World Travel in Your Head
Someone just asked me what it was like to switch from speaking Mandarin to Arabic in a short space of time. It got me thinking.
A story: When I lived in England, my best friend was Chinese, Song Ran. We spoke only Mandarin together. One day we were in a group of people who only spoke English so I spoke English. As we walked away she said to me, “Don’t speak English again. You turn into an American.”
And that’s the exciting part of languages. Trully when you get to a certain level of fluency, you have to take on part of the culture to sound normal. Think about it in the opposite direction. The more fluent someone becomes in speaking English, the more they seem American, or British if you live there. It happens as you become fluent in other languages as well.
Chinese: When I speak Chinese, honor and saving face become more important. Chinese combines characters in unique ways to make new words so things are grouped together differently in my head than in English. There is no word for ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for example.
Arabic: When I speak Arabic, time slows way down and I must add more religious terminology. There aren’t a lot of specific vocabulary words meaning ‘soon’ for example.
Sign Language: When I am signing, sound is drown out and visual cues take on a whole new dimension. I can tell a whole story using linguistic spatial cues and barely even hear the person next to me calling my name.
Juxtaposing those languages close together is trippy because literally my brain jumps from continent to continent and culture to culture. Making language usage like world traveling in your head.
aud'acious 
You’re awesome. Loved your post.
i love this post too. it’s so interesting for someone who never really got far enough with another language to understand some of these nuances.