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Why won’t she speak Croatian with me? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5331 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 33 20 February 2012 at 5:43pm | IP Logged |
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My wife and I spoke English exclusively for about 6 years before I started learning
French. She occasionally tried to give me French vocabulary lessons, and we both found it really frustrating. Clearly, there was no way she could teach me French by immersion without driving both of us nuts. :-) So I had to study Assimil on my own. Today, my wife speaks to me in French, or rather, we switch back and forth many times per day. My wife says that it was difficult to start using French with me, and that she had to consciously force herself to use it. Over time, it became easier, but it's still not completely automatic. I think that when you meet someone, your brain figures out which language works best, and remembers it. If you ask people to override this subconscious decision, it can be fairly awkward. For example, when I speak to French consulate officials in the US, they tend to switch to French and only use English if they get very frustrated. Here's some ideas which might help: 1. When your girlfriend says that it's surprisingly hard to use Croatian with you, you should totally acknowledge her. She's right. If she's like my wife, she can't do it without consciously forcing herself to switch languages, and this may be surprisingly hard. So ask nicely, accept refusal gracefully, and tell her that you owe her for being so awesome. :-) 2. As other people have suggested, you can make it much easier for your girlfriend by finding situations where Croatian is the natural choice. Good luck! I suspect that you'll be happily code-switching between Croatian and English in a couple of years. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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