Thanks to having studied Spanish for over two years in College but lived in China, I often want to speak both languages (Chinese and Spanish) at the same time. I end up wanting to say things like, wode zhongwen no es muy bueno. Of course, wo Espanol shuode tambien bu hao :-P Hahaha. Okay, I really do know better and I'm not trying for grammatical accuracy here either...but hybrids like this do happen, especially when you know the word for something in a different language than the one you are speaking in. Afterall, it was an Amherst College professor (right down the road), Ilan Stavans, who wrote a book on the emergence of Spanglish today. We've probably all tried Chinglish but do you speak three or more languages? What hybrid languages have you encountered?
3 comments:
I do the same thing. This is my first year studying Chinese, but I've studied Spanish since 7th grade. It does get really confusing. The worst is if I don't know a word in Chinese, I tend to replace it with a Spanish word rather than English. It's really weird and confusing too.
Hi Melanie! Thanks for your comment. It's nice to know I'm not the only one sometimes struggling to juggle languages.
When I first got back from China, I took Spanish in college (I was being a dutiful daughter...my parents wanted me to) and was constantly saying things in Chinese to my Spanish language professor. She thought this was somewhat amusing and I did eventually learn to switch more easily...but it took some time. I think that our first language must be in one part of our brain and all the second languages go into another separate area of the brain, at least until we gain fluency at such a level that we can speak and think in the second language as well as the first. :-)
I've had a unique experience with this phenomenon. I also studied a lot of Spanish in highschool and college, and for a long time I was using Spanish when I couldn't think of a Chinese word. However, when I did my immersion program this past summer, I reached a level in my Chinese when it replaced my Spanish. There have been times since then when I try to speah Spanish, but it doesn't work. I want to use Spanish, but the only thing that I come up with is Chinese. Now I never use a Spanish word when I'm reaching for a Chinese word, instead its the other way around. I also now find that I use Chinese when I am stumbling in English and that, by far, is the most exciting thing about progressing in a language.
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