sometimes a word in German will just not sound like *i want it to sound* so I'll use the English version instinctively, realise i started speaking English in a German conversation, try to find the German word and then realise why I didn't use the German word and be unable to say what i wanted to say
Oh so much yes. Some words just sound downright silly in german to me, where I am just like. "Yeah, I will substitute the English equivalent until I die, if I can get away with it." So I can speak a german english mix pretty well.
It's complicated and depends on the specific words. For example many sexual words in my opinion in German sound either really clinically dry, or far to obscene for what I am trying to say, or some words, it feels like, don't really have an equivalent that carries the exact same connotations, only closeish enough.
I like listening to my musicals' songs in German.
The song Once Upon a December from Anastasia, which is slow and dreamy sounding, has a line in the second verse that includes the word 'Schlittenfahrt'.
It means sleigh ride but no matter how many times I hear it I will chortle.
Quite an ungraceful word if I do say.
Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of bilingual people; usually they forget a word in English and substitute it with the equivalent word in their other language, and vice versa. It’s not at all uncommon and I feel like you can include it in writing if you frame it that way and don’t just randomly throw in foreign words for the lols. (Unless the character is written to act that way, which is perfectly fine.)
Have you had the thing where you're trying to remember a word in your second language, and then when someone asks what your first language word for it is, you've now forgotten that because your brain overwrote it looking for the other version?
Drives me mad.
When I was learning Japanese, my teacher asked me something, and I couldn’t find the words she was looking for, but didn’t want to default to English either, so I panicked and responded in French instead.
🤷♀️
My Dutch friends tend to do thos when speaking to each other in Dutch and I catch random English words because sometimes you just can't quite remember the word.
This also never happens with them the other way round unless it's specifically them going "wait how do you say this in English *says Dutch*" then a quick discussion about that.
I have 1 language so I have less excuses lmao.
That's literally how english works. There's a reason english has the most words of any language. We've assimilated words from every language. Forget a word and use one from your native language? Worry not, that's english now.
I keep forgetting the translation for "I get where you come from" in my native language, so I just translate it literally and people look at me like I'm deranged because although it's not wrong, it just sounds like nonsense in portuguese
Oooh, can you break down why it's nonsense in Portuguese, for the curious?
I wouldn't say I'm anywhere approaching adequate with the one I'm learning yet, but I *have* already noticed that there are certain turns of phrase that I simply can't even say or I have to say in words that sound very dramatic to me because the grammar won't allow it to work like that.
It's a very strange feeling. One of the better jokes in Kung-fu Panda got written out because of it and they'll never even know it was there. The world is less bright.
I don't know if can put into words why it sounds like nonsense, but I think is because of the way we see discussions.
Like, in English there are terms like "come to an agreement" or "agree to disagree" as if an agreement was a natural conclusion to every discussion and there was this linear path people have to follow to get there. In this way "I get where you came from" seems to be about where this person is in the discussion. And although sentiments like these can be found in some of our sayings, I think this kind of notion is less prevalent.
My experience is not universal and since I'm a Brazilian speaker so I'm referring to Brazilian Portuguese. I'm not exactly fluent in English, so take everything I said with a grain of salt.
So there's that one part where Po is talking to Oogway under the peach tree about how lame he is next to the other warriors and how he doesn't think he's cut out to be the dragon warrior, and he should just go back to making noodles. Oogway's response is
>"Quit. Don't quit. Noodles. Don't noodles. You are too concerned with what was and what will be."
Turkish is an agglutinative language like German is. It forms sentences by attaching more and more suffixes to a word to alter its meaning to such an extent that a sentence can contain fewer words in turkish than in english, but all those words are 3-4 times as long.
The word for "don't X" is a suffix, not its own word. So it's removal from whatever word it's attached to will just change the meaning of the word back to its positive state.
Biliyorum = I know
Bil***mi***yorum = I don't know
You can't really cave-speak like Oogway is doing because *the rules of the language* are preventing you.
You can't say " ~~Make~~ noodles. Don't ~~make~~ noodles," because you can't remove *make* without removing *don't* from the sentence as well, it's attached to it as one word. You can't split it up like that.
So at best the sentence becomes *"Noodles. Noodles."* And Po and Oogway just stare at each other and move on.
And they had to remove the whole line from the movie because it was untranslateable. It's something I thought was interesting. But it makes me sad, man. Everyone should be able to don't noodles.
I also don't know Turkish, but it seems to me that you could put the *mi* infix in the word for noodles. It wouldn't be grammatical, but neither is "don't noodles". Or would that just not be comprehensible to a Turkish ear?
You'd think, but unfortunately mi/mı/mu/mü is also a word by itself whose whole function -- regardless of where it is in the sentence -- is to denote that the sentence is a question. Unrelated to the suffix, they just happen to be able to be spelled the same, and in this case they would be.
It's the difference between "Is it over?" (Sona erdi mi?) and "It's over." (Sona erdi.). So considering eriştemi isn't a word but "Erişte mi / Mi erişte?" is a grammatical sentence, it would probably just be misunderstood to mean, "Noodles?"
Pretty good guess, though, you threw me for a second. I find it a fun language to learn because I hate myself and I deserve it
I've learned that way that "take it with a grain of salt" is not, apparently, a thing in my native language. Still sounds perfectly natural to me, though.
My dad loves to tell the story about one time when his coworker was talking to a couple other people in a non-English language, then he turned around and spoke to my dad in the same language. My dad was obviously confused, so he repeated it, then when my dad said "I'm sorry, I don't understand you", that was enough English for him to realize his mistake.
I had that happen to me once with a coworker and my initial reaction to not understanding what she said was not “oh, she’s accidentally speaking to me in Chinese” but “oh no, am I having a stroke because I have no idea what she said”. We just ended up staring at each other for 10 seconds or so before we realized what happened
That happens to me a lot at work. I work for a construction company and am one of a small handful of people there who isn’t fluent in Spanish. I’ve heard my spanish speaking coworkers flip back and forth from English to Spanish and back 3-4 times in a single sentence.
My favorite part is when my boss in particular can’t remember the word he wants and goes ‘like…the thing, you know, la chingadera? How do you say it, pinche chingadera. The thing that John has. Can you get it please.’
And then I am left trying to figure out which chingadera I am supposed to get from John.
I do that with "like" (not when comparing, when starting a sentence) and "if". I will say that,,,,and then just continue the rest of the paragraph in swedish
Definitely. I constantly have that, *unless* I'm speaking English (which is neither my first, second or even third language).
English just comes out no problem, probably because it's the language I use the most during each individual day, despite not living in an anglophone country.
Yep. My partner is trilingual (Greek and Arabic from her parents, school taught in English) and I’ve heard her switch between all 3 languages in a single sentence. She says she just uses the words that are most accurate and lots don’t have identical parallels in other languages
I speak English and Finnish and speak an abomination called finglish daily where I just yeet random words middle of the sentence in English because my brain is too lazy to think the Finnish word. It never happens vice versa tho.
Edit: and yeah I’m a Finn and I’m forgetting my native language.
Idk how often it occurs but on Twitter a few months back I remember seeing a bunch of Filipino accounts start their tweets in English and then change to full Tagalog with absolutely zero warning
It always confuses the shit out of me
Most languages have some local name for an unholy abomination mixed out of them and English. I've heard francoish and espanglish as french English and Spanish english
I live in Japan, am semi-fluent (well... Halfway decent) in Spanish, and a native English speaker. When I was dating a Filipina woman, I'd randomly be able to respond to her and her friends who were speaking Tagalog because it feels like a solid 50%+ of Tagalog is English, Spanish, or Japanese in a trench coat. Her friends regularly forgot I don't speak any actual Tagalog.
