Weird Language Learning Experiences
The Lenguajero team has been studying Spanish pretty hard for almost 10 months now. The experience has been fantastic, but we’ve noticed some things about learning a language, weird things. These are two weird things that have happened to us over the past 10 months while learning Spanish.
1. If you form a relationship with someone in one language, it is incredibly weird to speak another language with them. In fact, it is like meeting them for the first time. We went out one night with our best friends in Colombia, Diego and Angela from Study Spanish Medellin. Although they both speak excellent English our friendship had always been in Spanish. We had known each other for months, and the only time I had ever heard either of them speak in English was when I wouldn’t know a word in Spanish and they would give a quick, one word translation.
So, as we are driving to a bar one night we decide, hey, let’s all speak in English tonight. The next 30 minutes was like being with complete strangers even though they were our best friends. Every time one of them would say something funny in English neurons in my brain would start misfiring, synapses unable to relay signals to one another. What the hell was going on here? Sure, they were still our friends, we still loved them, but the entire relationship dynamic had suddenly shifted. Everything was different.
2. The great migraine experiment of ‘09 promises to be one of the most fascinating breakthroughs in scientific history. Before we met Natalie used to experience migraines that would render her unable to communicate with anyone around her. Simply put, she would be able to form complex thoughts in her mind, but couldn’t tell you what you called a chair if you pointed at it and asked “What is this?”.
Fortunately for her it had been several years since she had had a migraine with aura. Then, one night, on an overnight bus to Mexico City from the coast a migraine struck. I thought she was having a stroke, and was getting super freaked out. She couldn’t form a coherent sentence in English to save her life. It took about 10 minutes for me to figure out what was going on. Struggling to find the words to express what was going on Natalie slipped into a state of Spanglish. Whenever she couldn’t think of an English word (which mainly seemed to be nouns) she would simply replace it with the Spanish equivalent. Coherent sentences in two languages began to come out, and just like that we were communicating. Whatever was happening that was interrupting her to transmit nouns in her native language, English, was not affecting her ability to do so in her second language, Spanish.
