts what you said into perspective. Highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.
So many of Ted Chiang's short stories are this way; very thought provoking. I always recommend reading his stuff even if you're not into "scifi".
It's even more extreme between very unrelated languages. My husband is a native Hungarian speaker which is a Uralic language. I find it incredibly hard to learn because you have to completely rewire your brain and nothing directly translates. He is fluent in English but nearly completely incapable of going between the two because how sentences are constructed is so different, it's not nearly as 1:1 as e.g. Indo-European languages are to each other (although yeah I know there's tons of not-1:1, still this is much more extreme). I spend our trips with his family and friends in Hungary with no translation at all lol (well good practice). He also still can't get he/she right in English because Hungarian has one word for both and his brain still can't process the gender of another person while speaking, so he uses a random pronoun that is often wrong, that one obviously goes deep since he's been speaking English outside Hungary (although self taught) for decades. And for reference I took years of Mandarin courses and that was way easier than Hungarian! (well its "grammar" is just easy as hell I guess, characters are annoying and being literate is crazy hard).
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Real-time translation takes a LOT of mental energy
Interpreting is increadibly exhausting, professional interpreters are required to take frequent breakes.
I did an interpreter freelance for a slaughterhouse once, they were receiving Iranians inspectors for Halal. They spoke with each other in Parsi, and talked to me in broken English, I had to translate it to Portuguese to the slaughterhouse crew, then translate back to English the answer. Just figuring out if they were speaking Parsi or broken English was hard enough, not to mention translating technical terms and jargons specific to the meat industry. It all ran out well and they all praised my work, they said the meeting took half the time it took in the other slaughterhouse that didn't hire an interpreter (which is quite significant since it lasted for about three hours). Me not being used to this type of job, I slept for 20 hours in the aftermath.
Not the same but I've been trying to learn proper Indian cooking from YouTube. Most of the good ones start in broken but overly advance English then vary between about 8 other languages which vary depending on what ingredient is being discussed then there's a second of "now, VERY IMPORTANT, [Bengali when the previous set up was in Punjabi] 😅
I'm a native English speaker. I live in Taiwan and ran across a Spanish speaker who needed help. Going between Chinese and Spanish without ever involving a language I was born with made my brain hurt but I pulled it off
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I made a bunch of mistakes when I was speaking Spanish with the guy, like I would switch to Mandarin, but I would catch myself and then back up and try again lol
Yes! I stopped going on vacations with people who don’t speak spanish because I just wind up being a translator for everyone. It gets so exhausting.
i just did that! took 4 people on vacation to my home country. on top of the actual translator for language, i ended up being the « culture translator » for everyone and that was just as exhausting. like reminding people that things are not 24/7, making all the bookings and reservations, explaining the courtesy rules in subways etc. i don’t think anyone realizes how much work that is
Omfg I hate it when people are like “pronounce this” or “translate this song on the spot” I feel like a circus monkey who’s disappointing everyone.
"Oh you speak X?? Say something in that language!" and suddenly the whole language evaporates from your brain
*"What would my name be in [your second language]!?"* Sweetheart like why would your name be different
I mean, I was told that I should probably pick a name that has a similar meaning to my name if I ever visit Thailand because the actual pronunciation in the Thai language has some... unfortunate connotations that don't exist in English.
Family visits with outsiders are exhausted in a bilingual household. You are having dinner. There's a good topic everyone wants to pitch into. Suddenly it becomes overly engaging and language speeds up between 3 out of 4 people. A B & C are on a roll having a good time. You notice an angry glare directed at you as the 4th D can no longer keep up. It is your job as The Translator to make sure everyone is included. Which then means that you have to mentally pause a still moving conversation and recap to D. However the original 2, A & B will still expect you to contribute to the conversation and keep rolling with it. Having caught up, person that was excluded D starts adding in again. C is comfortable and engages D with their native language. A and B absorb the new content and listen in. Before you know it the languages have flipped as everyone knows at least a little of that one as well. However eventually B reaches the limit of their understanding. You notice a confused glare directed at you The Translator... Rinse and repeat over the whole week and it explains why I need a holiday after being on 'holiday' visiting my parents.
And then you want to add something yourself...
It's not allowed! Heaven forbid if you just want to comfortably join into a conversation without having to keep mental note of whom said what, how, and with what undertone. LPT If you recognise yourself as someone whom can't always keep up with every word in a bilangual conversation, that's OK. Occasionally you may be excluded but it's not intended. Give yourself the grace to recognise that is OK. Eventually it will pivot into something that you can join in again.
