What is it like to know two languages?

To all multilingual ones here, I pose this question: what is it like knowing multiple languages? Do you think in different languages, change when the environment does, or switch between them randomly? Do you ever get your words mixed up (i.e., you're talking to an English speaker but instead of saying cheese you say queso)? Do you find that knowing another language helps or hinders your understanding of your native one?

Pick and choose whatever you want to answer, but thank you for your time either way!

>>39
You've never been abroad, have you?

I am fluent in two languages, however one of those is a minority language which is a little limited. Doesn't have words for as many things as English does, for example. Nationalists invent neologisms to try and keep up, but as a fluent speaker I find them silly.

Anyway, I speak it all the time with my mother and no one much else. I try and listen to the radio station in it sometimes to see if I can still keep up like I could when I went to school and was mostly educated through it.

It's also pretty cool to be able to speak to my sister and whatnot with other people not understanding. Being part of something with less than 1m speakers world wide feels good, too.

>>42
Feels good, man.

>>42
WOULD YOU TELL US WHAT LANGUAGE IS THAT!?!?!

>>44
Finnish

I know English and Polish about equally well, and I constantly get words mixed up. It's usually a bother to speak, unless I speak with people who know both, and will understand if I inject words randomly from the other. I think in English, for the most part, despite it being my second language.

I also know German and Russian a little bit, but I don't get to use these a lot.

>>45
Why the Finn hate? You must be so miserable yourself.

I know Dutch, English, German, Russian, French and Estonian.

I'm like a multilanguage dictionary.

>>48
You don't know Japanese though so that's a pretty useless dictionary.

I am German and consider myself fluent in English and Spanish. I'm studying Japanese too, but I'm still far from fluent (I can read like 500 kanji or so, you need around 2 or 3 thousand to read a novel).

I mostly think (and talk to myself...) in English, since I pretty much live on the Internet and read all my books and tutorials in this language. Ever since I started surrounding myself more and more with Japanese though, some Japanese words and sentence structures started popping up, like "you're my slave, dakara!". But I can keep this under control and it doesn't happen to me when I talk to people.
However, my Japanese is pretty much overwriting my Spanish, which I don't use in any meaningful way anymore. Maybe it's because I used to watch anime with Spanish subtitles, or because they use similar sounds/phonemes, I dunno. As of now, I can hardly formulate two sentences in Spanish without using Japanese words. "gomen, señor..."
I never mix up spoken German and English. I do sometimes use English spellings of Latin/Greek loanwords in German, however.
I usually sound things out in my head when I read something. Japanese/Chinese writing however emphasizes meaning over sound, and I frequently forget how to read certain words even though I remember what the characters mean. The first thing that pops into my mind in that situation is usually an English word (sometimes a German one) that I tend to sound out as Engrish. For example I might read 虫の音が聞こえる静かな夜 as "mushi no ne ga kikoeru shizuka na nighto"

>Do you find that knowing another language helps or hinders your understanding of your native one?
As for input, it definitely helps me understand my native language. And not just the language itself, but also the concepts that are expressed in it.
However, as far as output goes, I think it's more useful to be really good at just one or two languages than to be mediocre at several. I might move to Canada one day... in that case, I'll probably forget most of my German and my already deteriorating Spanish through disuse.

>For example I might read 虫の音が聞こえる静かな夜 as "mushi no ne ga kikoeru shizuka na nighto

Good lord why would anyone do that

>>50
Problem is, most foreigners, especially Germans, overestimate their language skills. Most Germans think their English is awesome when in reality, it's terrible.

>>52
This is true. Most Dutchmen also consider their english to be quite sufficient, but when I (who actually does speak fluently due to the fact that I started speaking English from a very young age) just get bleeding ears when I hear some of their accents.

>>52
Were you referring to me as well with that statement? Did I make any horrible mistakes in that post?

Native Spanish speaker and fluent in English, here.

>Do you think in different languages, change when the environment does, or switch between them randomly?

