random stuff about languages -25
Mar. 28th, 2019 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howsmyenglishThis is probably less about languages and more about brains, but it is about brains that try to deal with languages, so.
When I don't expect to hear a language, I might not understand it, even though I know it perfectly.
Once, this even happened with my mother tongue. I was in Germany (German is my second mother tongue), was walking down a street and expecting a call from a German friend. Then the call came - it was someone else - and I could not understand a word of what was said. I said something like "excuse me?", they repeated. I said "what?", they said their part again. And only after a couple of minutes did I get that it simply wasn't German, this was why I didn't understand. That was my first experience of this kind and I found it fascinating, I'd never felt like that before.
The second time was even worse. A couple of years later, in Israel. I was standing at a bus stop, listening to music in German and thinking about Hindi, when a girl approached me and asked something. This time, I did expect her to speak Hebrew. But probably because my brain already was busy with two other languages, the Hebrew failed to be processed correctly. She asked something, I said in Hebrew!: "what?", she repeated. I didn't get a word, decided to change tactics and asked: "do you speak Hebrew?" She, veeeery slowly: "Yes, do you?" Me, feeling how brain parts come back together: "Could you ask that question again?" She asked it again, it was something about a bus line and where it goes...
That time, I actually got scared. It felt like I'm going crazy. It felt like at some point the random sounds I heard when she first spoke to me might become all I understand in other people's speech. I keep reading in articles that knowing languages might prevent people from developing Alzheimer's or becoming senile, but at that moment I really wasn't that sure that I believed them.
A new experience of the same sort happened to me yesterday. I was very tired, I hadn't nearly slept enough the night before, and was at that moment teaching my second class. I started writing on the blackboard and... somehow I didn't manage to write the first letter correctly. I didn't understand why, but just erased it and tried again. What came out was that same letter, but inverted. You know, like people with dyslexia do sometimes? I never before did anything of the sort. It was sooo strange to look at that inverted letter and try to understand what I did wrong and what I have to change to do it right.
I almost didn't get scared, only very surprised. But. What I'd like to know. Did anything of the sort ever happen to any of you?
When I don't expect to hear a language, I might not understand it, even though I know it perfectly.
Once, this even happened with my mother tongue. I was in Germany (German is my second mother tongue), was walking down a street and expecting a call from a German friend. Then the call came - it was someone else - and I could not understand a word of what was said. I said something like "excuse me?", they repeated. I said "what?", they said their part again. And only after a couple of minutes did I get that it simply wasn't German, this was why I didn't understand. That was my first experience of this kind and I found it fascinating, I'd never felt like that before.
The second time was even worse. A couple of years later, in Israel. I was standing at a bus stop, listening to music in German and thinking about Hindi, when a girl approached me and asked something. This time, I did expect her to speak Hebrew. But probably because my brain already was busy with two other languages, the Hebrew failed to be processed correctly. She asked something, I said in Hebrew!: "what?", she repeated. I didn't get a word, decided to change tactics and asked: "do you speak Hebrew?" She, veeeery slowly: "Yes, do you?" Me, feeling how brain parts come back together: "Could you ask that question again?" She asked it again, it was something about a bus line and where it goes...
That time, I actually got scared. It felt like I'm going crazy. It felt like at some point the random sounds I heard when she first spoke to me might become all I understand in other people's speech. I keep reading in articles that knowing languages might prevent people from developing Alzheimer's or becoming senile, but at that moment I really wasn't that sure that I believed them.
A new experience of the same sort happened to me yesterday. I was very tired, I hadn't nearly slept enough the night before, and was at that moment teaching my second class. I started writing on the blackboard and... somehow I didn't manage to write the first letter correctly. I didn't understand why, but just erased it and tried again. What came out was that same letter, but inverted. You know, like people with dyslexia do sometimes? I never before did anything of the sort. It was sooo strange to look at that inverted letter and try to understand what I did wrong and what I have to change to do it right.
