"Lilith" ([info]liliths_diary) wrote in [info]linguaphiles,
@ 2008-11-30 15:55:00
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Current mood: curious
Entry tags:russian, turkish

Just out of curiosity, how do you mix your languages?
Hello all!

As I go along learning and focusing more and more on Turkish, this problem is slowly starting to fade, but it does still pop up every now and then.

It is, of course, normal to accidentally mix languages when you know more than one. Whether you start speaking English with German grammar, pronounce your German with a Turkish accent, or can only remember certain words in one of your languages; it happens to us all.

As I have seriously taken on Turkish in the past months, I have noticed something strange. The mistakes that I make having to do with confusing it with other languages have nothing to do with with the two that I speak fluently (English and German), but Russian. About a year and a half ago, I had taken a semester of very intense Russian. Even though I still try to read a little in some blogs and listen to some Russian music, I hate to say it, but I put it on the back burner in order to focus on Turkish and some Arabic (mainly Turkish though). That means, I have not tried to build on the Russian grammar that I had learned, or tried to extend my vocabulary in any way, pretty much since that semester ended. I literally just stopped learning it.

That is why, it hit me as being really strange when I would be learning Turkish with my teacher I would, without a thought, start integrated Russian words into sentences. When this first started happening, I didn't even realize that they were Russian words at all; then it hit me when I got home and saw my Russian dictionaries sitting on the bookshelf.

So basically, my focus on Russian is gone and it is not in anyway similar to Turkish, yet I was regulariy mixing the two together.

The most difficult words for me to stop mixing into my Turkish are:

dog = собакa / köpek
four = четыре / dört
grandmother = бабушка / babaanne
grandfather = дедушка / dede (I guess those can be seen as being similar)

The funniest thing is that I say / write the Russian word, but still use the proper Turkish grammar with it:

Benim собаkam yok. (I don't have a dog)
birinci, ikinci, üçüncü, четырıncı, beşinci...(first, second, third, fourth, fifth...)

Etc.

Has anyone else found themselves having this same issue? Mixing two completely different languages just out of the blue on a fairly regular basis? I just thought it would be interesting to know.


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[info]claudee
2008-11-30 03:40 pm UTC (link)
I am learning Turkish since October, so only a few weeks now with two 90 minutes lessons a week. I noticed that I tend to mix it up with dutch which I do speak but by far not on a fluent level. I do not mix it up with English which also is an aquired language but one I speak way better. I think it *might* have something to do with how fluent or not you're in languages, with two (or more) language you basically have the same level (more or less) tend to mix more than with those you know way better/worse. Just a theory, not sure.

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[info]oviaukko
2008-11-30 03:54 pm UTC (link)
i'll have to agree with claudee's theory that it might have to do with the level of fluency... my only experience with this type of language mixing is with spanish/french/italian but they're too similar for me to say that the reason i mix the three is solely because of my not being fluent in any of them (though i'm sure that plays into it).

in class just a few weeks ago the lecturer brought to our attention the fact that people actively try to use patterns that they already know when learning a new language (whether they realize they're doing it or not). maybe the fact that you speak several languages fluently and several not fluently has to do with the way you mix the languages - the patterns of the not so fluent languages might not have set associations yet and you're trying them out in the other languages in case there is similarity (which would make it easier to understand and remember another grammar rule, just by transferring it from one language to the other)...

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[info]akibare
2008-11-30 03:56 pm UTC (link)
I recognize what you say about the foreign languages not mixing up (accidentally, anyway) with the languages you speak normally.

In my case, I consider Japanese and English "my" languages, I don't consider them foreign, I use them regularly, have spoken them for as long as I can remember, etc.

The one foreign language I studied was Mandarin Chinese, in college. It's been quite a while since those days, but I remember what I remember. I only took the beginning two years of it, as it was a university requirement.

Anyway, I find that now, MUCH much later, whenever I have the need to try to say anything in a foreign language, or even in code for a game, I am making broken Chinese attempts. It seems to be marked as "The Foreign Language" for me, somehow.

This is different from regular code-switching, where I will (either to myself, or if the listener also is Japanese-English bilingual) switch from one language to the other or mix them on purpose, sometimes in one sentence even.


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[info]kill_the_onions
2008-11-30 04:01 pm UTC (link)
Oh, that's very funny! I live in Turkey, but I'm a native English speaker and I studied Russian for many years in the past.

