I was talking to Lucia recently about how I think, or don't think, in Foreign Languages. I remember that Barry Farber (I am 98% sure it was him. XD) wrote about having an 'intermediate thinking language' - which was essentially English words and such, organized in the grammar of the language he was speaking, and then, as he spoke, the words came. I was speculating that my own system was somewhat like this, if mostly subconscious. I have this theory that this 'intermediate thinking language' idea might fall somewhere in between trying to translate English thoughts as one goes and thinking in the target language in efficacy. I know that I could improve as far as thinking fully in my languages other than English! (Perhaps because, although it is impossible to know exactly how other people think, I have a few reasons to suspect that my own thought process is more language (English XD) bound and clear than many other people's - if I think in a way that leaves a thought 'sentence' incomplete, for example, it's a bit jarring.) It seems strange, that I'm not certain what language I'm thinking in a lot of the time, but I think it does change based on which language I'm speaking, with whom, at what level, anyways, a wide range of factors.
Well, I was thinking about this again today, as I was making corrections to my last German essay. On one sentence, my teacher wrote, "Sehr schön formuliert" - kind of like, "Very nicely formed". I assume she means sentence structure and grammar? So anyway, I paid more attention than normal to the sentence, and I was actually impressed. Not with myself, I swear to God above, I tell the blog when I am impressed with myself! No, I was impressed by the human brain, it's ability to come up with all these various ways of organizing thought, and of mastering different ways, and to be able to switch between them. In short, to learn languages. Although obviously German and English are laughably similar to each other in structure, compared to most languages in the world, I will still use this line as an example of how different even closely related languages can be.
"Wenn man dass glaubt, dann soll man das auch über Amerikaner denken, weil wir nicht von dieser Schwäche befreit sind."
Translated literally, this would be something like:
"If one that believes, then should one also that about Americans think, because we not from this weakness free are."
Translated... erm... more properly, it is:
"If one believes that, then he should also believe it of Americans, because we are not free from this weakness."
It's something, isn't it? Anyway, it made me revisit my little 'intermediate language theory', because I knew with absolute certainty that I hadn't at all thought about the literal translation of that line before, it would have just confused me - I know that at least in that moment, I was composing with the German sentence structure viberating in my mind. And that's something amazing!
March 05, 2009
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Yup, Barry Farber has a 'middle language'. I read about it in his seminal language learning book. I won't say I totally use his methods, but I love his enthusiasm and I read his book here and there for encouragement.=)
I did a bit of the 'How Finnish are you?' quiz and I think I'm about 10%, but I do think it's a shame that obeying things like green traffice lights has to be seen as a national trait and almost something to laugh at! I wonder how I'd fare in a 'How German/Swiss are you?' test!!!!!LOL!
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