12 Jun 2021

cimorene: painting of two women in Regency gowns drinking tea (tea)
My wife [personal profile] waxjism is a native speaker of Swedish and speaks Finnish (the dominant national language) and English with near-native fluency (sufficient to fool many native speakers but not quite all of them, making noticeable non-native errors very infrequently) and no hesitation, and she also switches effortlessly between them. She learned both of these languages as a young child, of course, with ample reading/writing and hearing/speaking practice going back to elementary school (she didn't learn them as an infant or in preschool however, so she's not actually bilingual or trilingual). She does this for work, taking calls in all three languages with semi-random distribution.

I started learning Swedish and Finnish when I was 21, having previously studied Spanish in school and Japanese in lessons from about age 15, but having always been the best student in all my foreign language classes before. I've been using Swedish (initially in college classes, then in family surroundings) since 2005 and Finnish with gradually increasing facility (in work experience placements etc) since 2012, and until quite recently my biggest problem was usually switching back and forth between foreign languages.

My experience of searching for a word in conversation is that it's like I'm looking at the meaning I want to say on the table in front of me and reaching over my shoulder to pull the right word out of a bin behind my back. There's a bit of fumbling, and then a lot of times the word that pops up is the wrong language, so I'll be thinking "No, that's Spanish... no, that's Swedish... where IS it?" and reaching further behind my back trying to locate the Finnish bin by feel.

So until recently, once I got started using one foreign language, my biggest problem was usually that it was very difficult to locate one of the other ones, and sometimes I'd just come up completely blank, get flustered, and only be able to make sentences in English; or I'd manage to switch one direction (ie an isolated sentence in a different language, if someone asked me in Finnish or in Swedish to translate it) but then find it 100% impossible to switch back, and often end up with one word of the target language (or a third one) and then the rest of the sentence would come out in a random mix of languages. I'd have to give up and use English, or pause and take a deep breath to try to clear the desk, mentally, and start over after a break.

I'm not sure if I've leveled up or what, but I'm getting a bit more practice now because this work practice, and living here in Pargas in general, is my first opportunity to really switch much at work. Pargas was about 52% Swedish-speaking and 48% Finnish-speaking when we last checked, a relatively quick change since it was entirely Swedish-speaking when Wax was a little kid here. It's really around half the people who come into this store speaking Swedish, and unlike in Finnish-dominated areas, Swedish speakers typically expect to be served in Swedish and start off speaking Swedish, where in Turku and Kaarina they often (80% maybe?) switch automatically to Finnish in advance. Most of them, even the older ones, do understand Finnish and can switch if the person they spoke to does, or simply continue the conversation in two languages sometimes (there are a fair number of people working in stores here who understand Swedish fine but perhaps stumble when producing it). But obviously, if you DO speak Swedish, the natural and expected response in Pargas is that the person in the store will answer in the language they're addressed in, and for the most part, they do.

And I do too! the conversations aren't beyond me, although there are names of plants/flowers and occasionally objects that I don't recognize in both Swedish and Finnish. But while I sometimes manage to answer someone in Swedish seamlessly, Finnish is the primary language of interaction between employees in the store (exceptions for two Swedish-speaking employees sometimes, but most of the time there will be a Finnish-speaking one present), so Finnish is often primed and I've noticed quite a few times people speak Swedish to me and I answer them automatically in Finnish without noticing until afterwards that I was speaking a different language from them. Maybe this is a phase? Perhaps it will pass after another few weeks of switching practice?

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