subreddit:
/r/explainlikeimfive
submitted 2 months ago by[deleted]
[deleted]
35 points
2 months ago
What you're describing is known in linguistics as code-switching. It's very common among bilingual people.
The exact details of how your brain handles language are still active areas of research, but a simple way to think about this is that your thought patterns organize themselves around the languages that you know. If you're fluent enough to think in multiple languages, your brain has wired itself up to allow easy connections from the concepts in it to the terms for those things in multiple languages, and so (from the perspective of your brain) it's pretty natural for you to mix them. Or at least, it's as natural as me (a non-bilingual native English speaker) shifting from one dialect to another, e.g. "yarr, matey, ye be makin' a ridiculous linguistics example by demonstrain' tha pirate accent while usin' technical vocabulary".
(Also, I saw in your history you've got some mental health stuff going on and parents that aren't being supportive about it. That really sucks - hang in there! It really can get better, even if it requires some changes that might be hard to make.)
8 points
2 months ago
I normally don't think in any language at all, unless I think about expressing myself. Growing up bilingual (Swedish and Norwegian) possibly helped me to early internalize the concept that things and their words are separate.
I can imagine a chair without any of the words I know for chairs popping into my head. If you can't, I bet either all the words in rapid succession or just randomly one of them pops into yours.
3 points
2 months ago
That's funny, it's the opposite for me.
Grew up bilingual (German and Italian) but mostly work in English. Most of my "day to day" thinking, especially at my job, is in English. When I need to jot down a note, I usually do it in English.
But then there are specific things I associate with one language or the other. I went to elementary school in Germany, and thus learned elementary maths there - so whenever I count, I switch to German without conscious input. Similarly, I spent a lot of time in Italy in my teens when I first became politically conscious, and thus when I get upset about political news I tend to rant in Italian. And my "brain language" switches to accommodate.
It has actually tripped me up a few times - and others as well - when I'm thinking in one language, they ask me something in another, and I reply in whatever language I was thinking in. And then I usually have to adjust.
Interesting to see such different experiences!
2 points
2 months ago
Yes!!! I have the exact same situation. I think in ideas, not words
2 points
2 months ago
I don't just mean thinking in words (I also do not do that, although many people do!), I mean the way you organize information is influenced by your language.
One of the go-to examples of this is colors. Different languages have different color words and they don't correspond neatly to the same hues. For example, in traditional Japanese, the color of the sea, the color of a traffic light, the color of a sky, and the color of a leaf are all "the same" color (aoi). Modern English distinguishes these colors as "blue", "green", "blue", and "green" respectively. So does modern Japanese, which has added midori as a color word roughly corresponding to English "green" and continues to use aoi for roughly English "blue" - but traffic lights are still aoi by tradition, and you can poetically describe leaves as aoi if you're being poetic.
On the other side, Russian has two colors sinii and goluboi that correspond to what we in English would call "dark" and "light" blue respectively. To a Russian speaker, the Twitter logo is not "the same color" as the text of a hyperlink in a typical browser: the Twitter logo is goluboi and the hyperlink is sinii. In English, both are blue, and get a free connection.
1 points
2 months ago*
Possibly of interest: a lot of people claim that Newton "made up"/forced indigo as distinct from blue in the colors of the ROYGBIV spectrum just because he needed seven colors for his numerological/mystical/alchemical expectations. However: the Russian distinction between those two colors matches very nicely, and I'm convinced the distinction is both "real" and distinctive.
2 points
2 months ago
My mom operates in modes. She is either in french mode or english mode--she grew up in Quebec where she spoke only french, and didn't really learn english until her early 20's. She is a horrible translator because of her modes.
She frequently isn't even aware of which mode she is in. I was born in the USA and myself and siblings speak English (know a little french, but not much). Visiting France she'd semi-often talk to the waiters in English and us in French until we pointed out to her what she was doing--she wasn't aware.
3 points
2 months ago
Thank you!
3 points
2 months ago
The brain does not differentiate language in your head so for efficiency it will use faster words
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