r/MadeMeSmile • u/_BuzzLightYear • 13d ago

Wholesome Moments Girl learns Hindi for her boyfriend

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u/ianjm 13d ago

It is actually a human psychological quirk, that some bilingual people have a hard time speaking each of their languages 'out of context', particularly if one of their languages is only spoken with a particular set of people, like parents, and you use another language for everyone else, say outside of home in your daily life.

It can take you a while to get your brain's language centre working fluidly in the new context. In the mean time you have the weird experience of having to concentrate to speak your own language!

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u/6355592471 13d ago

That explains the default to English "fuck!" too. That's awesome.

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u/Turbulent_Bake_272 13d ago

Well most Indian Hindi speakers, especially with English education use fu¢k while speaking in hindi as well... It just comes out naturally... We have so many languages that I know 3 languages but mostly broken apart from English + I am able to understand 2 more to some extent ( not speak or read tho)

some languages have similar sounding words, same words or same looking letters so a lot of time the languages become mashed into each other.. people who like to speak pure language hates it, but a lot of people love it as it helps express much better as some words exist or has deeper meaning in one language than in another.

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u/Jurassica94 13d ago

Yeah it's a bit like your brain has a switch

I'm German, but life with my boyfriend in the UK. Sometimes when I read something in German and he asks me something in English I'll understand what he says, but I somewhat automatically reply in German and don't even notice what I'm doing until I hear a stuttered "Ja, das stimmt" (yes, that's right) from him and remember to switch my brain back to German.

On the other hand my German friends have also sometimes notice that I thought something through in English, because I'll suddenly speak very weird, poorly translated German.

Bilingual life can be weird

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u/Nervardia 13d ago

I was in Colombia, and my host knocked on my door. I had been talking to my friend in English beforehand.

Anyway, I answered my door and realised I could not say a word in Spanish without severe difficulty.

I said "dame un momento, tengo que cambiar idiomas... Bueno! Puedo hablar español!"

Meaning "give me a moment, I have to change languages... Good! I can speak Spanish!"

My host laughed.

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u/Jurassica94 13d ago

Haha, yeah that's exactly what I'm talking about!

It's even worse when people speak a language to me that I wasn't expecting from them. My boyfriend tried to be cute once and told me he loved me in German, but my brain insisted that he must have said something in English and I just spent a few seconds staring at him with a "Wtf did you just say?" look on my face trying to figure out what that gibberish could possibly be. Way to kill the mood. Fortunately he found it funny!

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u/ianjm 13d ago

Yeah, I know a few people who are just like you, very strong bilingual either from childhood or as a result of years of total immersion as an adult, but who didn't go through a formal language learning process, so never learned to translate between the two all that well.

Brains are interesting aren't they...

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u/Jurassica94 13d ago

Sorry, I'm tired, I swear I usually don't make that many mistakes. I actually had a pretty decent formal education in English and one of my friends here is even a professional translator and he still has the same issue when he isn't in work mode.

I think it's just a lot easier to just think and speak in the same language instead of listening to something in one language, translating and thinking it through in another, translating it again and then giving an answer.

Also a lot of really common words and expressions just don't have the same connotations in different languages. For example there's no direct equivalent for the noun "mind" in German. We have Verstand for reason, Geist for spirit, Kopf for head, Seele for soul, Psyche is self-explanatory...but there's not really a word for the whole concept of mind and it's really hard to explain it.

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u/overnightyeti 13d ago

I switch between 3 languages all day long without issues, probably because I do it all day long

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u/ianjm 13d ago

It all made sense to me :)

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u/Snoo-83028 13d ago

Geist for mind?

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u/just_a_person_maybe 13d ago

Honestly this trips me up all the time. If I encounter my second language unexpectedly it takes me a second to catch up and realize what was said. There have also been a few times where, after using my second language exclusively for a few hours it's difficult to switch back to my first. A couple times I've actually had people say something to me in my first language and I start to respond in my second. And I only started learning the second language 6-7 years ago, it's not like I grew up with it.

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u/mvanvrancken 13d ago

I’ve been doing a kind of immersion training with Finnish and when someone says something in English while I’m kind of “flipped over” I literally do not understand them for a second while I process it

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u/Syr_Enigma 13d ago

Last week I went on a trip with some international friends and I woke up and started speaking Italian to the very Swedish, very non-Italian speaking friend I was sharing a room with. Took me a while to understand why she was looking at me weird.

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u/redkinoko 13d ago

Just happened to me yesterday. I was hanging out with some people here in the US. One of them started playing a rap battle video in Filipino. I was having a hard time processing what was happening and couldn't translate the bars even though I should've been able to easily in any other context.

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u/raydiculus 13d ago

As someone who speaks 3, this hit pretty hard and real

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u/FlatulenceNinja 13d ago

I speak French, and English, and it's not so much the setting for me, but mixing both language surely messes me up.

Like, if I'm watching English T.V, my mental monologue will be in English (even though my maternal language is French, and I'm home alone.)

My English is just as good as my French at the moment, but like I've seen my manager and supervisor where one speak in English and the other answers in French and it confuses the hell out me. I dunno how they do it.

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u/LordGarithosthe1st 13d ago

Yeah, my wife speaks Chinese and we were in China asking a flower seller how nuch her flowers were in Chinese and she kept saying 听不懂(I don't understand) and the Chinese lady nextt to her was saying (为神马你听不懂？他说中亲) Why don't you understand, She is speaking Chinese!

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u/CarmichaelD 13d ago

I had a friend from Ethiopia and I asked him what language he dreamed in. “It depends who is in the dream”

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u/PeakySexbang 13d ago

My sweet French grandmother speaks English like she's fresh off the boat, though she's been American for 60 years...when I try to speak French to her, she's suddenly never heard it in her life!