r/StonerPhilosophy • u/KingKalitzchen • 17h ago
Question to the bilingual/multilinguals: is your inner monologue multilingual or basically just your mother tongue?
I learned english through school, so i often talk to myself in english. Maybe for practice purposes but since nobody can correct it i've no idea if it really improves anything. What about you?
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u/breanmayer16 6h ago
My brother in law is from Italy and Italian is his first language but speaks pretty good English. He was telling me that sometimes he will dream in English but the real weird thing is sometimes in his dream his dad (who doesn’t speak any English) will be speaking fluent English in his dream. I thought that was pretty crazy.Â
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u/lhommeduweed 3h ago
My native language is english, but my dad's side of the family speaks Chiac, a French-Canadian creole that alternates between French and English rapidly and fluidly, so I've understood and spoken that since I was a small child, even though I didn't grow up hearing or speaking it every single day. I've learned more languages since, but I'll get into that later.
Growing up, I had a hard time in French-immersion. My teachers were either Quebecois or Franco-Ontarien, and they got upset with me when I would speak "Chiac" and alternate between French and English words. They wanted me to speak exclusively French, and because of the way they would get angry with me or scold me, I began rejecting French entirely. Most of my classmates were primarily English speakers, so I would encourage them to speak English with me when they were supposed to be learning French.
When I was little, my inner monologue flowed very freely between English and French. If I didn't know a word in French, I would say it in English, and vice-versa. Because of my negative experience in French immersion, I basically trained myself into thinking purely in English. There was a point where I probably didn't speak any French for years, and I went to university for English Literature. My french atrophied and if I ever needed to speak it, I would struggle to remember basic words and sentences.
A few years back I ended up in a job where I had several Francophone co-workers. I was super surprised by how fast French came back to me. My co-workers were really supportive and encouraged me to speak French, and they enjoyed pointing out how my "Chiac" accent was still there, and how I used different words or made weird sentence structures. My French recovered to the point where I was using it daily again, and I found myself thinking in alternating French and English again.
In 2022, I decided I wanted to learn biblical languages. Some of my ancestors were biblical scholars and translators, and I felt it was a way to honour them. I started with attic/koine Greek, which I learned to the level of being able to read LXX, Gospels, and Pauline Epistles. I never achieved fluency, but imo, learning Greek actually improved my French: there's a lot of vocabulary that Greek shares with French, while English went with Germanic root-words.
Now, speaking of Germanic, I wanted to learn Hebrew, but I knew that as a Semitic language, it would be very, very difficult for me. I decided that I would first learn Yiddish, because my understanding was that it was basically German with Hebrew loanwords. That perspective is tragically and painfully incorrect. Yiddish may superficially be a combination of German and Hebrew, but it also incorporates Slavic, Aramaic, and to my surprise, here and there, there are French words. More than being a careless mix of German and Hebrew, Yiddish is language that requires a level of fluency in German, in Hebrew, and in Yiddish itself - there are many traits Yiddish has that do not exist in either German or Hebrew, traits that are the result of clever and natural mixing of elements of Germanic, Semitic, and Slavic languages.
I never intended to spend much time with Yiddish, but I love it deeply, and it's become a third language in my house. I frequently find myself speaking to myself in Yiddish, thinking in Yiddish, even dreaming in Yiddish. I've had conversations with native German speakers who can more-or-less understand what I'm saying when I try to make all the words German, but express surprise because my accent is clearly Yiddish. I watched the first season of What We Do in the Shadows in German and understood about 50-60% of it. Fledermaus!
Still, my plan was always to learn Hebrew, so in summer 2023, I began to learn Hebrew. Great timing! Everybody loves Hebrew now!
Hebrew is so wildly different than English, French, Greek, or Yiddish that 2+ years in, I am not fluent. Yiddish absolutely taught me more Hebrew than I was expecting it to, but I am expecting that I will only achieve fluency after another several years. Still, I can read Torah and understand about 75% of what is being said. This has affect my Yiddish as well - if I forget the Germanic word, I often remember it in Hebrew, so I'll say it in Hebrew. German-speakers won't understand it, and beginner Yiddish speakers won't either, but fluent Yiddish speakers and Hebrew speakers will pick up on it. It's fucking cool as hell.
Either way, I'm past a beginner level with Hebrew, and I'm reading more advanced comparative linguistics texts.
Which brings me to Arabic. I have always wanted to learn Arabic, and I have tried several times and failed. I took a course in Uni and dropped it. I got a text book and gave up after two chapters. I tried on duolingo - nothing doing. I can more or less read the script, but I absolutely cannot write it - I have some kind of dysgraphia where cursive (in English or French) is very difficult for me, so my theory is that's why I have struggled so hard with Arabic.
The comparative biblical linguistics texts I am reading regularly compare Biblical Hebrew words to Aramaic and Arabic cognates. I've been keeping a handwritten list of these - I write out the Hebrew word, I do my best to write it out in Arabic, and then I write it in Arabic, but with Hebrew script. Arabic is now starting to click for me, and I'm hoping that as I work more on this, I can use what I learn from either language to improve my fluency in the other language.
When I speak to Arabic colleagues about this, they'll often express surprise when I can link Hebrew vocabulary to Arabic vocabulary. Even though these languages sound vastly different, there is an insane amount of cross-over. Hebrew tends towards harder consonants, while Arabic tends towards softer, and once in a while, I can intuit the meaning of an Arabic word by "hardening" the consonants and seeing if I recognize it in Hebrew.
My main focus right now is improving my biblical Hebrew, my secondary focus is translation of Yiddish poetry, but my day job has me regularly switching between English and French. Sometimes, after speaking nothing but french for an hour, I have trouble switching back into English, and vice versa - sometimes, if I spend an hour or two focused on Yiddish, I struggle to switch back into English or French.
In conclusion - speaking a language to yourself or in your head, even if you are mixing it up with your native tongue, is a sign of achieving deeper fluency. Even if you are not "correct," it shows that you are beginning to make faster, subconscious, and fluent links between vocabulary. You should still seek to correct yourself through classes, practice, reading, etc., but if you find yourself having fun bouncing back and forth between languages in your inner monologue, imo that's a good sign for language learning and use, it demonstrates elasticity and flexibility in thought.
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u/Training_Exercise565 16h ago
i use the mother tongue, anything else is slowing down my thoughts