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Dream in a foreign language | ||
Tags: Dreams | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cymro Triglot Groupie Wales Joined 6452 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English*, Welsh, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 33 of 43 04 March 2012 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I recently had a dream where someone was trying to tell me a phone number over the telephone and I was trying to write it down. I had to keep telling them to repeat it until I became so frustrated that I woke up. On another matter you certainly don't need to be fluent to dream in a language. I recently found I was dreaming that I was speaking Latin. Now I have studied Latin as a written language and I want to be able to speak it but I am extremely poor at it. These were the circumstances. In the dream I was using it as a secret language to speak to a friend. I have briefly spoken Latin to him in the past. I met him just after coming out of a Latin exam and he asked me how it went and I replied "Infandum amice iubes renovare dolorem" "Unspeakable oh friend is the sorrow you bid me renew" It is a paraphrase from book II of Vergil's Aeneid where Aeneus is telling the Queen about the fall of Troy and I knew he knew the original quote. Actually I was joking the exam went OK. During the day before the dream I had been thinking about how to improve my spoken Latin and practicing by trying to talk to myself in it. I think basically if you use a language during the day or with specific people then you may dream about things in it. In fact in the dream concerned I was using Latin to prevent Welsh speakers understanding. So I was dreaming in two non-native languages at once! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5032 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 34 of 43 04 March 2012 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I rarely dream in foreign languages, even when I have lived in foreign countries. The fact that it is so rare of an occurrence for me has made me wonder if I have a defect of some kind. Other language learners seem to claim foreign language dreams are a frequent happening.
One time a few months ago, though, after working through 3 phases of Pimsleur for Japanese, I had a dream that I had gone to Tokyo and was an airport kiosk trying to buy stamps. It was particularly interesting given that the dream was in English, Japanese and Spanish. As I was asking for the stamps, I hesitated, and somehow the shop clerk heard my hesitation and spoke Spanish to me. So we chatted a while in Spanish, and then once I had remembered within the dream who to say what I wanted in Japanese, I switched languages. I knew I had grammar structures in my head. When I woke up, I realized I said "please" in the wrong way (kudasai vs. onegaishimasu). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4699 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 35 of 43 04 March 2012 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You can use both. 切符をください、切符お願いします - both correct.
I can't even remember my dreams. Once my ex-wife told me I spoke to her in Japanese ... can't have been much, I was a beginner at that time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 36 of 43 05 March 2012 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had this crazy dream recently about taking a train through North Korea. It was totally surreal, especially because it looked somewhat European and I was just passing through on my way to South Korea... The fun language part was that I talked to some small boys on the train in Korean and tried to speak with a North Korean accent :D
I also had some kind of language nightmare. I was back at school and had to write a Latin test. Sadly, I had forgotten all my Latin (although some of it seemed to come back in the dream!) and I wondered how I could get through the exam... So finally I tried chatting to the teacher about the differences between Latin and Hebrew (random, I know) and it worked, I was actually allowed to just have a conversation instead of writing the test. I often dream in English, but it's so normal for me that I can't remember what language the dream was in... When I dream about people I know I dream in the language I usually speak with them. Edited by druckfehler on 05 March 2012 at 8:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lindseylbb Bilingual Triglot Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4930 days ago 92 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 37 of 43 08 March 2012 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Once I fell asleep reading an English book about feminism, then in my dream a low female voice kept repeating what I had just read rapidly. Not a pleasure feeling as I woke up with a heavy head, thinking I just had nightmare. But nothing beats the first English dream I had which was, horrible. There was a latina girl whos the new student of my school.She kept flirting with me in English. Then we had hot sweaty sex. Right after that, when I was about to say something, she said，"oh? you're not serious, right? Cos I didn't mean for a relationship"....Holy hell. So technically I was dumped by the last woman I liked in a tv show in English when I had my sex dream for the first time? And whats all that flirting vobs come from?!! Poor me kept wondering whats wrong with me and became aware of the powerful effect of damn american tv shows.... &nb sp;
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Duke100782 Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Philippines https://talktagalog.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4486 days ago 172 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Tagalog* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 38 of 43 12 October 2013 at 3:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been living in China and studying Mandarin for almost a year a half, and I finally had a dream of me
speaking a little Mandarin Chinese. The dream was long, I was at a mixed martial arts competition here in China with my wife, and I was speaking mostly English throughout, but there were episodes where I would try speak Mandarin Chinese to get my message across. In one of the episodes I was arguing with was a portly woman behind a counter and I was asking her to return some things my wife behind. In my dream I coldn't quite make out whether she was speaking with the Chongqing (the city in western China where I live) dialect or Mandarin with a heavy Chongqing accent. In another episode I was complaining to a government official about the portly lady earlier. We were speaking English most of the time, but when I spoke some Mandarin, she said "Hey, so you speak Chinese after all!" Edited by Duke100782 on 12 October 2013 at 3:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marcos_Eich Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4216 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German | Message 39 of 43 12 October 2013 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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I never dreamed about a language that I was learning, but when I started in a job that I
had meetings in English and talked this language a lot during the day... man... I have some crazy dreams speaking English. It was nice but disapeared when I got more confortable with the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5035 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 40 of 43 12 October 2013 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't dream often in a foreign language but think it represents a kind of conceptual breakthrough for the brain to incorporate the language you are dreaming in as one of your own languages. It is possible that thereafter you find it a little easier to communicaate in the language because it's becoming more a part of your identity (pure hypothesising - no evidence....).
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