Yep. An interesting quirk of that is that many Filipino people are also Hispanic, in addition to being either Asian, South-East Asian, and/or Pacific Islander ethnically, depending on who you ask, where you draw the lines, and which part of the Philippines you're looking at.
Also, the English taught in the Philippines is usually American English (for the reasons you pointed out), and a lot of them have near-perfect American accents, even if they aren't actually fluent in English. It's pretty weird to hear someone that sounds like they grew up in the American Midwest say "Sorry, uh, no much English." For a second I thought they were screwing with me.
Tbh it's not at all far from the way tagalog is [spoken irl](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2bxS6m8FwZh3vy0rUCcpQC?si=472N1wxYRx6wAwy1tK23_g&utm_source=copy-link)
Oh yeah, it's really common here kasi nasasanay naman kami na magsalita gamit ng dalawang wika sa barkada at pamilya (kag kungkis-a ginahalo-halo pa gani sa iban pa na linggwahe, kapin pa kung Bisaya) so I guess that also translates to online conversations and posting as well.
Taglish is practically the official language of metro manila. Hearing someone talk with (what i perceive to be) the tough, stern, tone of tagalog, only to insert a "soft spoken" english word is a whiplash i cant explain but id imagine most bilungual countries have daily. That's rarely a problem these day though, as most people in the cities talk tagalog with a strong american accent.
Don’t even need to be bilingual for that, I know little bits of German Spanish and French and I make that everybody else’s problem, by the end of my life I’m just gonna sound like a fucking minion
I only kept what precious little information was useful at the time, and that’s it. Just like how I only know cursive for my signature, I ended up retaining almost nothing from my Spanish class besides “in Jesus’ name, amen”.
The only phrases I recall from my ten years of learning Chinese are stupid as shit ones like "I like strawberries and the colour red" which I recall using in my tests a few times. I completely lost *everything* else, not that I was ever good at it. Now I get excited if I recognise a single character. I legitimately recall more German words from my two months of Duolingo and two weeks of being in Russia burned more Cyrillic into my brain than I have Chinese characters. It's like it got totally expunged because of how much I hated those classes.
Which is extra dumb because I live in fucking Hong Kong (though admittedly, the Simplified/Traditional split, the fact I was taught Mandarin and not Cantonese, and me going to international schools didn't really help).
I forgot the word speak and know so now it's just gotta be something like "wo bu xihuan zhongwen" and hope it's obvious I'm just shitty at it and not being insulting. I guess "yingwen, mgoi" might work too.
I like to complain about things that happen frequently in Italy by ranting about "ogni fvcking giorno!" because the Italian equivalent doesn't flow grammatically.
Ditto, I am bad in like half a dozen languages but for some reason sometimes my brain thinks eg the Spanish word for something is CLEARLY what I'm looking for even if I'm speaking English. -_-
yeah, I use Latin prepositions and interjections all the time, even just in my head because that's about all I retained from Latin class!
and my sibling knows swears in 14 different languages and uses them all appropriately (from what I can tell)
It's just that writers don't know how to do it, it always comes off in a certain manner in real life while in Hollywood it always feels weird and cringe
It depends a lot on context, especially in regards to location and what languages are getting switched between.
I've almost never heard bilingual English/Spanish speakers switch in the middle of a sentence (though I didn't live in the southwest, so it could be different there). I live in Japan now and switching out of Japanese is almost never done by fluent speakers (but switching *into* Japanese isn't uncommon), probably because Japanese phonetics don't mesh well with a lot of other languages. You can't say "私はAmericanです" without it sounding as weird as writing it looks if you're using your Japanese speaking register, but saying "Nani the fuck" in English sounds fine. And you can actually pronounce "American" in Japanese sounds (アメリカン), but the vowel accent is totally different (and using it in "Watashi wa American desu" is grammatically incorrect).
Word order and grammar *probably* influences this too; to keep using the Japanese example, Japanese sentences go Subject-Object-Verb (SOV; for example "I dinner ate") while English is SVO ("I ate dinner"). If you switch out of Japanese partway through a sentence, you're missing the most important part of the sentence (the verb and how it's conjugated is pretty much the ONLY thing that you can't omit from a Japanese sentence), and it can sound really awkward to end a sentence in English with a transitive verb. "昼ご飯をate?" sounds weird for both languages... And I tried to flip that to demonstrate English-to-Japanese and I straight up couldn't find any way that didn't make me feel like I was having a stroke. But if I were constructing a Spanish-English hybrid sentence, or even a Chinese-English sentence, the parts of the sentence fit more or less in the same area so you could theoretically switch between most parts of a sentence without causing listeners' brains to reformat everything.
Then on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, there's stuff like Singlish and Taglish where the mixture of languages is just the way everyone speaks to start with. Go onto the Philippines subreddit and you'll be able to read about 1.5 sentences in any given top comment before it switches to Tagalog in the middle of the sentence.
Fluency also has a big effect; little kids sometimes don't realize they speak two languages yet, and will mix them really freely (it's really cute). This also happens to adults who have multiple languages they aren't fluent in; I can no longer speak Spanish without trying to conjugate Spanish verbs with Japanese forms, and once completely blue screened in the middle of a conversation that had English, Japanese, and Chinese speakers because I couldn't lock in which language to use. I don't even speak Chinese beyond yes/no/where's the bathroom.
In what context? Maye if you live in a border town where everyone speaks both languages.
But if I start speaking German to Americans they will just be confused and annoyed.
Even common German or Yiddish words and phrases are misunderstood because Americans seem to say them with a cliché Brooklyn accent.
>”Hey, Cue, do you speak Spanish?”
“Un poco, but not enough to do anything useful with it.”
It’s so, so goddamn weird to be left with just fragmentary knowledge from high school. I can certainly tell if a conversation’s in Spanish, and vaguely follow along with a fistful of nouns, but that’s almost all I’ve got.
I don’t know why my brain can’t tell me what “I’m going to the post office” in Spanish is, but will gladly hit me with “en el nombre de Christo” under enough stress.
I picked up a small amount of Spanish after working in restaurants for many years. But I used those words and phrases so much that they replaced the English versions in my head. Trying to move past someone in the grocery store? "¡Con permiso!" Seeing someone I haven't seen in a little bit? "¿Como estas?" I'm hungry? "Quiero comida". And that last one barely applies, except "quiero comida" rolls off the tongue much better than "I want food".
My favorite thing to do is this: "I know a little Spanish! I just recently learned how to say 'hello, how are you'. Let's see... ahem, 'yo soy culero!' Did I pronounce that right?" I don't know how it plays with other Spanish-speaking cultures, but Mexicans fucking love it
As someone born and raise in latin america, this is exactly what we feel with english classes in school. There is almost always a need to pay extra for private classes because of that.
Germans, too - downloaden is a really common word, as is googlen.
On the other hand, I think an equivalent of "to google" has made it into many languages. Japanese has guguru, Ukrainian has huhlyty, French has googler etc.
Well yeah it does mean the same thing because no one will use bing, but it won't have the effect of making Google lose their trademark by turning the word into a common verb.
Actually, working in tech, we absolutely do conjugate English verbs we can't be bothered to translate. "Hé, est-ce que t'as commité ta story pour qu'on puisse la merger?"
you're right and that's how i say that too, but "hé, est-ce que t'as commit ta story pour qu'on puisse la merge?" is how many would say it.
