albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4170 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German
| Message 9 of 12 11 January 2014 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
Sometimes after having just spoken German , i experience some in inertia when switiching back to English
and German words fight to come out . That doesn 't seem to happen with my mother tongue Italian .
Edited by albysky on 11 January 2014 at 5:34pm
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shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4226 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French
| Message 10 of 12 11 January 2014 at 6:43pm | IP Logged |
Personally I considered Chinese as my mother-tongue. Over the years my Chinese skills have dropped because of
many years living abroad and using English. Recently I'm picking it up again. It is common to fill in technical terms
in English when talking Chinese because a lot of the new computer terms came from the West. Sometimes it would
be awkward to try to use a Chinese equivalent either translated by meaning or phonetics. Proper names of people
and places unless it is a common name like "South Pacific" if you go into a country name like "French Polynesia"
when translated as 法屬波利尼西亞 would sound a bit odd.
Normal conversation usually distinguish between 2 languages separate. The last time I was listening to a Chinese
news broadcast about Michael Schumacher the race car driver in the hospital from a recent ski accident. The news
anchor used the Chinese version of his name translated phonetically. Somehow listening to his name I was
thinking of a matching Chinese word with the same phonetics and wondering what the news anchor was talking
about? After listening to the rest of the story figured it was the translated version of a person's name...
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Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4151 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans
| Message 11 of 12 12 January 2014 at 2:57pm | IP Logged |
Not with English usually. I don't doubt that my English causes interference in other languages, but it's very unconscious. When I use one of my other languages, if I'm stuck for a word, about 90 percent of the time the equivalent I will think of will be German instead of English, and even word order will be more German-based.
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NivealSedulo Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3767 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Spanish Studies: Norwegian
| Message 12 of 12 13 January 2014 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
I used to believe that people always think in their native languages, but now I have been
reading so much English that I started renaming the layers of a drawing in English.
Sometimes I realize that I was about to say or writing something in English because it
sounds better. I found this funny. But I can not get rid of my Portuguese influence in
English yet.
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