Having served an LDS mission in Mexico (Veracruz to be exact), I became pretty fluent in Spanish. Now, some 10+ years later, I can still carry on a fairly decent conversation with someone. In the process though, I've discovered something interesting.
When I am focused on speaking with someone, mentally, I start to think in the language. This isn't all that unusual, I think it's the only way to really get into a language. The interesting thing is how it all goes full stop the second I want to express a thought for which I either lack the vocabulary or cannot remember the correct word.
Has this ever happened to you? Things are going pretty well, you understand everything that is being said and suddenly an idea pops into mind and you can't figure out how to express it. You struggle wanting to throw out a phrase or word in English knowing full well the person on the other side of the conversation won't have a clue what you mean. It's maddening.
I wonder how often this happened when we were children. As we were first learning our native language, how frequently did our own thoughts and ideas exceed the boundary of what we were capable of expressing. Infants, as they first learn and discover the world, surely encounter this frustration all the time. I know it happened with my own children when they were learning to talk and wanted to say something. Is that what happens when they babble? Is that how language is invented?
Another thing that I've found is that even after the conversation has ceased, the switchover continues for a bit. For example, last night, I had a chat with a friend in Chile. It was fairly late and before I go to bed, I'm in the habit of reading my scriptures and writing in my journal. So after making my farewells to her, I headed for my room. There, I found it was very hard to focus on the task at hand because I was attempting to mentally translate everything into Spanish as I read.
It seemed like every time I encountered a word or phrase that didn't translate things came to that full stop. Like there was a mental roadblock that kept me from continuing.
It's amazing to me how these things work. I'm just curious to find out not so much if, but how frequently this happens for people that speak or understand two or more languages.
No comments:
Post a Comment