i was just about to say, i always think in the language i'm speaking.
Inquirer stated: source post
Tryptamine stated: source post
I never attained the speaking ability of someone for whom either language was a mother tongue.
Not quite what you said but I'm wondering if it would even be possible to get to a point with a second language where you feel as much as home with it as with your primary. Well, unless you grow up multilingual, I suppose.
Either language, as in Spanish or French. I remember that during the class conversations we would have as practice, little-to-no English would enter my head. I found letting my mind be blank somehow made it easier to access what I needed to say.
I've studied french and some spanish. When I'm actively practising or trying to learn I sometimes mix up words and end up speaking a simplistic type of franglais or spanglais. This happens when some words have cemented in my mind so I'm no longer translating, they just are the thing they are like 'un gato', but I don't know the full phrasing and sentence structures well enough
My friend moved to France to immerse herself in the language and become fluent in french. She said that when a person is forced to communicate without using their native tongue that their 'true self' is forced to come out because they can't rely on nuance, being coy or using sarcasm and subtlety. That idea always intrigued me.
"I think you're taking more about being eloquent in a language. "
Erm... not quite. For me it's more like what Sensy said. I think more in images and sensations and half remembered sounds. There are usually songs and the memories they stir all swirling around in there, plus the outside noise and commotion that nons can filter out. My filtering mechanisms only work sometimes. I wish I could find a pattern bc they're on again-off again. I could prolly move mountains if I could figure that shit out.
Ha. Finally found the vid that gives a perfect portrayal of the mental clutter that happens with glitchy attention filters in the brain: This is how it affects me, at least.
Note: Pink and I had a lengthy discussion about the difference between mental clutter and psychosis driven hallucinations after I posted this. Remember that what clutters up my thinking is all stuff that is happening right now, ad verifiable by third party consensus. Or it's an echo of smthg that happened yesterdy or last week or however many years ago (memories) and still verifiable by 3rd party consensus. There are also plans and dreams and imaginings going on in there. But they are either not real, or are somewhere on the spectrum of possibility (not fully real just yet. ) That is the difference between a glitchy noise filter and psychotic delusions/ hallucinations.
I have the tools to be quite eloquent. I just have to work at it bc I have all this noise to sift through to find the right words. Hence the fish analogy :)
AerynFrellMe stated: source post
Damn. You're making me work now xP
You want to know what goes through my head? This one is pretty close. Me trying to sit through a math class. lol
Pay attention to the images and ignore the talkbabble. They're all memories and they all come from somewhere. I like that the people who made this vid chose moments in popular entertainment that are easily recognizable (at least in the US.) My own personal talkbabble is fact sorting for the most part. It's jumbled and cluttered, but is usually about stuff that could easily fetch a good deal of third party agreement.
The difficulty is in prioritizing the mass of incoming and outgoing information. It gets easier as we get older, but I still have to bite my tongue to stop myself from blurting out inappropriate things that nobody in my immediate environment gives a shit about.
The inside of my head is quite entertaining, tho. Sometimes I can just turn off the tv and computer and surf on the kooky images that flood my mindscape. :)
MissCommunication stated: source post
My friend moved to France to immerse herself in the language and become fluent in french. She said that when a person is forced to communicate without using their native tongue that their 'true self' is forced to come out because they can't rely on nuance, being coy or using sarcasm and subtlety. That idea always intrigued me.
Interesting indeed.
The hardest thing for me when I was learning the English language was the order, speaking (silent-soft-hard letter words) and the lack of formality when addressing others.
Instead of telling you the name of object and then describing it, I now had to describe the object and then name the object I was describing. La chamarra azul vs. The blue jacket. So I would say the "the ball red" instead of saying "The red ball". When you write some thing in spanish, the way it is written is usually how it is sounded out so I hated how the rules changed, sometimes it was a hard G, sometimes it was a soft(jelly) G. Same with "Ch". It was frustrating. If you'd asked me a question I'd have to think about it in spanish, form my answer and structure it and hope I hadn't mangled it completely in English.
We have formal (Ud.- Usted/es) and informal (tú/vos) Spanish. It was sorta shocking that English didnt have that. That I was putting myself on the same level as the teacher and speaking in a so familiar manner to her seemed incredibly wrong to me. Tuteando anyone, including our siblings, was not bueno and you betcha you were gonna get talked down to for being a savage.