I almost didn't get scared, only very surprised. But. What I'd like to know. Did anything of the sort ever happen to any of you?
no subject
Date: 2019-03-28 11:47 am (UTC)When I was in Hong Kong, I got confused a number of times when someone would reply to me in (usually just one or two words of) English after I'd said something in Cantonese. For example, I bought a cup at a coffee shop, and the cashier said, "Bag?" I thought he was saying something in Chinese, but I had no idea what word he was saying, and I didn't figure it out until the third time he said it, when he started to actually reach for a paper bag to put my cup in.
(Actually, Cantonese uses a lot of English words, and when I'm watching movies I often mistake some of the words for Chinese, sometimes even with actors who can speak English words without much accent. For example, in a movie I watched recently, there was a line in the Chinese subtitles with a two-syllable word which means "peninsula." I was confused because the actor onscreen was obviously not saying this two-syllable word. After listening a couple of times I finally realized what he was saying: pan-in-syu-laa. *facepalm*)
It's very interesting to think of being able to hear your native language as a string of nonsense syllables, though! But I think if you speak several languages, it's not too surprising if you sometimes have trouble switching between them, especially when it's unexpected. I don't think you need to be concerned. ;)
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Date: 2019-03-29 02:25 pm (UTC)Hindi uses a lot of English words, too. And it very often is much harder for students to understand them than to understand the actual Hindi words - whether it is in writing or speaking. I'd say, it has two reasons: one, that you don't expect the English words, and the other, that they don't follow the rules of Hindi (or Chinese) and seem stranger for this reason.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 08:20 am (UTC)Well (not sure if this'll help you too much) not out of nowhere, it hasn't.
I do reverse what letters go where when I type, though (and probably to a lesser extent, because doing so's slower, when I write) but that's a fairly lifelong issue, not some recent thing, which is why (between trimming verbiage and other routine edits, like for typos) I have to live in text editors during and after posts or replies, to fix all my other mistakes.
And I do the same when I read, except I flip not just letters but entire words or don't see half a sentence or some other thing where because of what happened I have no idea what I just read.
Luckily this usually sets some kind of mental alarm off so I'll go back and re-read as soon as it hits me something odd just happened there.
But enough about me, that's sounds like something maybe you should go get checked out by a health care professional, especially if it continues to go on.
(I don't read, write or speak a second language, btw, so am only referring to how you flipped a letter after it came out wrong in my thoughts above.)
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Date: 2019-03-29 02:19 pm (UTC)The inverting of a letter when writing by hand is a completely different act for me. Totally unexpected and foreign. And what was probably even more strange was that I needed time to understand what went wrong. But as long as I can count such occurrences on my fingers, I don't think I need to consult a doctor... ;)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 06:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's true (I've taken online tests where letters are not just reversed but scrambled in order to prove it's all still readable as long as the first and last letters turn up where they should, and was still able to read and understand that, so yeah).
It's flipping (or not even seeing strings of) words (for me) that's been a much bigger problem.
Personally, I think I reverse letters when typing for exactly this reason: when in a hurry, I just do my best to get all the letters in there, doesn't matter in what order.
Hmmm, I can type fast af as well, and am sure that's part of it, as I often don't pay attention to how I write something until I'm done writing it (if you could see how many letters I flipped within how many words last night just in my reply to you, which caught my attention especially hard because that's exactly what was being discussed, you'd probably be like, wow. It's that bad).
The inverting of a letter when writing by hand is a completely different act for me. Totally unexpected and foreign.
That's what caught my attention, too. Combined with other problems you mentioned having in switching between languages it's something where if *you* think it's an issue you might want to get it checked out, is what I probably should've said; but if it still seems like just some randomly occurring things then I agree there's most likely no need to.
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Date: 2019-03-29 09:38 pm (UTC)I also routinely mis-write voiced and unvoiced phonemes when handwriting -- p-b or t-d pairs. But that's different than reversing a letter (even though it might look like it with p-b).