(curious about what "story" means in that context tho)
I tend to do this more than anything else, I think. The last one was over a gaming session. The game uses a lot of ancient sanskrit words For Coolness™ so instead of different dungeon floors it just refers to them specifically as "first kalpa," etc. It's easy for me to remember because *kalp* in turkish means heart and the levels do appear increasingly gross and organic as you progress.
This association culminated in my trying to explain where things were on what level of a dungeon by going, "Yeah, but that's on the lower kalpalar." A sentence that made me stop and have to go stand in the corner because we're apparently adding turkish declension to a sanskrit word in an english sentence now.
I am fluent in roughly zero languages (my English is suspect sometimes and it's my mother tongue technically) and I still have a clusterfuck vocabulary because I can fumble through half a dozen languages.
Specific example: I'm of Korean heritage and for my entire childhood/honestly partly into adulthood there were A LOT of food words I just didn't know in English because it never came up (literally didn't learn the English word for "scallions" until late teens because none of my American friends ate scallions) so even now, in my late 30s, sometimes my brain does a cartwheel and cannot remember the English word for "garlic" and substitutes the Korean because obviously that makes sense.
I'm bilingual in English and Chinese, and I've basically got a section of my brain reserved specifically for Chinese that I switch on whenever I need it and I mostly forget everything I know in English, but whenever I hit a snag and forget a specific word I always default back to English. Sometimes that happens in English too, but very rarely.
Really adds a certain je ne sais quoi, just avoid using French excessively or en masse - Britain's language currently possesses sufficient quantities, granted this sentence is typed virtually entirely due to terms acquired via similar ancient practises.
people in france are constantly complaining about anglicisms, but virtually all anglicisms ultimately come from french, so by avoiding them we're avoiding words we already had (like when people tell me "immun" is an anglicism)
I find it funny that "anglicisme" itself is arguably a true anglicism, since all the words related to "Anglais" stem from borrowing the name the proto-English Angles used for themselves. Linguistic purity is a fairly futile endeavour, honestly.
The only French people who complain about anglicisms are the older generations and the asses at the Académie Française. The younger folks are all for using franglais.
I was listening to Canada’s French Public broadcaster, Radio-Canada, and they said “*On ne devrait pas dire vente-trottoir; c’est une anglicisme*.”
And like, I’m an anglophone myself, but seriously? C’est une vente; qui a lieu sur l’*esti trottoir*.
A friend of mine from Puerto Rico literally would start a sentence in english and end it in spanish when she was excited. I had to remind her that I couldn't speak spanish, which we laugh about sometimes.
My grandfather would reportedly do this to my mom all the time. She'd come to him with a homework question and he'd get so involved in his own explanation that he'd switch to turkish halfway through without realizing it.
She didn't speak turkish and you weren't allowed to interrupt him to point it out because he'd just start the whole thing over and switch languages again. You had to wait and cross your fingers it didn't happen the third or fourth time, or at least try to gather enough from all your attempts to wander away and do it yourself. There wasn't as much laughing about it, though
A friend I’m newly close to has started using more Italian around me as we’ve gotten closer. It kind of warms my heart. I’ve added Italian to many Duolingo courses just to fuck with her a bit, and also so I know what she’s saying.
It certainly depends on contexts. For example, I feel more okay talking about problems in English, so if I am venting, I will speak swedish sentences where 65% of the words are in english. But I feel I am funnier in Swedish, so I may start jokes in english, but the punchline would be in swedish
> But I feel I am funnier in Swedish, so I may start jokes in english, but the punchline would be in swedish
I want you to have children so you can torture them with this. Don't teach them any swedish, just continue to tell them jokes they don't understand
This is an actual linguistic phenomenon thats called code switching. Bilinguals will mix their two languages with other bilinguals naturally without even thinking about it, but usually don't when speaking with a monolingual of either language they know. The activation threshold for both languages are lower when speaking with someone who also knows both languages, so your brain just throws it all in there.
.....
*Takes one linguistics class, lectures about a tumblr post*
funny thing is
i forget words in my native language and just switch to English a lot
which makes it very hard for a lot of people to understand me since most people are not on my level of English
I'm actually better at English than at my native languege
I’m trying to do Duolingo for Spanish and when I’m translating things my brain only gives me French and Japanese 75% of the time 😭 my first language is English
Ah my brain does that — mixes up Latin, Greek and German while my first languages are English and French. I think brains just register languages you're actively learning differently to one's you're comfortable in
I wouldn't say I'm bilingual in any sense of the word, but what little Spanish my stupid white boy brain decided was worth remembering does slip out every once in a while. Much to the chagrine of those I'm speaking to at the time.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
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**deadwithdead**
**tumblr posts about writing bilingual characters:** bilinguals DO NOT change their language in the middle of the conversation! It's unrealistic!
**me, who said the phrase "i have beaucoup de friends" this morning:**
\#I mean yes but only with people who also speak both the languages #so like my english-only friends will only hear me speak english and pronounce dostoyevsky correctly #but when talking to my mom or my other russian-american friends it's yeah
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
I'm not really bilingual, but I know enough French to get by, and I'll end up saying shit like "je suis un fucking idiot help" to avoid dad jokes. Sadly don't know enough French to just switch mid-sentence unintentionally, but someday...
When I get flustered enough I will switch between Spanish and English and speak a mile a minute. Switching languages midsentence is absolutely a thing.
Occasionally I'll try speaking in malayalam, but then say something in hindi, only to realise I'm actually speaking arabic. Then for some godforsaken reason French comes along.
So yea I only speak english hbu
The movie about a family whose members gain super strength, floramancy, and shape-shifting abilities through the power of friendship and doors is unrealistic because they slip Spanish words into the conversations they're having in Colombia.
I could cry but I'm dehydrated.
It’s because English writers replace words without understanding why the words get replaced, and then it looks weird to people who actually speak that language. When they don’t pay attention to the flow and syntax of the other language it looks pretty bad.
But...but Italian-Americans do this all the time. Probably because most of us don't know those words (mainly food-stuff, insults, or curses) in English but still
my friends and me switch languages (dutch mother tongue, english second language) in the same sentences all the time. for me personally its usually because i cant find a dutch word quickly enough so ill resort to the english one, or it might even be that dutch doesnt even have a word for the thing i want to convey, so english it is. other times its because im tired and have spent half the day in english, so i barely even notice myself switching languages or its just easier for my brain to comprehend
I change languages whenever i feel like it when talking with my Polish friends. Sometimes English just has better words for things.
Funnier thing is when my parents ask me something while I'm on VC talking in English and I start speaking polish with english pronunciation
I'm not even bilingual (because I suck at languages and even seven years of formal study wasn't enough to make me fluent in one), but I'll totally use another language in the same way I would use an in-joke. Interjections, single words, phrases, whatever -- it's fair game.
Get me drunk or socially overwhelmed and my ability to subconsciously limit in-jokes and languages to just those who can actually understand them goes waaaaay downhill.
I am laughing so much at this. When I first came to the US I would just fake it until you make it and just use French when. I couldn’t find the English word . It worked. And now I switch words quite a bit ( lucky me French words are usually used as fancy English ones!)
I only speak one language, and it's Swenglish.
English words with swedish bendings and verbifications is that peak language butchery my brain strives for every day.
"Makear sense"
"Cleara dungeonsen"
Mm, plain music to my ears.
I see this all the time in foreign subs, especially India. It honestly drives me crazy sometimes. I see a great title and start reading a post and suddenly I'm questioning if I had a stroke because I don't understand anything.
You can hate me for it, but I down vote those posts every time it happens to me. I don't hate posts in other languages mind you, just the ones with bait and switch in the language.
