Language Interference

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Man, I can't speak Spanish anymore without Italian words creeping in at every turn. At my local Mexican joint today, every time I wanted to say "is," I said "e'" instead of "esta." It is as though there is one slot in my brain for "Romance language version of 'is,'" and pushing a new item in that slot simply knocks the old one out.



Comments

  1. Pedro7:18 PM

    Interesting. I learned English before I learned German (English is not my first language). I know much more English than German. After four years of learning German, I went there to learn some more. I was surrounded of German learners, but some were beginners, and with those I had to speak in English. But after a few days there, speaking a lot of German, when I tried to speak in English, German would come out instead! There must be some weird neurological mechanism there. Something like: "well, I'm speaking more German than English now; let's move German to the cache memory and English there, to the RAM".

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  2. Ken B12:52 PM

    I found a similar thing when I started teaching myself German. French kept invading(irony of ironies). And those of course are not both Romance.

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