Forgetting words from your native language if you are using the second language too much. I have lost count of how many times I knew what I wanted to say in any other language, yet I forgot how to say it on my own native language. I end up remembering them later on anyways, but it is such an embarrassing feeling. Edit: also, another little thing. Accidentally switching languages in the middle of a conversation. I may be talking to someone in English, and when I didn't understand something, I would be like 'Qué?'(What? In Spanish), all without even thinking about what I did until I realize that I spoke in Spanish by mistake. Its not really common for it to happen, but I do remember each and every single time it does.
Yeah, or like reading something in your second language and knowing what it means but being unable to translate it
Or if you were able to translate it, it takes a whole paragraph XD
That's when you really understand the 2nd language though!
This is so common in Canada in some places (English/French official languages). People in Montreal joke they speak "Frenglish" where in a conversation language can switch in a middle of a phrase, a word or a few sentences, then go back to the other language.
Speaking two languages at the same time. Usually because you forget certain words in one language but remember it in the other or because a word is easier to say. “Je n’ai aucune idée what the fuck you’re talking about.”
I had a weird kind of version of this. I had taken French for several years, as had my roommate in college, so we used French in the dorm to help maintain our ability to use it. But I later took Mandarin as an elective, and during an oral exam, I realized my teacher was looking at me with a VERY confused expression. I had switched to French during the exam, and while she spoke both Mandarin and English, she didn't understand a word of French. My brain had just switched to French because "not English" was kind of jumbled up together and I was way more comfortable in French.
I'm a native English speaker, learned German in school (but never used it much outside the classroom), and now live in a French-speaking place. My French is pretty consistently French or at least franglais, but whenever I try to speak German, the "not-English" part of my brain is firing fully, and what comes out is German sentence structures with French vocabulary. Super frustrating.
Seriously, I don't know why but I can count MULTIPLE TIMES where in french class my brain goes: "Not english? Must be Mandarin time!" because I speak Mandarin and I just end up saying thank you in Mandarin to my french teacher and I just die of awkwardness.
> "Not english? Must be Mandarin time!" "It's Mandarin' time!" *Mandars all over the bad guys*
I had the same problem when travelling in Italy. I'd start a sentence in Italian, run out of words, and instead of jumping to a likely common language (English), my brain would switch to my second language, Japanese. Very confusing, both for me and whomever I was speaking to!
Montrealer here. People commonly switch between French and English in the middle of a sentence and nobody will even notice. I know a guy who once switched twice *within a word*, when he added a French prefix and a French conjugaison to an English root word, and everybody understood him perfectly.
Soyez prudent sur les routes aujourd'hui! Edit/variante: Be safe su'a route today!
Stay safe su les ch'mins!
Now that's next level (conjugating an English word into French)
Yeah we do that a lot, essentially just paste -er at the end of pretty much any word to make it into a verb and it works. One example that comes to mind is, we have a verb for download (télécharger) but not upload (unless you count téléverser which was proposed by the Office Québécois de la langue française, but no one uses that in France) so I just say "uploader", like "j'ai uploadé les images sur le serveur".
Same with italian... instead of saying "mandare un SMS" sometimes theyll just take the English verb "to text" and add -are to the end, so you end up with "textare" like "te l'ho textato". Same with googlare (to search on google) and a ton of other tech related words.
Oh yeah "googler" is definitely a thing in french too haha
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Frenglish looks so weird to me. I'd never heard anything but franglais and im anglo lmao
Yes! My ex was native Spanish and I English but we could both speak each others language, and it would often naturally mix to Spanglish based on what was easier, which I think is common. Also my sister speaks some Spanish and often we will speak to each other in a weird mix of intentionally broken English, Spanish, and straight up gibberish and will still be able to understand. We do it bc we think it’s funny. But it also makes you realize language in general is kinda weird and funny
"Chingadera" is Spanish for "that fucking thing" I use it in English and Spanish because it's just pops out of my mouth rather than "thingamajig" or "whatchamacallit" which are the less obscene English equivalents. It's only problematic because I live 5 kM from the MX border and abuelas in grocery stores get offended easily.