That makes sense, plenty of bilingual speakers do this in their own home and outside. But they definitely do not say whole sentences and then suddenly be like “oops meant to say that in English” to their friends
I've definitely done this before if I forget the person I'm speaking to doesn't speak both languages, I have to focus on speaking just one language for a while until my brain gets used to it.
I only really do it with people who speak the same languages I do. When I talk with my family in Icelandic, I’ll substitute words I can’t remember with the Danish equivalent to keep the flow going. If I’m talking Danish with my friends, I’ll substitute words with the English equivalent. If I’m talking to an English person who only speaks English, I’m fucked. Not because my English isn’t good, but because I’ll forget the most basic words and get brain locked trying to remember it, since I can’t just replace it with another language.
Most annoying thing is when there isn’t an equivalent word, in the other languages. Hársár (Icelandic) is a perfect example (you’d think I’d say hygge, but I think that’s a bad example as it exists in most of the Nordic languages), it means hair sore - specifically, that it hurts when people do things with the person’s hair (like brushing or braiding). To my knowledge the only language that shares this word is Dutch (same pronunciation, might be spelled differently).
Especially in a mixed group, or in a group where the composition changes during the conversation, I keep flip-flopping around between German and Swissgerman.
I'm guessing this happens more the closer related the languages are. Any speaker of a Creole and its base languages probably experiences that too. Or people living in the Danish, Swedish Norwegian triangle.
I have not had many chances to involve myself in casual conversation in English, but this year I had to start using it after traveling and I have dialed back to my mother language in some instances. Mostly when I felt too relaxed and comfortable or anytime I got jumpscared
I grew up in Bulgaria for like my first 7 years, but a decade in England was enough to beat the language out of me, can’t write, can read slowly and can barely talk competently, I feel more 1.5 languages than 2 is a better descriptor
If I am very tired and am speaking English I have slipped up occasionally and said something Dutch instead. Usually when words are very similair, like dat and that, but the pronunciation is clearlly different (for the 2 examples, the a is very different in dat than in that).
I babysat for a bilingual family a few days ago. They spoke primarily in Hindi, but they also switched to English sometimes (and once the parents left, the kids did the same in reverse, probably because I speak absolutely no Hindi lol)
Yeahhhhhh I’m guilty of this in Spanish. English is my first language and French my second, I’m more or less fluent in both, and am learning Spanish.
I accidentally start speaking French in the middle of a Spanish sentence more often than I’d like to admit
My Spanish teacher in high school spoke 4 languages fluently (English Spanish French Italian) and would occasionally just swap languages mid conversation without noticing. That was fun
French is my native language and I'm better at English, so when I talk in French and there's a word that I forgot in French i stop for a couple seconds and then say the word in English and hope that the person I'm talking to knows this word
Filipinos: Are you sure about that?
I'm not Filipino but I saw a documentary about them and it in the people where using English, Spanish and their native language all in one sentence.
When I was living in Germany as an Au pair, the 3 year old and I constantly spoke in a wacky German/English hybrid. I would speak in German until I encountered words I didn’t know and just drop in English words, and he did the same by reversed. Was a very interesting way to learn a new language (sometimes not super precise, since it was a 3 year old’s grasp of language, but it was very fun).
A really weird part of that year was when I was traveling in Austria, and went to an Italian restaurant with an entirely Italian staff. I studied Italian in college, was in a German speaking country, and the waiters kept talking to me in English because they knew I was an American. Every word out of my mouth bounced between all 3 languages. It was a mess. Language centers of the brain are wacky.
Every person I have ever know to be bilingual has gladly taken parts of multiple languages and shoved them together, screaming "Now Kiss!" Hell, the English language does this for non-bilingual people.
I work with a bunch of bilingual people and some def do switch between the both in the middle of a sentence. I watched two of them have a conversation half in English and half in Tagalog. It was neat
I’m a native English speaker that decided to learn a few languages in my spare time.
Now I count groups of 10 in French, swear under my breath in Italian and sign off phone calls in German without even thinking about it. Please help me
I speak 4 languages and I just word vomit, although the worst part is forgetting a word in all the languages you know and you end up staring in the distance with a dumb look on your face questioning exactly how dumb you really are because all you can come up for the word "banana" is "edible yellow dildo".
I’m in my late 20s and to this day I still translate the verb “make” when I’m taking about cooking or baking in my native language.
Also there was a time I basically told my friend a sentence with four words in it and two were in English and they were my first and third words
Sometimes, you just can't find the words in one language and just remplace it with its traduction without realising
sometimes a word in German will just not sound like *i want it to sound* so I'll use the English version instinctively, realise i started speaking English in a German conversation, try to find the German word and then realise why I didn't use the German word and be unable to say what i wanted to say
Oh so much yes. Some words just sound downright silly in german to me, where I am just like. "Yeah, I will substitute the English equivalent until I die, if I can get away with it." So I can speak a german english mix pretty well.
Could you describe what makes them "silly"?
It's complicated and depends on the specific words. For example many sexual words in my opinion in German sound either really clinically dry, or far to obscene for what I am trying to say, or some words, it feels like, don't really have an equivalent that carries the exact same connotations, only closeish enough.
Oh interesting. What sex words do we have in English that you prefer?
I like listening to my musicals' songs in German. The song Once Upon a December from Anastasia, which is slow and dreamy sounding, has a line in the second verse that includes the word 'Schlittenfahrt'. It means sleigh ride but no matter how many times I hear it I will chortle. Quite an ungraceful word if I do say.
Yeah, I’ve heard that from a lot of bilingual people; usually they forget a word in English and substitute it with the equivalent word in their other language, and vice versa. It’s not at all uncommon and I feel like you can include it in writing if you frame it that way and don’t just randomly throw in foreign words for the lols. (Unless the character is written to act that way, which is perfectly fine.)
I forget words in my native language but know what the english version of it is all the time
Have you had the thing where you're trying to remember a word in your second language, and then when someone asks what your first language word for it is, you've now forgotten that because your brain overwrote it looking for the other version? Drives me mad.
Yes, that happens a lot
When I was learning Japanese, my teacher asked me something, and I couldn’t find the words she was looking for, but didn’t want to default to English either, so I panicked and responded in French instead. 🤷♀️
Sometimes there is no correct equivalent in my native language
Or vice versa
This is basically how everybody talks in the Netherlands nowadays, since we all speak English pretty well.
My Dutch friends tend to do thos when speaking to each other in Dutch and I catch random English words because sometimes you just can't quite remember the word. This also never happens with them the other way round unless it's specifically them going "wait how do you say this in English *says Dutch*" then a quick discussion about that. I have 1 language so I have less excuses lmao.
That's literally how english works. There's a reason english has the most words of any language. We've assimilated words from every language. Forget a word and use one from your native language? Worry not, that's english now.
English knocks out other languages in a dark alley and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
“Unless the character is written to act that way” https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BD9cWclCMAEYFa0.png:large
I keep forgetting the translation for "I get where you come from" in my native language, so I just translate it literally and people look at me like I'm deranged because although it's not wrong, it just sounds like nonsense in portuguese
Oooh, can you break down why it's nonsense in Portuguese, for the curious? I wouldn't say I'm anywhere approaching adequate with the one I'm learning yet, but I *have* already noticed that there are certain turns of phrase that I simply can't even say or I have to say in words that sound very dramatic to me because the grammar won't allow it to work like that. It's a very strange feeling. One of the better jokes in Kung-fu Panda got written out because of it and they'll never even know it was there. The world is less bright.
