language-switching troubles
12 Jun 2021 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneMy wife 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?
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?
(no subject)
Date: 12 Jun 2021 06:50 pm (UTC)It sounds to me as though she IS trilingual, as I understand it. (There was recently a very active discussion on Language Log about the concept of the "native speaker" and whether it's useful or not.)
Do you find Finnish, which is not Indo-European, significantly more difficult than Swedish?
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
I have seen people from Malaysia, a highly polyglot country where most people speak 3 or more languages, talk about things like this: speaking a mixture of languages in a single sentence, switching languages without anyone in the conversation really noticing, etc.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Jun 2021 09:41 am (UTC)I haven't looked into the the scientific definitions of the words; I was comparing her to the common bilingual children who learn a language from each parent and those who have a third language from school and societal immersion at a young age. This occurrence is not uncommon here and in other multilingual countries. Of course it's not a universal experience, as some people don't ever become fully fluent in one of their parental languages, or lose them later, or can use them only in selected settings and subjects. I imagine, prior to clicking, that the term is contested because of the greater within-group than between-group variation and the consequent difficulty of setting the borders of the definitions. Finnish, Swedish and many other languages use the equivalent of "mother tongue" which is translated usually as "native speaker", and I think there the import of a parental language is stronger than the implication about mastery.
Of course Finnish is much more difficult to learn for an English-speaker like me, or to any other speaker of an Indo-European language; its difficulty is comparable to that of Japanese or another non-IE but non-tonal language (I think Japanese is simply the highest profile one of these and that's why it's such a common comparison, but actually the necessity of learning new writing systems that are ideogram-based rather than phonetic adds significantly to the difficulty). And learning Swedish or English are comparably difficult to Finns or speakers of the other Finno-Ugric languages. The alien grammar of an unrelated language is very large barrier, and unrelated languages tend to share far less vocabulary. Finnish has an advantage over some other unrelated languages here because it's borrowed a huge portion of its current vocabulary over the years from IE languages going back at least to Old Germanic, but its phonetics often make it difficult to identify them, much more so than with the romance or germanic languages.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Jun 2021 05:34 am (UTC)This happens to me when I try to speak Spanish. I did not go to a full-on immersion elementary school, but my elementary school did have Spanish lessons from kindergarten and then I took it for four years in high school, so by that time I could speak and understand Spanish pretty well, but I didn't use it much after that and so now when I try to speak Spanish, I can remember a lot of nouns but not verbs (or if I do remember the verb, how to conjugate it) so it's hard to actually make sentences. But the weird thing is is that when I can't find the word in Spanish, my brain fills it in with Japanese not English. Like 100% of the time. It's like my brain knows I'm looking for a non-English word.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Jun 2021 09:20 am (UTC)I studied Spanish for like 3 years in a row in high school, getting to the top level offered by the school (5, because it had the stupid 98-minute classes that last half the year system) and then I took a Latin American literature class in college, so without ever being... anything like fluent I guess, especially because apart from the teacher in college there was never any native speaker interaction at all. But I could follow tv and read literary books with effort, and newspapers etc easily, and before I came to Finland I was fine for customer service interactions. But the lack of practice was pretty dire and after 2 years I tried to take Spanish conversation here in Finland and it was like... I understood but the words just wouldn't come out, and most of the time what came out was Swedish (occasionally Finnish).
(no subject)
Date: 14 Jun 2021 12:39 am (UTC)(I really wish I'd kept my Spanish up. :-/ I've tried refreshing with duolingo but it didn't really help.)
(no subject)
Date: 14 Jun 2021 10:11 am (UTC)I had a friendly acquaintance from Mexico some years ago who was in a Finnish class with me and I tried to chat with her a few times, but it was unbelievably hard to pull sentences up. Even when I'd listen to her and understand her just fine! That was like, also the FIRST time I ever had a friend who was a native speaker of Spanish since learning Spanish as a teenager, so I'd nver really tried before. I tried multiple times! We even hung out a little bit outside of class and it only got a tiny bit easier... and I basically just gave up and switched to English or Finnish every time.
(no subject)
Date: 14 Jun 2021 07:30 pm (UTC)