Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾 (liztai@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 08:27:47 JST Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

   "when a multilingual person wants to speak, the languages they know can be active at the same time, even if only one gets used. These languages can interfere with each other, for example intruding into speech just when you don't expect them."

   In Australia I often cause confusion when I switch to Hokkien/Mandarin or Malay midway. Sometimes I don't even realise I am doing this. In Malaysia most of us speak like this, inserting random words from languages all the time.

   https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220719-how-speaking-other-languages-changes-your-brain

   • Embed this notice
     Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾 (liztai@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 08:43:47 JST Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

     in reply to

     • Neil Hargreaves

     @glotcha apparently there's also a diff between those who learned multiple languages at once (most Malaysians) and those who learned second languages much later. In the former, the languages are stored in the same area in the brain while the latter it's in different areas, hence the effort it takes for you to access them. For me I don't even realise I am doing it sometimes. 😆

   • Embed this notice
     Neil Hargreaves (glotcha@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 08:43:48 JST Neil Hargreaves

     in reply to

     @liztai I find switching can be challenging sometimes, I got a lot better at it but some situations that involve multiple languages can be tricky, for example watching an Italian film with a Thai native speaker, I almost always end up speaking Italian even though I intend to speak Thai and it's a real effort to get back into Thai mode.

   • Embed this notice
     Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾 (liztai@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 10:19:15 JST Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

     in reply to

     • David McMullin

     @mcmullin yea most Malaysians pepper Malay, Mandarin, Tamil or other dialects in their English. Sometimes they switch to another language midway. Didn't realize how weird that is until I was in Australia and people keep reminding me to speak English 😆

   • Embed this notice
     David McMullin (mcmullin@musicians.today)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 10:19:16 JST David McMullin

     in reply to

     @liztai
     I’ve always been curious about this. In my home now we speak English and Mandarin, but only my wife is fully fluent in both, so her parents and I each speak to each other with a different proportional mixture of the two, either switching back and forth, using a stray word from the other language here and there, or using the vocabulary of one with the grammatical structure of the other.

   • Embed this notice
     Joe B (joeblubaugh@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Sep-2024 11:09:30 JST Joe B

     in reply to

     @liztai it's really very interesting and charming - my in-laws and wife always use "kuali" to refer to a wok, no matter which language they're speaking in. I'm not sure if they know the Mandarin word for it - I sure don't!