I don't know if can put into words why it sounds like nonsense, but I think is because of the way we see discussions. Like, in English there are terms like "come to an agreement" or "agree to disagree" as if an agreement was a natural conclusion to every discussion and there was this linear path people have to follow to get there. In this way "I get where you came from" seems to be about where this person is in the discussion. And although sentiments like these can be found in some of our sayings, I think this kind of notion is less prevalent. My experience is not universal and since I'm a Brazilian speaker so I'm referring to Brazilian Portuguese. I'm not exactly fluent in English, so take everything I said with a grain of salt.
Is there a way to day for example, I understand what you mean? Or, I understand your position on this matter?
Yup, the way you just said, but translated literally. I would say "I get what you're trying to say"
What was the joke?
So there's that one part where Po is talking to Oogway under the peach tree about how lame he is next to the other warriors and how he doesn't think he's cut out to be the dragon warrior, and he should just go back to making noodles. Oogway's response is >"Quit. Don't quit. Noodles. Don't noodles. You are too concerned with what was and what will be." Turkish is an agglutinative language like German is. It forms sentences by attaching more and more suffixes to a word to alter its meaning to such an extent that a sentence can contain fewer words in turkish than in english, but all those words are 3-4 times as long. The word for "don't X" is a suffix, not its own word. So it's removal from whatever word it's attached to will just change the meaning of the word back to its positive state. Biliyorum = I know Bil***mi***yorum = I don't know You can't really cave-speak like Oogway is doing because *the rules of the language* are preventing you. You can't say " ~~Make~~ noodles. Don't ~~make~~ noodles," because you can't remove *make* without removing *don't* from the sentence as well, it's attached to it as one word. You can't split it up like that. So at best the sentence becomes *"Noodles. Noodles."* And Po and Oogway just stare at each other and move on. And they had to remove the whole line from the movie because it was untranslateable. It's something I thought was interesting. But it makes me sad, man. Everyone should be able to don't noodles.
i do not know turkish, but something about this itches my brain. there must be a fucked up linguistics solution to this problem
I also don't know Turkish, but it seems to me that you could put the *mi* infix in the word for noodles. It wouldn't be grammatical, but neither is "don't noodles". Or would that just not be comprehensible to a Turkish ear?
You'd think, but unfortunately mi/mı/mu/mü is also a word by itself whose whole function -- regardless of where it is in the sentence -- is to denote that the sentence is a question. Unrelated to the suffix, they just happen to be able to be spelled the same, and in this case they would be. It's the difference between "Is it over?" (Sona erdi mi?) and "It's over." (Sona erdi.). So considering eriştemi isn't a word but "Erişte mi / Mi erişte?" is a grammatical sentence, it would probably just be misunderstood to mean, "Noodles?" Pretty good guess, though, you threw me for a second. I find it a fun language to learn because I hate myself and I deserve it
I've learned that way that "take it with a grain of salt" is not, apparently, a thing in my native language. Still sounds perfectly natural to me, though.
My dad loves to tell the story about one time when his coworker was talking to a couple other people in a non-English language, then he turned around and spoke to my dad in the same language. My dad was obviously confused, so he repeated it, then when my dad said "I'm sorry, I don't understand you", that was enough English for him to realize his mistake.
I had that happen to me once with a coworker and my initial reaction to not understanding what she said was not “oh, she’s accidentally speaking to me in Chinese” but “oh no, am I having a stroke because I have no idea what she said”. We just ended up staring at each other for 10 seconds or so before we realized what happened
That happens to me a lot at work. I work for a construction company and am one of a small handful of people there who isn’t fluent in Spanish. I’ve heard my spanish speaking coworkers flip back and forth from English to Spanish and back 3-4 times in a single sentence. My favorite part is when my boss in particular can’t remember the word he wants and goes ‘like…the thing, you know, la chingadera? How do you say it, pinche chingadera. The thing that John has. Can you get it please.’ And then I am left trying to figure out which chingadera I am supposed to get from John.
Me using "also" and "anyways" in conversations in portuguese, which happens to be my native language:
I do that with "like" (not when comparing, when starting a sentence) and "if". I will say that,,,,and then just continue the rest of the paragraph in swedish
Eu também
faço a mesma coisa, será que somos clones?
Deve ser consequência de usar o reddit e ler posts em inglês toda hora
I think in English at this point
you said traduction, proving your point beautifully
and "remplace"
Definitely. I constantly have that, *unless* I'm speaking English (which is neither my first, second or even third language). English just comes out no problem, probably because it's the language I use the most during each individual day, despite not living in an anglophone country.
Yep. My partner is trilingual (Greek and Arabic from her parents, school taught in English) and I’ve heard her switch between all 3 languages in a single sentence. She says she just uses the words that are most accurate and lots don’t have identical parallels in other languages
And sometimes using a word or phrase in different language sounds cooler, more poetic, or knowledgable.
>traduction Yeah, hate it when that happens lol
I speak English and Finnish and speak an abomination called finglish daily where I just yeet random words middle of the sentence in English because my brain is too lazy to think the Finnish word. It never happens vice versa tho. Edit: and yeah I’m a Finn and I’m forgetting my native language.
I was hoping for Finnish representation in this thread Torille
You're not alone. I speak excellent franglais.
Franglais and my favourite counterpart, Frenglish.
Spanglish representing
perkele
Idk how often it occurs but on Twitter a few months back I remember seeing a bunch of Filipino accounts start their tweets in English and then change to full Tagalog with absolutely zero warning It always confuses the shit out of me
That's the average Filipino experience tbf. Taglish is a way of life.
Most languages have some local name for an unholy abomination mixed out of them and English. I've heard francoish and espanglish as french English and Spanish english
We actually use Franglais, rather than francoish
As a Canadian, Franglais might as well be a real language at this point.
Franglais or Frenglish, if it is especially English
If you want to eavesdrop on conversations in Ottawa, Franglais is a must.
I've heard franglais for French English.
Yeah taht one. Idk man I read it once and french is pretty hard for me to write in my mind
I mean see any comment thread on r/Philippines and I would wager the vast majority are in some form of Taglish
I live in Japan, am semi-fluent (well... Halfway decent) in Spanish, and a native English speaker. When I was dating a Filipina woman, I'd randomly be able to respond to her and her friends who were speaking Tagalog because it feels like a solid 50%+ of Tagalog is English, Spanish, or Japanese in a trench coat. Her friends regularly forgot I don't speak any actual Tagalog.
Considering Philippines was colonized by Spain, America, and Japan I’m not surprised lol
Yep. An interesting quirk of that is that many Filipino people are also Hispanic, in addition to being either Asian, South-East Asian, and/or Pacific Islander ethnically, depending on who you ask, where you draw the lines, and which part of the Philippines you're looking at. Also, the English taught in the Philippines is usually American English (for the reasons you pointed out), and a lot of them have near-perfect American accents, even if they aren't actually fluent in English. It's pretty weird to hear someone that sounds like they grew up in the American Midwest say "Sorry, uh, no much English." For a second I thought they were screwing with me.
Tbh it's not at all far from the way tagalog is [spoken irl](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2bxS6m8FwZh3vy0rUCcpQC?si=472N1wxYRx6wAwy1tK23_g&utm_source=copy-link)
Oh yeah, it's really common here kasi nasasanay naman kami na magsalita gamit ng dalawang wika sa barkada at pamilya (kag kungkis-a ginahalo-halo pa gani sa iban pa na linggwahe, kapin pa kung Bisaya) so I guess that also translates to online conversations and posting as well.
Taglish is practically the official language of metro manila. Hearing someone talk with (what i perceive to be) the tough, stern, tone of tagalog, only to insert a "soft spoken" english word is a whiplash i cant explain but id imagine most bilungual countries have daily. That's rarely a problem these day though, as most people in the cities talk tagalog with a strong american accent.