Language is a weird thing, and the way our brains manage them is close to magic... Still, this could be a symptom of something. I'd recommend getting checked up, just in case, especially if it happens again. Hugs!
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Date: 2019-04-02 08:06 am (UTC)When you write about mixing up voiced and unvoiced consonants: do you mean that you're not sure which one is correct or that you mean to write p and write b instead? Because the first thing - the not being sure - happens to me a lot, especially with words I don't remember having seen in writing, but the second - never! *big eyes*
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Date: 2019-04-02 08:46 pm (UTC)The p/b-t/d thing -- it just happens, both in English and in Polish for me (and in Dutch but I write very little of it). Mostly when I handwrite, though. And it's not that I don't know which is correct -- I think one and write the other... Brains! Weirdness, I tell you!
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Date: 2019-04-02 08:56 pm (UTC)See? Why should it be weird then, when I first write the last letter of the word I'm meaning to write, instead of the first one? I'm just running infront of the horse, that's all! :D
Oh! I missed that! Off to read :D
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Date: 2019-04-01 10:19 pm (UTC)At times in Germany I have heard people speaking a strange language and then realised it was English but it has been a few moments before I could make sense of it. As you may have gathered, I am a native English-speaker.
If you are used to reading in e.g. English, Hindi and maybe old-style German lettering, or perhaps even Arabic or Hebrew from Israel, I expect your brain occasionally does a sort of flip-out and makes some odd and wrong connections. That would possibly explain your reversed letter.
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Date: 2019-04-02 08:00 am (UTC)I have a very good friend, who is Serbian. We used to talk to each other in a mixture or Serbian/Russian/German, and it was so great. Like understanding each other without a language. The story about your German friend reminded me of that.
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Date: 2019-04-02 06:17 am (UTC)I had some similar experiences when I was living in Munich. I was writing a diary entry in English, and accidentally switched to German halfway through. I also wrote a letter home, and wrote the whole thing in German because I'd temporarily forgotten how to write English words.
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Date: 2019-04-02 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 08:19 am (UTC)When I was in Munich, our class watched the movie The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain. Which is in English, but all the characters (bar one) have very strong Welsh accents.
It took me ten minutes of watching until I could figure out whether they were speaking English or German - and until I worked it out, I couldn't understand a single word.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-02 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 12:39 am (UTC)This hasn't happened to me on a macro level, but I definitely have had (and have observed) the experience of getting some wires crossed between languages I'm fluent in. The personal experience I have is that sometimes I've been in a work setting and someone will approach me and I will respond to them in Russian instead of English, which I have no reason to speak with them. This has always happened when I was in some kind of unusual work setting and the person I spoke Russian to was more familiar than surrounding people -- like, someone I work closely with approaching me when I was setting up for a conference among people I didn't know, or a work friend stopping by to chat after I got done talking to a vendor -- the language choice was I guess my brain going "o, svoi!" and choosing the home language. My mother has experienced the same thing under similar circumstances, and my husband sometimes catches himself saying a sentence in Hebrew when lecturing in the US (he taught in Hebrew before moving to the US), and sometimes says things to me in Dutch (his native language) instead of the English we normally speak to each other. He also told me a delightful but possibly apocryphal story about an immigrant math professor in Israel who walked into his class and started teaching in his native Hungarian -- and the students all sat very still and looked attentive, so he never realized something was wrong and did the whole lecture that way. (I'm not sure I believe the last part, but I can totally see someone starting to lecture in the wrong language if they have taught in both, and just continuing until something triggered a switch.)