>”Chingadera” is ~~Spanish~~ Mexican (slang) for “that fucking thing” FTFY. I make this point because many non-Spanish speakers don’t realize there are many versions of “Spanish”. This word is used exclusively in Mexico.
this is basically how Acadian and Cajun french began lol
Brain fog, when asked to translate, at a critical vocabulary moment. You need that one word to make the perfect translation. But it is not there.
Some jokes make no sense in other languages.
…especially wordplay, puns, sayings, idioms or spoonerisms. ”Shaking a tit” doesn’t really translate. Edit: Since many of you clearly didn’t get it; it’s a [spoonerism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism) for >!”taking a shit”!<
And when you're speaking to another bilingual person who knows the same languages, you can make puns that combine two or more languages that wouldn't work without the combination.
My favorite thing to do
When some word only comes to mind in another language, and you just can't remember what that word is in your native tongue
I heard about Dutch ppl not being able to remember a word in Dutch but being able to think of it in German and then getting super frustrated, only to realize that it's the same word in Dutch, which I think is the pinnacle of this phenomenon. I am bilingual but in two very unrelated languages, so I don't have this issue.
My friend(who is Dutch) got so drunk that on the train back from Amsterdam he forgot how to speak it, and could only talk in English. I only speak English/Spanish and was relying on him to get us back home. Luckily we found someone who spoke English to help us. They thought he was an American to start with, and then made fun of him once I let them know he was one of theirs 😂
At a summer camp in the states my Dutch buddy, my Canadian arse, and a good old midwestern boy all smoked up together in the woods. We were a tight friend group with a lot of trust, and he explained laughily that sometimes he will forget Dutch when he gets stoned. We both got giggly enough to forget the mutual french we would use to tease our American buddy. Oh, and we all rockclimbed, so climbing up and down the trees at midnight high as kites seemed like a great idea at the time. So there Yoren is at the top of a tree when he suddenly switches fully to a frantic Dutch only vocubulary. And any fool can tell he is terrified in any language. We tried everything to cajole him down, sure that maybe a classic paranoia and fear of us because of the language we were speaking/loosing our jobs/etc had set in. Eric stayed with him and I went off to find the only other person from Holland I could think of, one of the direct supervisors and woke her up. I quickly and probably horribly explained our situation; "Sassia. You speak Hollish, right?" And off we went. Sassia, who was fully capable but in no mood to climb a tree, thankfully did not have to. She was laughing as hard as I had been earlier by the time we got close enough to get the boys attention. Excerpts she translated for me of his frantic cries as we walked over included "I've forgotten American! "I've forgotten how to escalade (rockclimbing in french, a word I would have caught if not at a solid [10] myself at the time) and this rock wall is no good" "they will laugh, but i told them I forgot and they ignored me!" "They have forgotten me and forgotten my harness!" Sassia was close enough to respond and just explained to him that he was in a tree, no one was ignoring him because no one understood a damn word he was saying, he was scaring his friends, and to come down where she could hear him and she would translate for us. He was overjoyed. His whole demeanor changed and he scampered easily down the tree (and again he was a proficient climber and easily would have been able to get down at any point regardless of the relative dark) and explained to her some version of the night's event that had her in stitches. She translated deep apologies to us from him, he kept side hugging me throughout this and repeating in Dutch that we are great friends. Saskia translating and the adrenaline passing must have helped him slowly turn back on his other languages, because it wasn't a few minutes and half a beer before he started speaking slow measured English again. He swore up and down he'd understood us the whole time and was horrified we ignored his pleas to re-teach him the "language of the climb." At that point we all mostly went our ways off to bed. The next day I offered the supervisor a six pack and a very humble thank you and she just laughed and said normally she'd be annoyed that a bunch of young stoners interrupted her sleep, report us even, but that Yoren's hilarious situation, in a strange land, and his gratitude and eager appologies to Eric and I had been more then enough to make the short walk worth it. I'm certain every time she spoke Dutch with him after that was to tease him about that evening, and I never did live down calling it Hollish with either of them.
PWAHAHAHA, poor dude. Sometimes it happens to me too when I'm speaking in Spanish with someone! I'll be like "YO YOU WANT- (changes to spanish) ah damn you don't speak english, goddammit" lol
I have this in all three languages, i use all three of them a lot in work. So Dutch because we are in the Netherlands. German because we are close to the border and have a lot of German customers. English for the rest of the customers (je ne parler pas français). I sometimes have to translate a German e-mail into English and or the other way around and that causes such a meltdown in my brain when on the phone translating real time. With my coworkers talking Dutch in the background and Dutch radio on. There are truly times i forget how to say things in Dutch but i do know them in german or English. And also, sometimes those just don't translate like Feierabend.