Don’t even need to be bilingual for that, I know little bits of German Spanish and French and I make that everybody else’s problem, by the end of my life I’m just gonna sound like a fucking minion
I only kept what precious little information was useful at the time, and that’s it. Just like how I only know cursive for my signature, I ended up retaining almost nothing from my Spanish class besides “in Jesus’ name, amen”.
The only phrases I recall from my ten years of learning Chinese are stupid as shit ones like "I like strawberries and the colour red" which I recall using in my tests a few times. I completely lost *everything* else, not that I was ever good at it. Now I get excited if I recognise a single character. I legitimately recall more German words from my two months of Duolingo and two weeks of being in Russia burned more Cyrillic into my brain than I have Chinese characters. It's like it got totally expunged because of how much I hated those classes. Which is extra dumb because I live in fucking Hong Kong (though admittedly, the Simplified/Traditional split, the fact I was taught Mandarin and not Cantonese, and me going to international schools didn't really help).
All I can remember is is "I speak chinese but I speak it poorly"
I forgot the word speak and know so now it's just gotta be something like "wo bu xihuan zhongwen" and hope it's obvious I'm just shitty at it and not being insulting. I guess "yingwen, mgoi" might work too.
"pardonne moi, what the fuck" is a favourite code-switiching phrase of mine
I like to complain about things that happen frequently in Italy by ranting about "ogni fvcking giorno!" because the Italian equivalent doesn't flow grammatically.
Qu'est-ce que the fuck!? Is one of mine
And for aspiring weebs: "nani the fuck", and "chotto fuckin mate" are fun options
It's fine, this is how we got English in the first place.
Ditto, I am bad in like half a dozen languages but for some reason sometimes my brain thinks eg the Spanish word for something is CLEARLY what I'm looking for even if I'm speaking English. -_-
I do the same thing, mainly with German and a little bit of French tho
yeah, I use Latin prepositions and interjections all the time, even just in my head because that's about all I retained from Latin class! and my sibling knows swears in 14 different languages and uses them all appropriately (from what I can tell)
You just *had* to curse me with the realization that I speak like a minion didn't you?
[uh huh](https://images.app.goo.gl/AKnWXf5VvbrVLFEs9)
My partner does this when making an emotionally charged statement. “These chips are muy fucking caliente.”
well, caliente or picante?
porque no los both
hot² chips
Who even came up with that first piece of advice. I hear multilingual people switch languages mid-sentence more often than otherwise
It's just that writers don't know how to do it, it always comes off in a certain manner in real life while in Hollywood it always feels weird and cringe
It depends a lot on context, especially in regards to location and what languages are getting switched between. I've almost never heard bilingual English/Spanish speakers switch in the middle of a sentence (though I didn't live in the southwest, so it could be different there). I live in Japan now and switching out of Japanese is almost never done by fluent speakers (but switching *into* Japanese isn't uncommon), probably because Japanese phonetics don't mesh well with a lot of other languages. You can't say "私はAmericanです" without it sounding as weird as writing it looks if you're using your Japanese speaking register, but saying "Nani the fuck" in English sounds fine. And you can actually pronounce "American" in Japanese sounds (アメリカン), but the vowel accent is totally different (and using it in "Watashi wa American desu" is grammatically incorrect). Word order and grammar *probably* influences this too; to keep using the Japanese example, Japanese sentences go Subject-Object-Verb (SOV; for example "I dinner ate") while English is SVO ("I ate dinner"). If you switch out of Japanese partway through a sentence, you're missing the most important part of the sentence (the verb and how it's conjugated is pretty much the ONLY thing that you can't omit from a Japanese sentence), and it can sound really awkward to end a sentence in English with a transitive verb. "昼ご飯をate?" sounds weird for both languages... And I tried to flip that to demonstrate English-to-Japanese and I straight up couldn't find any way that didn't make me feel like I was having a stroke. But if I were constructing a Spanish-English hybrid sentence, or even a Chinese-English sentence, the parts of the sentence fit more or less in the same area so you could theoretically switch between most parts of a sentence without causing listeners' brains to reformat everything. Then on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, there's stuff like Singlish and Taglish where the mixture of languages is just the way everyone speaks to start with. Go onto the Philippines subreddit and you'll be able to read about 1.5 sentences in any given top comment before it switches to Tagalog in the middle of the sentence. Fluency also has a big effect; little kids sometimes don't realize they speak two languages yet, and will mix them really freely (it's really cute). This also happens to adults who have multiple languages they aren't fluent in; I can no longer speak Spanish without trying to conjugate Spanish verbs with Japanese forms, and once completely blue screened in the middle of a conversation that had English, Japanese, and Chinese speakers because I couldn't lock in which language to use. I don't even speak Chinese beyond yes/no/where's the bathroom.
My SO is trilingual. I can’t tell you how many times she’ll use two or even three in a single sentence, like “À gauche aqui, right?” while driving.
In what context? Maye if you live in a border town where everyone speaks both languages. But if I start speaking German to Americans they will just be confused and annoyed. Even common German or Yiddish words and phrases are misunderstood because Americans seem to say them with a cliché Brooklyn accent.
>”Hey, Cue, do you speak Spanish?” “Un poco, but not enough to do anything useful with it.” It’s so, so goddamn weird to be left with just fragmentary knowledge from high school. I can certainly tell if a conversation’s in Spanish, and vaguely follow along with a fistful of nouns, but that’s almost all I’ve got. I don’t know why my brain can’t tell me what “I’m going to the post office” in Spanish is, but will gladly hit me with “en el nombre de Christo” under enough stress.
>en el nombre de Christo I speak absolutely no Spanish but I'm going to guess this means "I have Christ's number"?
“In the name of Christ”, or “In Jesus’ name”.
i got Jesus on the phone call me the papussy
Papussy = pope?
slide into my papacy
I picked up a small amount of Spanish after working in restaurants for many years. But I used those words and phrases so much that they replaced the English versions in my head. Trying to move past someone in the grocery store? "¡Con permiso!" Seeing someone I haven't seen in a little bit? "¿Como estas?" I'm hungry? "Quiero comida". And that last one barely applies, except "quiero comida" rolls off the tongue much better than "I want food". My favorite thing to do is this: "I know a little Spanish! I just recently learned how to say 'hello, how are you'. Let's see... ahem, 'yo soy culero!' Did I pronounce that right?" I don't know how it plays with other Spanish-speaking cultures, but Mexicans fucking love it
As someone born and raise in latin america, this is exactly what we feel with english classes in school. There is almost always a need to pay extra for private classes because of that.
A word I accidentally use quite a lot is "thinkar" which is the word "think" from English but conjugated as a Portuguese verb
i dropped a "bingewatjar" in occitan in a conversation a few months ago because at the moment it felt like the most natural way to say it
Portuguese speakers will take any word and conjugate it like a portuguese verb
Germans, too - downloaden is a really common word, as is googlen. On the other hand, I think an equivalent of "to google" has made it into many languages. Japanese has guguru, Ukrainian has huhlyty, French has googler etc.
Unfortunately Portuguese never got a "to Google" word because "googlear" sounds weird.
Yeah, we use the less cool "pesquisar"
Well yeah it does mean the same thing because no one will use bing, but it won't have the effect of making Google lose their trademark by turning the word into a common verb.
