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Hey Polyglot Pandas, What Is The Craziest, Most Interesting, And Most Challenging Thing About Speaking Multiple Languages?
Do you often have dreams in a foreign language? Do you get sometimes so confused that you are getting serious Pandemonium vibes? Let me know all the funny details!
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I've learned a couple different languages in school, but I'm not very good at either, so sometimes I switch from one to the other mid-sentence, or I get the accents mixed up (idk if that makes sense, but trust me, it sounds really weird when I do that), or I forget basic stuff but somehow remember the most useless, obscure phrases.
Oh, and sometimes I forget a word in English (which is my first language) and can only remember it in a different language.
1.As long as i have been able to speak i have spoken Finnish and English. differentiating between who i speak to in which language from the age of two. But i find it almost impossible to speak the other language to people i've grown up speaking one language to even if there is other people who don't speak the language we are speaking.
2. When we lived in England me (then born to 6years old) and my brother (born to 11 years) spoke English to each other. the we moved to Finland and slowly it started changing to finish but there was a period where we would mix it up, speaking both languages and understand each other perfectly but no one else could understand us.
3. I have a certain type of dyslexia that can come with learning two languages from such a young age.
oh i see! i can slightly relate since i speak both french and english and some words are quite similar such as 'courgette' 'example' 'lingerie' 'queue' and i usually just say it in french kekeke
Sometimes I forget words in English, which is my first language, and can only remember it in malay which is my 2nd language. In Malay there are 2 ways you can pronounce words, pasar and baku. And I usually mix it all up since, I can never remember when to use them correctly. Resulting in me failing during my malay oral exams lol.(basically conversation and reading exams). Onto the next problem, arabic. I can never remember the vocab and how to read fluently. The Quran is also written and read in arabic so it's difficult to switch between modern spoken arabic and Quranic arabic as, you have to read both differently.
Guess what? I often get tested to read both MSA and the quran, on the same days so everything gets incredibly messed up lol
I switch tones when switching languages so I may be talking in a polite tone in English and mid-sentence I switch to either Marathi or Hindi and I suddenly sound very rude. Sometimes I mix Hindi, English and Marathi together in one sentence when I’m feeling very lazy. For example if I want to say the sentence “She told me that this is nice” I say “she said ki yeh changla aahe” which uses very less energy but it confuses people who only know two of those languages so I only speak like this with my crush and my family
It’s also kind of challenging when you have a word that has different meanings in different languages. For example, in marathi “taak” means buttermilk but in Hindi I think it means up
when i’m REALLY tired, i forget my friends don’t speak Rus and they end up staring at me lol. Also; i’m not very fluent in english slang terms so naturally i use Russian slang, none of which has a good direct translation to english.
haha i do it in french, like i say it to my hungarian friends and i expect them par défaut (see? :D) to understand my french slangs and catchphrases
Not yet fully bilingual, but I'm learning French and the most difficult part is definitely getting things to stick and make sense. I have an integral understanding of the English language and all of the root words and how to use suffixes and prefixes and all that cool stuff, and I'm worried I'll never get that with French. To be fair im only planning to use it in Canada and not actual France so I'll probably never have to totally rely on French
I'm in my 50s and learning French (in France). I've had 1 6 week intensive language course (FLE) that really zipped through the "basics" of grammar, which did help somewhat, but out in the real world, you realize that vocabulary is very compartmentalized. The words you use at the market aren't the same you use with the Doctor, the lawyer, at the bank, etc.. While I often understand the "gist" of a conversation, sometimes I'll get stuck on a word or phrase and then I miss the rest of what's been said.
Mixing up words in one language or phrasing a sentence in English as I would phrase it in polish, and then it sounds weird.
Sometimes I look like an idiot because I misspell basic words. I was in French immersion growing up so my only English class was literally english.
To this day I write bl- and then freeze because i suddenly can't remember if the ending is eu or ue. This proved to be a chuckling point for my professors in university when i could write Phenolphthalein correctly every time but usually wrote bleu after it. The sheer number of half mark deductions for spelling.
I know both English and Mandarin. Sometimes I forget a word in English)/Chinese and use a word from the other language, (it goes both ways). This can be really embarrassing in school or when I'm speaking Mandarin to my taipo
Had to take Spanish. Required to take two years. The hardest thing for me is remembering evrything. I mean I think I got a B or a C so I passed! But I got to take it again this year since..2 years. It was easy at the beginning but my teacher..heh. Changed the grading scale so A’s became B’s and B’s became C’s kinda. Like you had to do EXTRA to get an A. So that made things a bit harder..
I learned some French last semester and plan on continuing with it plus Japanese. I’d say one of the hardest things in French so far is remembering what gender an object is. Like cucumber, or pie, or bookcase. Because if you were trying to say “Beautiful bookcase” the adjective beautiful is an exception where it comes before the word not after. And you have to add an e for feminine and s for plural.
My first language is Afrikaans and second English. I had to use translator app the other day as I could not remember a few simple Afrikaans words.
I speak English and mandarin some times when speaking English I accidentally say a word in mandarin just as reflex
The craziest thing in speaking multiple languages is that I sometimes get confused when I try to translate
When I get drunk everything merges into a language soup of English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Esperanto, Mandarin, Farsi, Russian, Japanese, and Klingon.
There are times I get 'stuck' in a language. I need to hear another language being spoken before I can start thinking in the second language.
When my children were small, we were speaking Welsh together, in a cafe in England. I was desperately trying to remember how to ask for ice cream in English. It wasn't until the waiter asked what we would like that 'English' was unlocked.
