anglicisms...

[ratcreature]

You know, writing/reading in English so much has some odd (and rather embarrassing) side-effects. Like in English in German there are some fixed expressions, some quite similar to their English counterparts, but not exactly. And I have developed the odd tendency to take the English phrasing, with German words, instead of the German one. For example, today I caught myself with the phrasing "das Ding ist, dass..." (the English "the thing is, that...") instead of using "die Sache ist die, dass..." as I should have. I also catch myself rather frequently with using "hast du eine Idee, was..." (the English "do you have any idea what...") instead of using "hast du eine Ahnung, was..." and I'm sure there are more examples.

It gets really annoying when even after thinking for a moment I'm not sure whether you can use some phrasing in German. I mean, these transformations are always more or less grammatically correct, they could exist, they are just not the right phrasing, and it's really disconcerting to have lost hat feeling of certainty in some instances. Of course I'm not alone in doing this, and in some cases the process is so far along that the "English" wording is replacing the one previously used or becoming an alternative like it has happened with "das macht keinen Sinn" (the English "makes no sense") and the German "ergibt keinen Sinn", I googled both combinations, and "macht keinen Sinn" is now about six times as common as the other one. And it's not like I'm some kind of language purist and think that the process in itself is awful, but it still is sort of embarrassing if you are doing it with phrases for which it is not common yet.

I think that the embarrassment of this is only surpassed by using common fixed expressions that don't exist at all in German, but are useful in English, so I use them in German as well (notorious is "I get the idea" though I really watch myself with that one by now). Just they don't exist (yet), and of course people look at me funny. Or I barely stop myself in time, and then have to scramble to think of how to phrase in German. I'm really starting to see why bilingual people, when they talk with other bilingual people (that is when they share the same two languages) seem to switch between languages in mid-sentence fairly regularly for some words or expressions without missing a beat. It sounds sort of odd at first, but I see why that is fairly common.

Comments

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

language learning is pretty weird. I know people who will do the shifting thing, usually because the language they are speaking doesn't have a particular concept or only has a long phrase for the concept instead of a word or two.

my sister J. speaks...um...I've lost count how many languages, but at least 2 fluently (English, French) and at least 2 others well enough to get by (German, Spanish), plus a smattering of others (Cantonese, Greek...don't know what else). She says that the worst thing is that you end up losing words in all languages - your brain gets confused, and you'll end up not able to think of a word in *any* of the languages you know. For example, she used to routinely not be able to produce color words in any language. She'd wave her hands around, yelling "that thing! the ....thing!" and we'd have to go "what? the box? the blue thing? the red thing? the yellow thing?" and then she'd go "yes! YELLOW! the yellow thing!" because until we said it, she could not bring the word to mind at *all*.

It was very strange.

[ratcreature]

I only speak German and English fluently, and some French and Spanish (I don't think my pitiful knowledge of Latin counts in this context), so I don't know enough languages to justify serious confusion. ;) I mean, I'm not very talented with languages, I don't pick them up easily (see me green with envy here for those people who seem to pick up languages almost effortlessly).

It also happens to me that I can't come up with a word in any language (iirc, it hasn't happened with primary colors yet, but it's not only complicated words either) and I've always thought of that as the "regular kind" of glitch, that something is on the tip of your tongue, but refuses to materialize. It has to be really common when there are even idioms for it (German has one also: "auf der Zunge liegen"). It never seemed strange to me that it would happen with all words I know for something at once.

That somehow annoys me less than when I can come up with the word for something in English, but the German one refuses to materialize, because in that case I end up grasping for that word for a little while and then stutter something like "that thing, in English it's called..." because that's the fastest way to get around the communication block as in most cases the other person will know English well enough to recognize the word. It comes across as odd though.

Although in everyday situations any of this is dwarfed by my embarrassing problem with people's names. I can know someone a long time, and really *know* the name, and still it happens fairly often that it refuses to come to me. I have a very hard time memorizing names for people in the first place, e.g. once I was in a comic workshop with five other people, and I had seen them once a week for months, and still couldn't remember all their names. And we met outside the workshop a few times as well, because it turned out to be a really nice group of people. I mean, I remembered all sorts of details they had told about themselves, what their majors were, anecdotes about their SOs, families, pets, ... it's not like I couldn't tell the people apart. After a certain point in an acquaintance it gets really awkward to ask people for their name again though. By now I ask people to tell me their name again fairly often early on, and just tell them that I have a hard time memorizing names reliably, so they're not offended and think it's a personal thing. It doesn't help making a good impression on people, though. :(