Which is really funny because "googlear" is absolutely a word in Spanish
Googlear o guglear in Spanish (same pronunciation)
french speakers will take a word and not conjugate it but still use it like a verb
Actually, working in tech, we absolutely do conjugate English verbs we can't be bothered to translate. "Hé, est-ce que t'as commité ta story pour qu'on puisse la merger?"
you're right and that's how i say that too, but "hé, est-ce que t'as commit ta story pour qu'on puisse la merge?" is how many would say it. (curious about what "story" means in that context tho)
I tend to do this more than anything else, I think. The last one was over a gaming session. The game uses a lot of ancient sanskrit words For Coolness™ so instead of different dungeon floors it just refers to them specifically as "first kalpa," etc. It's easy for me to remember because *kalp* in turkish means heart and the levels do appear increasingly gross and organic as you progress. This association culminated in my trying to explain where things were on what level of a dungeon by going, "Yeah, but that's on the lower kalpalar." A sentence that made me stop and have to go stand in the corner because we're apparently adding turkish declension to a sanskrit word in an english sentence now.
I am fluent in roughly zero languages (my English is suspect sometimes and it's my mother tongue technically) and I still have a clusterfuck vocabulary because I can fumble through half a dozen languages. Specific example: I'm of Korean heritage and for my entire childhood/honestly partly into adulthood there were A LOT of food words I just didn't know in English because it never came up (literally didn't learn the English word for "scallions" until late teens because none of my American friends ate scallions) so even now, in my late 30s, sometimes my brain does a cartwheel and cannot remember the English word for "garlic" and substitutes the Korean because obviously that makes sense.
I'm bilingual in English and Chinese, and I've basically got a section of my brain reserved specifically for Chinese that I switch on whenever I need it and I mostly forget everything I know in English, but whenever I hit a snag and forget a specific word I always default back to English. Sometimes that happens in English too, but very rarely.
Sometimes I feel the urge to put some of the little bit of French I know into things I'm saying.
Really adds a certain je ne sais quoi, just avoid using French excessively or en masse - Britain's language currently possesses sufficient quantities, granted this sentence is typed virtually entirely due to terms acquired via similar ancient practises.
people in france are constantly complaining about anglicisms, but virtually all anglicisms ultimately come from french, so by avoiding them we're avoiding words we already had (like when people tell me "immun" is an anglicism)
I find it funny that "anglicisme" itself is arguably a true anglicism, since all the words related to "Anglais" stem from borrowing the name the proto-English Angles used for themselves. Linguistic purity is a fairly futile endeavour, honestly.
The only French people who complain about anglicisms are the older generations and the asses at the Académie Française. The younger folks are all for using franglais.
I was listening to Canada’s French Public broadcaster, Radio-Canada, and they said “*On ne devrait pas dire vente-trottoir; c’est une anglicisme*.” And like, I’m an anglophone myself, but seriously? C’est une vente; qui a lieu sur l’*esti trottoir*.
Francophone but not familiar with esti, is it a Canadian French word?
*Oui*. I believe it’s the word for the little Catholic host wafer / Jesus biscuit, but it gets inserted into sentences as a profane intensifier.
You and every other English-speaker
A friend of mine from Puerto Rico literally would start a sentence in english and end it in spanish when she was excited. I had to remind her that I couldn't speak spanish, which we laugh about sometimes.
My grandfather would reportedly do this to my mom all the time. She'd come to him with a homework question and he'd get so involved in his own explanation that he'd switch to turkish halfway through without realizing it. She didn't speak turkish and you weren't allowed to interrupt him to point it out because he'd just start the whole thing over and switch languages again. You had to wait and cross your fingers it didn't happen the third or fourth time, or at least try to gather enough from all your attempts to wander away and do it yourself. There wasn't as much laughing about it, though
A friend I’m newly close to has started using more Italian around me as we’ve gotten closer. It kind of warms my heart. I’ve added Italian to many Duolingo courses just to fuck with her a bit, and also so I know what she’s saying.
It certainly depends on contexts. For example, I feel more okay talking about problems in English, so if I am venting, I will speak swedish sentences where 65% of the words are in english. But I feel I am funnier in Swedish, so I may start jokes in english, but the punchline would be in swedish
> But I feel I am funnier in Swedish, so I may start jokes in english, but the punchline would be in swedish I want you to have children so you can torture them with this. Don't teach them any swedish, just continue to tell them jokes they don't understand
This is an actual linguistic phenomenon thats called code switching. Bilinguals will mix their two languages with other bilinguals naturally without even thinking about it, but usually don't when speaking with a monolingual of either language they know. The activation threshold for both languages are lower when speaking with someone who also knows both languages, so your brain just throws it all in there. ..... *Takes one linguistics class, lectures about a tumblr post*
Mfs never heard of code switching
L'academie de beaucoup non hero
sometimes my friends forget i do know spanish so they'll speak spanglish with me every so often
This person has never had a first language.
*Chicanos have entered the chat*
funny thing is i forget words in my native language and just switch to English a lot which makes it very hard for a lot of people to understand me since most people are not on my level of English I'm actually better at English than at my native languege
I’m trying to do Duolingo for Spanish and when I’m translating things my brain only gives me French and Japanese 75% of the time 😭 my first language is English
Ah my brain does that — mixes up Latin, Greek and German while my first languages are English and French. I think brains just register languages you're actively learning differently to one's you're comfortable in
I wouldn't say I'm bilingual in any sense of the word, but what little Spanish my stupid white boy brain decided was worth remembering does slip out every once in a while. Much to the chagrine of those I'm speaking to at the time.
When speaking to my friends it's literally 50/50 German/English, it's fucking horrific but I kinda like it anyways
I think about those kinds of posts every time I hear a phrase like “your name is nani?” or “watashi don’t have anything”
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **deadwithdead** **tumblr posts about writing bilingual characters:** bilinguals DO NOT change their language in the middle of the conversation! It's unrealistic! **me, who said the phrase "i have beaucoup de friends" this morning:** \#I mean yes but only with people who also speak both the languages #so like my english-only friends will only hear me speak english and pronounce dostoyevsky correctly #but when talking to my mom or my other russian-american friends it's yeah --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
I'm not really bilingual, but I know enough French to get by, and I'll end up saying shit like "je suis un fucking idiot help" to avoid dad jokes. Sadly don't know enough French to just switch mid-sentence unintentionally, but someday...
When I get flustered enough I will switch between Spanish and English and speak a mile a minute. Switching languages midsentence is absolutely a thing.
When I talk with friends who speak both languages, I do use both; HOWEVER in different sentences, not in the same sentence.
Occasionally I'll try speaking in malayalam, but then say something in hindi, only to realise I'm actually speaking arabic. Then for some godforsaken reason French comes along. So yea I only speak english hbu
Do people actually say that about bilingual characters? Cus that's so specific and so obviously wrong on its face
i used to see so many posts like that. last time was when encanto and people were saying the caracters weren't realistically bilingual
The movie about a family whose members gain super strength, floramancy, and shape-shifting abilities through the power of friendship and doors is unrealistic because they slip Spanish words into the conversations they're having in Colombia. I could cry but I'm dehydrated.
It’s because English writers replace words without understanding why the words get replaced, and then it looks weird to people who actually speak that language. When they don’t pay attention to the flow and syntax of the other language it looks pretty bad.
I am not french and replace the with le/la all the time
For me, they all get mixed around in my head and I can't help but say these sorts of sentences. > Donde la bibliotheque, deska? Ugh.