When I first arrived here, having not spoken any Russian for about three years at that point, Russian vocabulary was just flowing back into my brain like magic! Whenever I was trying to express myself but didn't know enough Turkish to round out the sentence, Russian words would pop out instead, words that I really would have thought I'd forgotten. It was like my subconscious was reasoning, "As long as it's NOT ENGLISH, it will count!!!" Russian and Turkish are the only languages I've studied with serious dedication; had I ever learned anything else, I'm sure it would also have been Turkish-sentence-filler at the time. :)

Then not too long ago, I was writing an e-mail in Russian for the first time in ages, and I wanted to say something about my husband. So I typed out мой муж, and then I was completely stumped. What on earth was the right first-person possessive ending for **my** муж?! I wanted to say it was -ем, but I wasn't sure, and I couldn't really imagine what ELSE it could be, and I felt so stupid for forgetting, and I spent a good 15 minutes ransacking the house for my old Russian texts... and I really did have to crack open an old text book to realize that I was just sticking Turkish grammar into a Russian sentence. :(

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[info]kill_the_onions
2008-11-30 04:07 pm UTC (link)
And P.S. !
It's so cool that so many other people are learning Turkish! :D

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[info]laura_anne
2008-11-30 04:54 pm UTC (link)
Oh man, I always have the "As long as it's not English" problem when I visit somewhere and can't speak the language, very frustrating!

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[info]mar1s
2008-11-30 04:04 pm UTC (link)
dog = собакa*

i have the same problem too sometimes.
it's my second year studying spanish, so i'm not very good at it, but i've also studied russian for 3 years, but my russian is much worse than my spanish. sometimes when i'm in my russian class, i come up with words i find funny and then realize it's a spanish word. it's sometimes really distracting, i can't stop thinking about that word and can't remember what's it in russian. they are usually very simple and common words that i mess up. i never have this problem with spanish or english, and i only use some spanish words in russia, not english or estonian words.

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[info]laura_anne
2008-11-30 04:52 pm UTC (link)
Yes!
I always found myself getting confused between Russian and Kiswahili when I was learning Kiswahili! Similarly to you, I studied Russian for about 2 years and then gave it up basically.

I attributed that fact that it's only these two that I get mixed up to the fact that they're both languages I started learning later in life (Russian at 16, Kiswahili at 19), so I'd passed that magic language learning window.

I don't tend to get mixed up with English and French (my other languages), and I started learning French at the age of 9 (English is my L1).

There might be something to the fluency idea that others have mentioned, but even now that my level of fluency in French has dropped dramatically, I still don't make the same kind of inadvertent mixing errors.

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[info]sonhobonito
2008-11-30 04:58 pm UTC (link)
in high school i studied abroad in finland for a year. prior to that i had studied french for like 5 years. every time i would try and say things in finnish the french would work as a "filler" for me, among the few finnish words i knew when i got there. I didnt even notice until someone asked me why i did it (english is my first language). it was wierd, and i thought that maybe it was because french, at the time, ws the only foreign language i knew... but then a few years later I moved to brazil and had no similar problem learning portuguese.

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[info]acrophilia
2008-11-30 05:17 pm UTC (link)
I did it a lot when I restarted Latin.

I took Latin for 2 years (9th and 10th grade) in high school, the second year was far more intensive, since we had just switched to block scheduling.
11th grade was boring without taking a language, so I began German with the same teacher. I thought German was so much easier, but I still loved Latin.
In college, I took German my first 3 semesters and declared a German major. My German wasn't extremely intensive, just one class per semester. I decided to continue taking Latin in my 4th semester. I took a class lower than I'd placed into. I remembered grammar nearly perfectly but I didn't know any words. My professor (for 102!) actually conducted class in Latin, and I was terrified of getting called on. Instead of "nescio" for "I don't know," I would say something like "ego nicht... uhh, ego non erinnern. Ich non scio." Luckily, it was more entertaining to my classmates than it was embarassing for me. On paper, though, my Latin was technically more developed than my German.

Now I do it almost intentionally. I'm studying in Berlin, it's fair to say I'm close to fluent, and most of my friends are Americans or speak near-perfect English. Often I don't do it intentionally and use the word that fits more naturally or sometimes I think it will be more amusing when I'm telling a story.
I tend to decide the language based on the words I like better, as in "I was going spazieren before Unterricht and couldn't find a Geldautomat. I had ein bisschen Kleingeld mit so I went einkaufen for a Vokabelheft"

Since I'm already on a procrastination tangent and story-telling string, I'll share a major native language brain fart:
At the Weihnachtsmarkt at Schloss Charlottenburg with two other Americans, after it's gotten really dark. There are colored lights being projected on the castle.
a: Check it out! There's something like a bat signal projected onto the sky from the lights hitting the statue. That wasn't like that before.
b: Sophie Charlotte would be proud. I wonder how that works.
a: I think it's because this light is yellow and the clouds are... oh man. The clouds are like, fester than they were before.
c: right. fester like heavier?
b: genau! thicker. more tightly packed. what is it?
(after a good few minutes of thinking of English synonyms)
a, b, c in chorus: denser.

