Speaking in tongues

[sistermagpie]

Today was S's last day in my Saturday ballet class, because she's been transferred back to Germany, which is where she is from. She said she hoped one day to get transferred to India because she speaks Hindi, which I thought was really cool. She said Hindi sounded something like German and English because they're all Indo-Germanic languages.

C, who is also in this class, is from France. So we started talking about speaking different languages and C said that she was much more outgoing about her feelings in English, that she was very shy in French but now sometimes got frustrated speaking to her family or her best friend thinking, "This would be easier if you understood English." She felt she was sort of hiding behind the language but also letting her true self show more...which made sense to me, somehow. I'm sure if I ever finally mastered another language well enough to communicate in it I might feel that way. It also made me think of a discussion about TTT where somebody said it was fake the way Elrond and Arwen switched from English to Elvish in mid-conversation, only to have some multi-lingual people say no, that was very realistic, that they often switched languages depending on the subject. Some things are more easily spoken about in different languages.

So I thought I'd throw this out to the amazingly polyglot people on lj--I know some of you speak more than one language...do you find differences in yourself from one language to another? Do you all often speak English or just write in it? I used to have a bookmark I made that said, "To speak another language is to possess another soul" or something like that--does it seem like that? Does what C said make sense to you?

Comments

[trobadora]

i switch between languages depending on subject. i cannot talk about math in any sophisticated way in english and have a hard time expressing myself about my work or childbirth in german...different experiences and parts of my life are thus connected to different languages.

It's exactly the same for me. There are topics I have a very hard time talking about in German, and then I feel awkward about it.

Besides, there's this weird phenomenon of talking to another German in English - and I don't mean on LJ, I did that when I lived in England all the time. Context just sort of defines your default language once you're fluent enough in it to manage, and then you only switch if you have a reason. Then again, sometimes it even happens to me that I remember a specific expression but can't remember which language it was in...

i've had this pet theory for a while that there are two types of bilingual speakers...those that are fluent in two languages independently and those that can think in both simultaneously.

I find this really fascinating even if I'm not sure which type I am myself - it completely depends on the subject, and on my level of exposure to it in the respective language. (I was switching languages like mad when I was working on the Romantics.)

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

see, i wonder if one can learn to be a better switcher. i never had to exist in both languages for any length of time, so i never had to learn...but i assume i might be able to were i do move back or teach german here ...

[trobadora]

Probably. Again, it's probably exposure. I mean, try tackling a subject where half the terminology is in English and the other half in German, and see what that does to your mind... I had the hardest time sticking to one language in the end.