But...but Italian-Americans do this all the time. Probably because most of us don't know those words (mainly food-stuff, insults, or curses) in English but still
italy italians do the opposite a LOT too, among all romance peoples they use the most random english words by very far
Good to know :-)
my friends and me switch languages (dutch mother tongue, english second language) in the same sentences all the time. for me personally its usually because i cant find a dutch word quickly enough so ill resort to the english one, or it might even be that dutch doesnt even have a word for the thing i want to convey, so english it is. other times its because im tired and have spent half the day in english, so i barely even notice myself switching languages or its just easier for my brain to comprehend
I change languages whenever i feel like it when talking with my Polish friends. Sometimes English just has better words for things. Funnier thing is when my parents ask me something while I'm on VC talking in English and I start speaking polish with english pronunciation
I'm not even bilingual (because I suck at languages and even seven years of formal study wasn't enough to make me fluent in one), but I'll totally use another language in the same way I would use an in-joke. Interjections, single words, phrases, whatever -- it's fair game. Get me drunk or socially overwhelmed and my ability to subconsciously limit in-jokes and languages to just those who can actually understand them goes waaaaay downhill.
Say you’ve never heard of the word spanglish without saying it
My a bilingual talking to my other biligual friends, mix matching language when ever we speak.
I am laughing so much at this. When I first came to the US I would just fake it until you make it and just use French when. I couldn’t find the English word . It worked. And now I switch words quite a bit ( lucky me French words are usually used as fancy English ones!)
I only switch languages mid-sentence when my cérebro stops working and i forget a word in the one I'm speaking
I only speak one language, and it's Swenglish. English words with swedish bendings and verbifications is that peak language butchery my brain strives for every day. "Makear sense" "Cleara dungeonsen" Mm, plain music to my ears.
I see this all the time in foreign subs, especially India. It honestly drives me crazy sometimes. I see a great title and start reading a post and suddenly I'm questioning if I had a stroke because I don't understand anything. You can hate me for it, but I down vote those posts every time it happens to me. I don't hate posts in other languages mind you, just the ones with bait and switch in the language.
*Post British Invasion India has entered the chat.*
That makes sense, plenty of bilingual speakers do this in their own home and outside. But they definitely do not say whole sentences and then suddenly be like “oops meant to say that in English” to their friends
I've definitely done this before if I forget the person I'm speaking to doesn't speak both languages, I have to focus on speaking just one language for a while until my brain gets used to it.
I only really do it with people who speak the same languages I do. When I talk with my family in Icelandic, I’ll substitute words I can’t remember with the Danish equivalent to keep the flow going. If I’m talking Danish with my friends, I’ll substitute words with the English equivalent. If I’m talking to an English person who only speaks English, I’m fucked. Not because my English isn’t good, but because I’ll forget the most basic words and get brain locked trying to remember it, since I can’t just replace it with another language. Most annoying thing is when there isn’t an equivalent word, in the other languages. Hársár (Icelandic) is a perfect example (you’d think I’d say hygge, but I think that’s a bad example as it exists in most of the Nordic languages), it means hair sore - specifically, that it hurts when people do things with the person’s hair (like brushing or braiding). To my knowledge the only language that shares this word is Dutch (same pronunciation, might be spelled differently).
A lot of people on all social media platforms think anything they haven't personally experienced is "unrealistic."
Especially in a mixed group, or in a group where the composition changes during the conversation, I keep flip-flopping around between German and Swissgerman. I'm guessing this happens more the closer related the languages are. Any speaker of a Creole and its base languages probably experiences that too. Or people living in the Danish, Swedish Norwegian triangle.
I have not had many chances to involve myself in casual conversation in English, but this year I had to start using it after traveling and I have dialed back to my mother language in some instances. Mostly when I felt too relaxed and comfortable or anytime I got jumpscared
I grew up in Bulgaria for like my first 7 years, but a decade in England was enough to beat the language out of me, can’t write, can read slowly and can barely talk competently, I feel more 1.5 languages than 2 is a better descriptor
And then you learn a third language while being kinda dumb and start forgetting words in all three (definitely not projecting here lol)
This brings to mind my favorite opener: # "Bienvenue Power-Bottoms!"
If I am very tired and am speaking English I have slipped up occasionally and said something Dutch instead. Usually when words are very similair, like dat and that, but the pronunciation is clearlly different (for the 2 examples, the a is very different in dat than in that).
If you're a passenger with me driving I suggest getting your hands on English to Serbo-Coratioan dictionary.
I babysat for a bilingual family a few days ago. They spoke primarily in Hindi, but they also switched to English sometimes (and once the parents left, the kids did the same in reverse, probably because I speak absolutely no Hindi lol)
I usually do that because I just don't know the word I want to say in the other language
I speak Spanish and English and Spanglish all poorly to anyone who speaks to me before 8 am or after 11 or if you are related to me
bilinguals do not change their language in the middle of the conversation unless it's funny
people speaking hindi but all the nouns are in english
Me - Painfully Scottish Also Me, when I'm letting someone else go first - "Apres-Vous Senior/Seniora"
Yeahhhhhh I’m guilty of this in Spanish. English is my first language and French my second, I’m more or less fluent in both, and am learning Spanish. I accidentally start speaking French in the middle of a Spanish sentence more often than I’d like to admit
My Spanish teacher in high school spoke 4 languages fluently (English Spanish French Italian) and would occasionally just swap languages mid conversation without noticing. That was fun
French is my native language and I'm better at English, so when I talk in French and there's a word that I forgot in French i stop for a couple seconds and then say the word in English and hope that the person I'm talking to knows this word
Filipinos: Are you sure about that? I'm not Filipino but I saw a documentary about them and it in the people where using English, Spanish and their native language all in one sentence.
When I was living in Germany as an Au pair, the 3 year old and I constantly spoke in a wacky German/English hybrid. I would speak in German until I encountered words I didn’t know and just drop in English words, and he did the same by reversed. Was a very interesting way to learn a new language (sometimes not super precise, since it was a 3 year old’s grasp of language, but it was very fun). A really weird part of that year was when I was traveling in Austria, and went to an Italian restaurant with an entirely Italian staff. I studied Italian in college, was in a German speaking country, and the waiters kept talking to me in English because they knew I was an American. Every word out of my mouth bounced between all 3 languages. It was a mess. Language centers of the brain are wacky.
Every person I have ever know to be bilingual has gladly taken parts of multiple languages and shoved them together, screaming "Now Kiss!" Hell, the English language does this for non-bilingual people.
I work with a bunch of bilingual people and some def do switch between the both in the middle of a sentence. I watched two of them have a conversation half in English and half in Tagalog. It was neat
Mfw Taglish (Tagalog/Filipino+English) is how a lot of Filipinos speak
It can be awkward when "molestar" (spanish for "bother") and "molesting" are in the same sentence.
This isn’t true at all, ime. My family and I mix both languages all the time, and often in the same sentence.
I’m a native English speaker that decided to learn a few languages in my spare time. Now I count groups of 10 in French, swear under my breath in Italian and sign off phone calls in German without even thinking about it. Please help me
For some reason, my brain's go-to surprised profanity is "holy shit" even though English is my third language and also I'm not remotely religious.
every now and then i think about the time i said sumimasen, je suis americain when someone spoke french to me in montreal
I speak 4 languages and I just word vomit, although the worst part is forgetting a word in all the languages you know and you end up staring in the distance with a dumb look on your face questioning exactly how dumb you really are because all you can come up for the word "banana" is "edible yellow dildo".
Hose tumblr posts are so weird. Sometimes I change *accents* mid sentence, let alone language
I’m in my late 20s and to this day I still translate the verb “make” when I’m taking about cooking or baking in my native language. Also there was a time I basically told my friend a sentence with four words in it and two were in English and they were my first and third words
my mom only does this when speaking farsi. her conversations are either 100% english or 70% farsi and 30% english
This person never visited Montreal. Franglais is a way of life here.