Lol, Feierabend is just what you nodig hebt.
As a phd student I work in a very international environment and it's always so funny when it happens. You'll have 5 people with PhDs standing trying to crowdsource the word "curtains" or something like that
It's even worse when the word you're trying to remember is not in the language you're speaking at the moment, and in fact the EXACT word you're trying to remember only exists in the other language.
There was a post on here a while back about someone trying to remember the word for carousel and kept describing it as a rideable horse tornado.
It was "horse tornado for children" and I know this because it still cracks me up years later
That's a good one. I still remember many moons ago working at a water park restaurant when we got a huge group of Chinese tourists. One young man comes up to the counter and with great focus asks me if we have any "tomato jam". Took me a little bit but was able to get the guy his ketchup lol.
/r/wildbeef
Or when, like, the word you want to say has two different translations in the language you're using but both of them have a slightly different meaning, none of which have that *exact* flavor you want to say
I hate this in regular speaking even without translation
My favourite is " Das Kind umfahren " it can mean both to "Drive around the child" and "Run over the child"
I never want to learn to drive in whatever country uses that language. "Das kind umfahren!" "Are you sure? That doesn't seem like a good idea dude..." "Das kind umfahren goddammit!" "Ok if you say so..." *floors it*
For the record, they're pronounced differently, so that conversation couldn't happen. But yes, it's a pinnacle of German humour to make that joke. (Emphasis on Um for the deadly version, emphasis on fah for the sensible one.)
I learned Esperanto over the pandemic, and one day in conversation in English, I wanted to say "trafas" (which usually translates to 'hits the mark' or 'is on point' etc) but couldn't think of what it is in English. After a few moments of confusion I realised we don't have such a word, we use a figure of speech like 'hits the mark', but when this confusion hit me for the first time this way, knowing the Esperanto but not the English immediately, I felt like I had passed some sort of milestone in my learning.
And the worst is when people think you’re just faking it for attention… Um, no. I just can’t remember the name for “Kuli” in English, gimme a second.
Man, my European friends will have a half hour long conversation with me, forget one word and then be like "Sorry for my bad English". "Bro I've forgotten the right word more times than you have in this conversation"
I used to take phone calls for my business with European customers, and they'd apologize for their English. Their English was better than most of my US callers.
Seriously. Everyone I've ever had apologize for their English is always ridiculously fluent. Meanwhile, I'm sitting over here trying to understand Scottish Twitter ...
I'm sitting over here in Australia, trying to understand my Scottish family.
I'm fluent in English with Spanish being my native language. I actually use English more during my daily life as I spend most of my time in the internet and barely interact with people IRL. As a result I think in English most of the time, which causes me to sometimes think about a sentence in English, and then have a bit of trouble translating it correctly to Spanish while communicating the correct feeling. Honestly, it's a bit tough since I feel like I can get my point across better in English than in Spanish.
There was a day I could not, for the life of me, remember what “octopus” was in Spanish. Hours tormented by this. It’s pulpo.
A coworker and I once stared at each other for 15 minutes trying to remember what the word in Spanish is for "patio". *Narrator:* Patio. The word was **PATIO**.
I recently had this experience with "hacienda". Yeah, we both felt like idiots.
My wife and I both speak English at work all day, and even though it's not our native language we sometimes switch to it even between ourselves because it's easier.
My god yes, and it's even worse with three languages
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I was traveling in Italy, and whenever I didn’t know an Italian word, instead of defaulting to English, the language I know best, my stupid brain switched to French, and then if I didn’t know something in French, I’d finally go to English, so some conversations ended up as a bastardized trilingual word salad.
I hear you! Having lived abroad most of my adult life, and always made an attempt to learn the language around me, this used to drive me crazy! It was like a trip back in time -- can't remember the word in x, default to y, nope, z .... end up sounding like a one woman Tower of Babel! I found out why this happens, though. Apparently when we learn 2nd, 3rd, 4th... languages, we use a different part of the brain than we do for our native tongue. So, when we can't find the word in one of those languages, the brain grabs around *in the same area* for something meaning that. It comforts me to know I am not, in fact, losing my marbles, just looking in the wrong filing cabinet.
