A few friends and I have a reading group that meets every other week to try out cool topics and random stuff. Our current miniproject is learning Spanish (everyone else has at least some Spanish language background; I'm the only one starting from scratch), but it is long enough to get a window into how you learn it.

We are supposed to try to do something towards language-learning every day. Today is Day 3. I have been extremely unsuccessful, mostly because something interesting has come up: it seems that my brain lumps languages into a couple categories.

  1. English
  2. Fookien (my family's Chinese dialect)
  3. ASL
  4. Everything else

It's pretty obvious why - English is my native tongue, and I learned rudimentary Fookien from birth to toddlerhood (when my parents decided they should stop speaking everything but English to me so that I would "learn English properly"). I still hear Fookien frequently today when I'm with family, so I'm used to sorting between English - which I'm used to hearing and understanding - and Fookien, which I'm used to hearing and not understanding. Not a problem there.

I learned ASL in middle childhood, and it's physical rather than verbal, and thus easily separable. But the rest - Japanese, Mandarin, Tagalog, German, Spanish - they get tagged with OH HEY LOOK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE. Meaning I produce exchanges like this when attempting to talk to myself while walking down the street (for practice):

"Buenos dias. Kumusta ka? Sehr gut, danke." (Which is "Good day" in Spanish, followed by "How are you?" in Tagalog and a reply of "Very good, thanks" in German.)

This was not intentional; it came out almost without me realizing it, and then I went "wait WHAT?" and slapped my forehead. I was actually trying to speak Spanish the entire time. But some words come more easily to me in some languages than others, so I think my brain goes "oh, you're trying to speak Some Other Language!" and out comes the first word in something-that-isn't-English-or-Fookien it finds.

This has happened before - I baffled my Mandarin teacher by occasionally reading the Japanese pronunciations of the characters in the text I was reciting, and now I do the opposite (I'll look at Japanese text and hear the occasional character in Mandarin). Sometimes, at Kaffeestunde (German Coffee Hour) at Purdue, I need to bite my tongue to keep from inserting a Japanese word into a German sentence -- because I know the word in Japanese, but not in German.

I'm absolutely nowhere near fluent in any of these other languages. At best, I'm beginning-to-intermediate in ASL, somewhere around mid-second-semester college-level in German, and able to converse brokenly with my relatives in Mandarin. But I'm far better at all of them than in Spanish, so when I try to say something in Spanish, it's way easier to say it in something else that isn't English, so I do.

Not sure how to get past this problem yet; I think that working on processing Spanish input for a while (say, this week) rather than producing output might help -- listening and reading first, not speaking and writing. So... we'll see if that helps. In the meantime, this is terribly amusing.