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[info]lollipop_melon
2008-11-30 05:50 pm UTC (link)
I am a native speaker of English and I've learned Spanish, Japanese and am now studying Korean.
I speak only English well but my Spanish isn't bad at all. I learned Spanish in jr high and high school and then out in the world... For the most part I learned that language in a formal setting.
I learned Japanese by ear and by being there and having zillions of exchange students. Honestly, I don't know how I know it, but I can pick up a conversation without a problem - it just kinda happens.
Now, when speaking Spanish to someone I have to think how to form the sentence, the appropriate tense, the ending and all that. It doesn't take long, but that's the process. So I've thought through the whole thing I want to say and then I go to say it and my mouth does Japanese.
It's so embarrassing. For me and the people I'm trying to talk to. ;(

I think it's because of the way I learned each language.
I am learning Korean in a mixed kind of setting - somewhat academic and somewhat "natural." Perhaps that's why I'm not mixing and Japanese or Spanish into my Korean.
?
^_^

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[info]72stroopwafels
2008-11-30 05:58 pm UTC (link)
I speak German and Dutch (native speaker of English) so to some extent it's natural that I mix them up all the time- the two of them do kind of leak into eachother a little bit. Generally it's possible to guess a word in one language by changing it slightly from the other language.
There are problems, though. I keep saying bellen instead of anrufen, for to ring someone up. In Dutch, bellen does indeed mean to ring someone, but in German, it's to bark. This has created horrible humiliation for me, more than once.
I also get confused with the word Bleistift (pencil) in German. Blei means lead, but before I learnt this, I learnt the Dutch word blij, pronounced much the same, which means happy. So a Bleistift, in my mind, is a happy pen. :D

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[info]bohemiabythesea
2008-11-30 06:37 pm UTC (link)
I'm a German native speaker, live in Britain and had, until recently, a French-speaking flatmate with whom I used to speak French at home. Both my French and my English are on quite a high level, and while I mostly speak English here, I still sometimes randomly switch to French in the middle of a sentence when saying something related to a francophone context or when my former flatmate is around - probably because she triggers my French. In general, I only realise when people look at me funnily. And nine times out of ten I will use the French 'farine' for 'flour', convinced that it is the correct term. The same goes for 'sable'/'sand'. I would therefore second the theory that it depends on the level of fluency of the languages: you recognise that you are in a foreign-language context, and sometimes, particles from the wrong language compartment tumble out of your mouth, because the other language offers a comparable level of confidence and feeling at ease as the one you are supposed to be speaking.

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[info]hirtzenocker
2008-11-30 07:19 pm UTC (link)
I speak Swedish with a Canadian-Irish accent, and tend toward German grammer. Come to think, my Japanese teacher said I sounded rather Irish, too.

I have no proper excuse for all this, being an English-speaking American with a slight West Coast Canadian accent (I've lived most of my life within an hour south of Vancouver, BC), but that's how it is.


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[info]nefis
2008-11-30 08:29 pm UTC (link)
Just think about vowel harmony. Words like дедушка simply cannot be Turkish. How long have you been learning Turkish? It usually takes some time to get used to vowel harmony, but not much

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[info]splintercat
2008-11-30 08:42 pm UTC (link)
I had a similar problem, except for me, the language I acquired first kept being replaced with the later language. I studied French for 4-5 years and am now in my second year studying Japanese. I've completely given up French (though I might pick up a book now and then) and am studying Japanese as my major. Now when I try to say anything in French, it comes out in Japanese word order, with Japanese grammatical particles. I never had problems with the opposite, even when I was first learning Japanese - I feel like I took to Japanese a lot more easily than I ever did to French, even though Japanese is harder for English speakers to learn usually. Japanese has totally replaced French in my brain.

Except, because of the writing systems, I'm left in a situation where I can read French books looking at a dictionary occasionally but not speak, understand, or write French, while I can speak and understand Japanese just fine in most cases but I can't read it above maybe a third grade level without taking an hour per page.

Good luck with Turkish!

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[info]ledh
2008-11-30 09:18 pm UTC (link)
are they very similar languags, turkish and russian? I know turkish but I can't read russian at all (it's cyrillic alphabet, right...?)