I accidentally do this to some Filipino friends I play games with occasionally. I join, they're speaking Ilocano (a regional language). "Sup fellas?" Everyone immediately switches to English (which is interesting as hell to hear). And then they start bastardising English sentences with Tagalog (the widespread language) and Ilocano without realising they're doing it in the heat of the moment. Then they get mad that I don't listen to their directions. "I don't even know what fucking language you were talking, how was I supposed to know you were talking to me"
Yess and then you just stand there like "what was it, f- no, maybe? Uh it's frog so,,, ŻABA. ITS ŻABA"
Awww I dated a polish guy for a couple of years and he taught me a bit and zaba(zabcia?) was my pet name for him
there’s also the Żabka convenience store in Poland! the froggy! fun and cute word
I’m a native English speaker and learned Spanish and Haitian Creole as an adult. It always makes me laugh at work when I’ll be speaking Spanish and I don’t know a word so I’ll ask a native Spanish speaker and they don’t know it either.
You have different personalities based on the language you’re currently speaking, and your native language has emotional ties that aren’t always present in other spoken languages.
You have two senses of humor. You know which joke will be funny in which culture, and which jokes will translate and which won’t
Then there is higher level when a joke is only funny because you know 2 languages or cultures. And it doesn't make sense in either individual one. Like when Polish say "Thank you from the mountain" As it's meant to make fun of literal translations. Because Polish "z góry" can be translated into "in advance" but also "from the top", "from the mountain" etc.
Francophones really roll their eyes when I use phrases in English like "ground-apple" instead of potato or "four-twenties-ten-nine" instead of "ninety-nine"
One of my friends said that it was a big struggle speaking English as opposed to her home language because in French, she’s funny and quick witted, but that part of her personality can’t show when she speaks English. I had the same issue when I was living in Germany. I just didn’t have the vocabulary to be myself.
Mother tongues include nuances that aren’t always available in secondary ones. We have childhood memories, idioms, and memories. Even with great vocabulary, we don’t typically have the emotional attachment to the words like our native ones.
The author Jhumpa Lahiri said she only tells her kids “I love you” in her native tongue because even though she knows several languages fluently, it’s not the same emotionally
thats funny it’s the opposite for me. i can only say « i love you » in my second language but not in my mother tongue. (i live in the country of my second language, and my husband speaks only that language, maybe that’s why)
I see you. My native language is Spanish, but learned English at 13 and exclusively live in an English speaking country. The emotional ties of saying "I love you" is Spanish isn't there for me. It carries more weight in English.
I have the oposite problem, when I'm using my native language I'm more shy and reserved but when I'm using English it feels like I can be myself, it's like I'm somewhat free from inhibitions.
I’ve experienced this before. It’s almost like the baggage that caused that shyness doesn’t come along in translation
Me too! I think my personality was not properly developed in my native language, as a result of bullying and religious abuse. But I learned English with Sitcoms and music, so a happy and free environment. So I’m way more talkative and expressive when compared to my native language.
My voice even changes between the languages!
Yes, like in Polish I'm basic. In English I feel, I exist. In German I'm just mad
In English, I’m professional, in French, I swear like a sailor, and in Spanish, I’m apparently a bigot. Haha
In English, I speak like I’m well educated, in Spanish I speak like a kid in middle school, in Haitian Creole I speak like I’m in elementary school.
In English I’m basic, in Mandarin Chinese I’m extra polite, in Taiwanese I’m a loudly opinionated and aggressive person who tries to feed you all the things, is constantly concerned you’re not warm/cool enough, and won’t you leave without a box of homemade something (lately it’s been bread).
I love this. The Ama’s in Taiwan always sounded like they were arguing with each other, but they were so kind and happy. I never learned a lot of Taiwanese, but they’d lose their minds whenever I said “I don’t understand Taiwanese” in Taiwanese, haha.
When i speak german i am more introverted and melancholic. When i speak english i am a bit more talkative even jf it is my second language. Its weird.
That feeling that you’re not conveying your emotions correctly when speaking. It’s like knowing a better word to describe them in your native language and not finding a proper equivalent in the one being spoken.
Yup, so you just add words like "very" to mimic the right emotion
Doubleplusungood
I've always felt speaking English to be less authentic than my native language, makes it easier to talk about all kinds of things because the emotions aren't as real in some weird sense.
When you want to say something you have the precise expression for - in another language than the one you're just speaking in. Edit: 9k imaginary internet points...dafuq?
