Polyglots sometimes experience faulty language selection, accidentally reaching for words from a language different from the one they’re speaking. Listener Phoebe Liu of Seattle grew up speaking Chinese, then learned English, and studied Japanese in college. She says that physically embodying stereotypical speakers of each language when speaking helps her keep the languages straight. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Polyglot Faulty Language Selection”
A while back we were talking about faulty language selection.
That problem that polyglots have when they’ve learned several languages and then one language gets in the way of the other one.
We got a lot of response from our listeners about that, and one really interesting one came from Phoebe Liu.
She’s Chinese.
She currently lives in Seattle, and she said that she learned English as a second language when she was in middle school, and then when she went to university, she majored in Japanese.
And she says that during her freshman year, when she talked to people in English and forgot the vocabulary, she would immediately go to Japanese rather than her native Chinese.
And she said that eventually she came up with this strategy that seemed to help.
She writes, I pretended to be a stereotypical Japanese anime girl when I speak Japanese, using soft intonations and more humble body language.
When I talk in English, I would use a firmer voice and hold up my chest like a confident American young girl.
I got to be back to myself when using Chinese.
This helped me to separate the languages efficiently during talking, and even if I got stuck, it was still in that language and wouldn’t slip away to another.
And I’ve been wondering if this role-playing solution only works on me.
I guess if connections are made between body languages and the language, it’ll be harder to change the language you’re speaking.
Oh, what a really good point.
Isn’t that interesting?
Yeah. I’ve heard that being effective for other people.
Yeah.
They feel like different characters when they’re speaking different languages.
Oh, definitely. Definitely. When I speak Spanish, I’m much more demonstrative.
And if you’re learning a language, that’s the advice that I give to people and have been given myself, which is imitate.
Imitate like the parody, even, somebody that you know that already speaks the language.
Even mimic them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you’ll find that you become that other kind of person.
Interesting.
Yeah.
If you’ve got more to say about what it’s like to get confused between two languages, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
