I’ll admit, I was a bit of a grammatical/spelling stickler in the “old life”. One misspelled word or improperly placed (or worse- nonexistant!) apostrophe and I was shaking my head and wondering . Well, how quickly the brain atrophies. The last two months I have battled my brain for what language would dominate the small space where my thoughts brew.
He’s got better English than I do.
photo: olivander
In Athens you are able to get by with moderate amounts of Greek supplemented with English and hand gestures for the precise words you don’t know.
After that I spent the time in Monemvasia in a French and German speaking home, so I was back to thinking and speaking in German and English, sometimes the conversation at dinner was entirely in French and I’d be able to pick out a few words here and there.
Oddly, after leaving Monemvasia my brain decided it was going to think solely in Spanish for a few days. In Sparta I found myself struggling to remember even the most simple Greek words “who, how, where” all escaped my vocabulary- then I realized I couldn’t remember the right words in English- oh cruel brain, it would ONLY let me think in Spanish.
Now that I have been settled in Olympia for a month using predominately Greek, except with those who wish to practice English, I find myself thinking and speaking in Greek- even when I am alone. Now I realize my I am losing the English battle.
When I wish to tell someone I am going to my house in English, it comes out as “I go house mine sleeping now”. Wow- What happened? The sentence structure of nearly every other language I know has caught up to me. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, its a freaking free-for-all in my brain.
To sit and write in English used to be a mindless task, I plugged in the headphones and out poured the words. Now, I type a few sentences and try to read between the lines to see what message I am actually trying to convey. I know I am not the only sufferer of “overseas English brain” as I have confirmed this with a few friends. The only question, what’s the cure? More importantly, do I care enough to cure it? My pigeon English is much more direct…
Who else is with me? We could create our own language!
'Learning Languages is Hard' have 2 comments
May 5, 2010 @ 8:06 pm Tanja
I’m so totally there with you! As a kid I’d spend every summer in Germany, and the only english I heard for 2 months was the occasional BBC station I could pick up on the radio- My mami and I had firmly appropriated Ginglish as the official language of our home. The worst mind bend came however after a trip around western Europe one summer culminated in going to see the movie 8 Women, in Germany, with my cousin and college roommate. The movie was in French (which had me trying to dust off my schoolgirl french) with German subtitles, and my college roommate spoke none of either language, so I was trying to listen to the French, read the German subtitles to make sure I understood what was going on and simultaneously translate the lot into English for my friend. I think at the end of the movie, my eyes were crossed and my feet were firmly pigeon toed. 😉
May 7, 2010 @ 7:27 pm Leilani
I experienced this a little bit when traveling, too. Being forced to switch from French to Spanish to Italian was crazy enough, but since I wanted to also speak English, I found that my English sentences all contained pauses after every 4 or so words. “I want to see….the museum…over by the main church….do you want to…come with me today?” Obnoxious. But the only reason I had started to do this was to give enough “processing time” to my friends where English was not their first language, and somewhat studied as a second (though not really practiced much). It was great for them, however I KEPT doing it after I returned home. Took a couple of weeks to break the habit.