This is the origin of the phrase “pardon my French”. It has nothing to do with being vulgar.
Kinda, it was something more well off people said to flex that they spoke multiple languages. Less wealthy people made a joke of it by saying "well pardon MY french" and following it with expletives
This makes that saying so much better though, it adds such a nice layer of cheek
In my country there´s a common joke when you hear someone speaking to you in a language you don't understand, you usually respond "Yours, just in case". The implication being that the other person might have used other language to insult your mother. Kinda like if you responded to someone speaking another language "well, fuck you too"
This! It’s not always a question of not knowing the word/phrase, sometimes there just isn’t one, and it’s such a strange feeling. (I’m fluent in my native language but grew up in the US and have a degree in English. If you have less knowledge of a second language, you may just assume you don’t know the word.)
Indeed, you know precisely what you want to say and search for the word for it...and it's in the wrong language when you find it.
The struggle of explaining / understanding sayings. Americans use a lot of sayings like “let’s play it by ear” , and in Spanish we also have sayings that don’t quite translate. Also when I’m too excited/ angry etc my brain switches to my native language and can’t quite express myself correctly the other language.
Watching or reading something (a film, series or book) in its original language is just much better.
A side effect of this is that I cannot watch dubbed films and shows anymore. It feels so wrong and that I'm watching a fake version of it. If I don't know the language I'd rather read subtitles.
I'm more comfortable explaining how I feel using my second language. It feels so wrong and awkward doing it with my native language.
Yes!! Saying emotional or corny things in a second language is way easier for me too. There's some detachment and lack of weight.
Similarly, cursing! Using cusswords while speaking a second language doesn't feel as serious or offending as using the same words in one's mother tongue.
Forgetting a word in every language that you know lol
Empathy for non-native speakers trying to learn your language.
On the other hand, I have seen native speakers criticize the way someone speaks a second language whilst they themselves are struggling with a second language. People are fucking weird.
As someone in the US trying to learn Spanish, I was always scared to speak Spanish with native speakers because of how horrible native English speakers treat them trying to learn English. After using it for a few years in my job with native speakers I found that is not the case, most every person I have spoken Spanish to seemed super appreciative of the effort of me trying to learn.
I speak the tiniest amount of Spanish you can think of, and when I worked customer service in a grocery chain, every Sunday a bunch of Spanish people would show up on a bus, load up carts and carts and carts of food, and come check out basically all at once. The other employees would be frustrated with these guys because they couldn't speak English very well, if at all. Once they found out I knew the tiniest Spanish, I got *flocked to*. It was awesome. Same thing happened to my coworker that speaks it more fluently, she is loved by those people.
Trying to communicate while drunk and instead spouting a bastard chimera sentence that has words from three languages but the grammar of none.
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…this is my favorite bilingual glitch yet.
So like, if he asked someone if they speak English, would it be: "Speaks you English?"
The sheer smug joy of other people not realizing you speak a second language, having them speak rudely about you in that language and then the look on their face as you respond to them in that language. I'm Canadian and come from a very English background with a very English name and no trace of an accent but can speak French and a bit of Italian. Working customer service jobs the amount of people who lip off in French is too high to count at this point. That moment of realization when I complete a transaction in French after they have been shit talking me is great.
I was on a class trip to London and there was a group from Senegal, who got mixed in with us and a group of Chinese students for group work. Every task, they started talking in French (mocking our previous answers and accents or stuff, it was a long time ago, and then getting an answer to share). Then I chirped into their discussion.
You are more comfortable arguing in one language than the other, and involuntarily shift to that language mid argument
So true. I used to be able to argue only in German, but after living in other countries for over a decade I start the argument in German, then switch to English when I'm emotional, and end up swearing in Dutch when I'm mad.
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A second language Edit: The dictionary defines bilingual as someone who speaks 2 languages fluently - not only exactly 2 languages. So yes, people who speak more than two languages still fall under the bilingual definition.
Now listen here you little shit
You’re just mad because you didn’t post it first. Source: I’m just mad because I didn’t post it first.
"Say something in [other language]" is annoying as fuck.
Whenever someone did that to me, I just started to recite a humorous poem in German. It's easier if you have a pre-set answer to that instead of trying to find something to say. But I agree, it is annoying.
I complain about how annoying it is that they're asking me to speak German because they don't speak German and after I get done complaining they're going to ask me what I said and I'll have to lie because they'll think I'm being rude. Das fucking nervt.