If by "think" you mean internal monologue, then yes. I can think in either language and may even tend to switch back and forth between sentences without noticing it. Since I don't have many chances to actually speak it, this is the closest I get to practice without having to speak to myself aloud.
There's no correlation between my external situation and the particular language I'm using to think, but there may be correlation between the language and the subject I'm thinking about (e.g. programming, which is better expressed in English).

>Do you ever get your words mixed up (i.e., you're talking to an English speaker but instead of saying cheese you say queso)?

No, but it has happened to me to unknowingly translate English phrases that don't exist in Spanish (e.g. "not so much X as it is Y" becomes "no es tanto X como es Y").
If I get upset I may accidentally speak complete sentences in the wrong language, though this hasn't happened in a very long time.

>Do you find that knowing another language helps or hinders your understanding of your native one?
Neither. Other than the previously mentioned effects, both languages haven't interfered with each other much if at all.
I do, however, think that knowing more than one language helps understand the underlying structure in language in general.


An interesting side-effect is that you (well, I) can't remember what it was like not to understand the language. This has also happened to me with non-human languages. I'm guessing it's for a similar reason than people who lose color perception due to brain damage can't remember what colors looked like before the damage.

Another interesting aspect is the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon. It's possible to remember the word for a thing in one language but not in another. It helps if you're talking to a person who speaks the right language.

I'm a French native speaker and I can use english (especially technical english).
I have a small hability to think in english, and thanks to that I don't have to deal with a translation phase when I want to speak or write.
I learn German some years, but me level is very bad :'(

I put often english words in my french sentence, but it's computer science related word (such as kernel, OS, ...).
2 days ago, a strange things happen to me : I though a french phrase with the world 'underlying'. At this moment I tried to search to french world but I don't remember it. It took 10 minutes to me to remember of the word ('sous-jacent').

Well, since I'm fluent in reading and listening english, I like learning tongues. Soon I'll start 日本語.

>>56
good choice on nihongo there bro, its the only language worth learning IMO.

>>56
It's weird how romance languages are connected. When I read "underlying", I was trying to think of that word in Spanish, but then I read "sous-jacent" and the answer was clear (Subyacente).

I think it's fun/interesting. It allows you to think about/approach things in a bit of a different way. Languages convey the same concepts slightly differently and their are cases where their is no equivalent concept in your native language. So, basically, makes life a little more interesting.

Yes, I consciously think in a different language - makes for good practice. I'll throw in English when necessary (the goal being to maximize usage).

Never mixed up a word in a conversation before. I see it as two different OS's in your head - you operate in one or the other.

I can't really say it's helped my English that much but my knowledge of languages in general (particularly grammar) has risen a bit.

>>51
Never read any manga? The authors often take English loanwords and write them as special kanji readings. Like, I just read the first volume of the Elfen Lied manga, and ミュータント for example is given the kanji 突然変異体.

>>60
That seems like an awful lot of strokes just to say "mutant".

変異体 by itself is fine as mutant

突然変異体 is "suddenly changed body" so yeah.

>>62
Yahoo's monolingual dictionary has an entry for 【突然変異体】 with とつぜんへんいたい given as the normal reading. One of the Homonyms it gives in the definition is ミュータント。
A mutation/突然変異 really is a sudden change/variation since it happens from one generation to another without intermediate steps, so I think the kanji aren't that bad a choice.

>>61
how many brush strokes something would require if you were to write it on paper is irrelevant in the computer age.

>>63
More strokes means greater complexity, which means it's harder to read.
Unless you're saying "突然変異体" is just as complex as "mutant". I'm talking about the graphical representations, not the words themselves or the semantics.

I know Estonian and English.
Nobody knows where Estonia is and everybody knows how to speak English.
I wish I knew Russian and German a bit better.

>>65
Estonia is a remote province of Russia as far as I know.

>>66
True

Estonia is one of those Nazi countries who viciously attacked the innocent peace-loving Russians together with Germany.