I usually mix my english and dutch. I sometimes don't remember the dutch word nd say the english, though my native tongue is dutch. nutty.

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[info]buckfush530
2008-11-30 10:05 pm UTC (link)
Last year I was taking Japanese, German, and French. Oh my the fun I had with mixing. For the most part I got it under control, but I still remember one example from the year previous where in German I said, "Ich will nicht arbeiter" where I'd used the French indicative marker (er) on a German word (arbeit).

Oh, and good luck with both Turkish and Russian!

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[info]kaikias
2008-12-01 02:01 am UTC (link)
I have a sneaking suspicion that that happens to most learners, especially early on when there are weird holes in one's vocabulary that need filling. My brain has been known to cheerily construct sentences mixed from Spanish, Greek, and Finnish, or call up Finnish in the middle of Latin class.

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[info]invinciblend
2008-12-01 09:33 am UTC (link)
The only other language I have a decent-sized vocabulary in is Indonesian, so no matter what language I'm trying to speak, if I don't know a word and Indonesian one automatically slips out. Since I started learning small amounts of Japanese, German and Serbian, sometimes my sentences come out as complete gibberish. :P

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[info]bookwrm17
2008-12-01 03:13 am UTC (link)
I have a similar problem with French and Italian. I almost never slip into English when speaking either, but I frequently mix the two. I think it must have something to do with the fact that French and Italian are more similar to each other than they are to English.

Of course, then there are those times when I'm trying to speak English and my brain has to go through the French, Italian, and Latin words before it can get to the English one. I find that this usually happens after I've been speaking/hearing/reading one of the other languages for an extended period of time, when my mind is switching gears, so to speak.

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[info]markusn
2008-12-01 06:19 am UTC (link)
It's a common thing. Foreign languages take up a different part of our brain from our native one, and they all share the same spot. It's quite uncommon to mix in words of your native tongue.

I found out this weekend that Standard German indeed is a foreign language to me. (Native Speaker of Swiss German, a rather distinct Dialect; Germans a little higher up north don't understand us.)

I was at a post office desk in Germany, and didn't understand something the clerk asked me. My immediate comeback was: "Pardon?" Kind of embarrassing, really.

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[info]miconazole
2008-12-01 11:13 am UTC (link)
Man, I totally do this. When I started learning Russian I'd fill in the gaps with the remnants of my sad high school French. And these days I can't speak French anymore because I just start talking Russian mid-sentence. A few days ago I found a book called "Teach Yourself Ukrainian" but I am leaving it the hell alone because after reading it for an hour I decided a better title would be "Destroy Your Russian".

Strangely enough, I've been tinkering with Croatian on the side and it's never interfered with anything. It's just floating out there in its own little happy bubble. Weird.

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[info]telebikun
2008-12-01 11:34 pm UTC (link)
As I've said before, I had a hard time avoiding mixing in some Thai when I started studying Khmer, and I still speak Khmer with a bit of a Thai accent.

But the two languages have a lot in common--even though they're not related, and both grammatically and phonologically, they're quite distinct, they share a lot of vocabulary. Mostly Pali and Sanskrit loanwords, but also some borrowings directly from one another.

I also found myself sticking both Russian and Spanish words into Romanian, and now that my Russian's gotten quite rusty, I occasionally insert some Spanish. In general, I return to languages I'm not necessarily fluent in but have studied most recently when trying to acquire a new language--lots of random Japanese words popped into my head when I took up Cantonese, for example.

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[info]nazarboncuk
2008-12-03 08:36 am UTC (link)
It depends on whatever language I'm more into at the time. When I used to try to speak Russian I would mess it up with Georgian. And when I tried to speak Georgian I would mess it up with Turkish. When I tried to speak Spanish I would mess that up with Turkish too. But now the only foreign lang that I am concentrating on right now is Arabic. So I mess up all of those languages with Arabic. I don't get mixed up when I speak Arabic though. But I bet if I switch over to another dominant foreign lang my Arabic will get messed up. And I DOOOON'T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN. Yet...

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[info]talkjive
2008-12-07 01:39 am UTC (link)
Kitchens in the US are heavily Hispanic. Even if you think you're in an Italian restaurant eating garlic bread, you're actually eating pan y mantequilla con ajo*, made by Poblanos calling each other maricons. This has frequently left me standing in the kitchen at work, after my German class, attempting to deal with insults to my mother without a single ich, du, weil, oder Rattenarsch.

I usually fail.



(I have no idea if this is a proper Spanish construction, because yo hablo espanol como una gringa borracha.)

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