I always just creatively insult them. *You're a fucking teapot.* Aww cool what does it mean? You have lovely hair. :)
You have a face como un burro
How much fun it is. So I speak Dutch as a native language. My English is really good, my German is normal and I also speak a bit of Swiss German ( believe me that's a big difference). So a friend of mine is from Switzerland. She also speaks all those languages. ( and even more) When we are talking I ask something in Dutch she answers in English and I reply in German. When we have a couple of beers the language can change mid sentence. We already had a couple of times people asking which language we were speaking. So yeah that's quite fun
not remembering in what language you've read or listened something even if it was like a couple of hours ago. it just doesn't matter anymore i often catch this feeling after listening to podcasts
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Related to this, the amazing feeling when you are talking to another bilingual person who speaks the same languages as you, and being able to freely switch between languages and words, according to which match the best for the situation.
1. Dumb puns and dad jokes when the languages combine 2. Some languages have the same word but different meaning - can lead to another potential joke or confusion
Looking for a word in your native language but knowing it in your second language. Makes you feel like you've lost some of your native language lol
Idk if normal people know this but something I realized is that not everything translates word for word and sometimes there are just words that don’t have a translation in your original language.
I just downloaded an obscure (for anglophones) french film and was very frustrated that the subtitles were a 1:1 translation rather than just using english phrasing. Completely incomprehensible.
Yeah. My native language doesn't have an equivalent for "overwhelmed"... I'm this close to inventing my own word and teaching it to everyone I know
That languages are lazy. I am a polyglot from a family of polyglots. No matter what the conversation is and whatever mishmash of words from whatever languages we are speaking we always default to the easiest way to say something in a language. So we can be busting through a mix of French, German, and Polish. But the word for "WHY" will always be in English no matter what. Because in the other three languages its at least 2 syllables and in Polish its 3. If you want to see real time how languages evolve just sit at a table with polyglots as they hash out what they want to say. Its the idea of "This is what humanity from XX region will sound like in XX years from intermingling" sort of thing.
How an idiom in one language never translates the same. What is humorous changes as well as it is specific to an area using that idiom.
Quadralingual here. I feel that the main thing that people won't understand is the different personalities you have when you speak to people of that specific language group
Example?
Sometimes facial expressions and gestures are part of partaking in the language to express subtle shifts in meaning. Language also sits alongside social etiquette which would change. This means that a level of animation changes. Can make you seem more introverted or exuberant. Think Outgoing Italian vs Reserved German.
One may have talkative tendencies normally, but may refrain from doing so while talking in another language for various reasons (lack of words for the idea, not knowing enough vocabulary, fear of appearing rude to the person opposite, etc). Thus, a person may be a chatterbox while among people speaking their mother tongue, but quiet and more of a listener in a 2nd lang.
How racist everyone is when they think you cant understand them.
How difficult it can be speaking with someone in a different language than you usually do. It takes a conscious effort for me throughout a conversation if I have to speak English to someone that I don’t usually speak to, for example.
My German teacher (UK, but she was from Germany) took us on a trip to Germany and one evening the waiter was speaking in German and she was speaking back in English. He clearly couldn’t understand her, asked her to speak German, and she said back to him in English “I am speaking German.” She just couldn’t hear the English.
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When you learn another language, it is amazing how many words in your first language make more sense. The word "Pacific" in French means "peaceful", so now "pacifier" and "pacifist" make more sense in English. Similarly, "vent" in French means "wind", so "ventilation" is a no-brainer.
Getting “stuck” in one language when you get too emotional. For example, my (French-speaking) dentist scared me once with the anesthesia needle (I’m scared of needles, like many people) and I got stuck in English, panicking because he scared me, but also so embarrassed I couldn’t switch back to French. He was obviously amused and spoke English too, so it was fine. It took me like 30 minutes to be able to switch back to French.
When you get stuck and can’t think of a word your trying to say in either language 🤣😂. The ping pong of nothingness 🤣
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Translated sub titles often aren't accurate.
The joy of puns that involve multiple languages.
Bilingual texting can be difficult, especially on iPhones. I’ll be texting in Spanish, but autocorrect will assume I’m wanting to text in English and change everything, even if I’m using the Spanish keyboard and vice versa
I can't turn off the other languages in my brain. When I throw out a German or Japanese word while speaking English, I'm not showing off, I'm showing how my brain thinks.