The example I really wanted to share, though, was kind of the opposite of your "have I forgotten how to speak Hebrew??" one. As I mentioned in our other convo, my husband is fluent in a bunch of languages (Dutch, French, German, English, Hebrew, and I would say Russian though he denies it; actually, he denies the German, too, but invariably ends up speaking German with German speakers with no visible effort, so I don't believe him). He also has studied, either in school or recreationally, a bunch of other languages, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, and is generally very good at languages -- identifying them, picking them up, etc. One day I was doing a language quiz on, I think, Sporcle -- you get a sentence in many different languages and are supposed to guess the language (write in, not pick from a bank of options) based on the sentence. Some were pretty straightforward, like French, German, Spanish, and Chinese (which I couldn't read but could identify by the characters) and some rarer things, like Irish Gaelic, Hungarian, Esperanto, Afrikaans, etc. I did the quiz on my own, and was able to identify some things outright and guess some easily ("this thing written in Cyrilic but clearly of Turkic origin is probably Mongolian" and so it was) or after some guessing of related languages ("I've already had Swedish, so if this isn't Norwegian it's got to be Danish or Icelandic"; "I've already guessed Arabic so this bnch of squiggles that looks almost the same has got to be Farsi"; "this seems Romance but clearly not any Romance language I know even a little bit -- Romanian? Esperanto?"
Anyway, after I managed to guess whatever I could, I gave the quiz to my husband, and he did really well, as expected. What I didn't expect was what happened when he got to the Old English sentence. He read it and did a double-take. "I understand this!" he said, sounding very bemused. "I don't know what language this is, but I understand it perfectly! Why do I understand it?" It wasn't like he could sort of understand the language by reference to other languages he speaks, like he can do with Italian or Afrikaans. He could understand the sentence completely, on an intuitive level, like a language he could speak -- but it was clearly not Dutch, or German, or English. He was so bewildered! It was incredibly funny to watch, because it was something like what I imagine a person finding themselves being able to do magic in real life would act like -- why can I do this impossible thing?! -- or maybe someone with a translation symbiote from a sci-fi story, where you intellectually know you are hearing a foreign language but your brain is processing it the way it would a language that you speak. He was getting agitated and sounding plaintive and aggrieved about being able to understand this weird language, and he kept rereading the sentence, as if he was expecting it to either stop making sense or turn into a language he did speak. To date one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed, and one of the funniest -- so I had to share :)
no subject
Date: 2023-03-02 06:15 pm (UTC)I think I've had all of the experiences you mentioned, including the "why do I know this" one (with specific words which I didn't remember having learned - my memory is freakishly good), but they're all kind of logical and not similar to what I described in that entry. But I'm really glad you commented on it, because it gave me an opportunity not only to revisit the memory of those events (and to remember that I've had another one like this many years ago), but also to realize that I haven't had any similar events since this entry was written. Which is good :)
And, unrelatedly, I just feel I should mention that the fact that my comments are rather short has a lot to do with me learning to type with all my fingers right now, which considerably slows me down XDD
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Date: 2023-03-02 06:43 pm (UTC)This is my greatest source of skepticism about the story, too XD
Also oh wow you husband is a math prof?! Mine too. Do you feel comfortable sharing which institution(s) and/or area of math? My husband taught at Ben-Gurion before moving to the US, but he also knows a bunch of Technion people because he went to grad school there (his undergrad was in Europe and PhD in the US).
What I'm getting from all this is that it would be great to have a couples dinner with you guys and geek out about languages and math :D
but also to realize that I haven't had any similar events since this entry was written. Which is good :)
That is good! :) Maybe it was a case of having particularly a lot of languages in rapid exchange at the time? Or, I definitely find that unrelated stress impairs my cognitive abilities, because there are background processes running that impinge on my normal abilities to remember things, and so I start forgetting stuff that I normally never would, or mixing up fairly simple tasks.
And I don't think your comments are that short, but touch/ten finger typing is very handy and I wish you luck with that! :) (it is always so awkward when switching keyboards... I'm damnably slow on anything but a standard English keyboard and it drives me nuts whenever I have to use an AZERTI one in Europe or a Russian kb layout...)
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Date: 2023-03-02 08:05 pm (UTC)I'll hide your previous comment tomorrow and let's talk privately!
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Date: 2023-03-02 08:08 pm (UTC)