Life Of a Polyglot/Too Many Languages in My Head
chairdesklamp
Registrant
My languages are native=Japanese. Spanish was the second one I gained fluency in. I studied French a bit between then, and it took 15 years to get to this level in English. I have also studied Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and picked up by osmosis random stuff in Russian and in Serbo-Croatian. None of those I speak.
I don't use Spanish as much as I did in construction and renovation, so these days, it's Broken Spanish. I blank on a word, and just say it in Japanese to fill the gap in the sentence. That's how breaking a language works.
So, rare as it is in SoCal, it's pouring. It's evening, I'm coming home, my neighbour is taking his wife and daughter somewhere. I stop and ask them: do you have an umbrella?
However I forget the word for umbrella and substitute the Japanese word, not really thinking, because Japanese is my default; of course it makes sense to me.In Japanese, it's"kasa."
As far as they heard: ?No tienen casa?
For non-Spanish speakers, because the word in Japanese for umbrella sounds just like the Spanish word for home, I ended up asking my NEIGHBOURS if they were HOMELESS.
I don't use Spanish as much as I did in construction and renovation, so these days, it's Broken Spanish. I blank on a word, and just say it in Japanese to fill the gap in the sentence. That's how breaking a language works.
So, rare as it is in SoCal, it's pouring. It's evening, I'm coming home, my neighbour is taking his wife and daughter somewhere. I stop and ask them: do you have an umbrella?
However I forget the word for umbrella and substitute the Japanese word, not really thinking, because Japanese is my default; of course it makes sense to me.In Japanese, it's"kasa."
As far as they heard: ?No tienen casa?
For non-Spanish speakers, because the word in Japanese for umbrella sounds just like the Spanish word for home, I ended up asking my NEIGHBOURS if they were HOMELESS.