Sayed lives in Houston, Texas, but grew up in Pakistan speaking Urdu and Punjabi. As someone who began learning English two years ago, he finds that he often mixes up gendered pronouns. It’s not surprising that he would confuse he with she and...
A native English speaker who’s been studying Spanish for 11 years with her husband finds that learning a second language has an effect on her original tongue. She can’t spell as well as she used to, and sometimes finds herself reaching...
Rosa recalls that when she was growing up in Karnes City, Texas, in the 1960s, she and other Mexican-American children were segregated into a separate classroom and forbidden to speak Spanish at school. Her teachers also replaced her first name...
Destiny from Huntington Beach, California, speaks German proficiently, plus some Spanish. She’s now learning Russian, but finds herself frustrated as she reaches instead for Spanish words for the same thing. This phenomenon is so common among...
New research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who speak more than one languagetend to be less superstitious if they’re reading or thinking in a different language. This is part of a complete...
A New York City man who grew up speaking both English and Tagalog reports an experience common to bilinguals: his behavior and emotions tend to shift when he’s speaking one language as opposed to the other. Two good books on the topic: Life...