Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Foreign Language Center

I spent this weekend in Madrid. The first morning, I went to the supermarket. Happily chattering away to the cashier, I realized she was looking at me strangely. Then I realized I was speaking Hungarian, not Spanish.

Last night in the taxi ride home, I was chattering away to the driver when I realized that she hadn't responded in awhile. Sure enough, I was speaking Spanish, not Hungarian.

It's always been fascinating to me how closely my foreign languages live together in my brain, and how they invade each other without my realizing it. I even wrote about it a bit in my masters thesis (I love that it is called the "talk foreign phenomenon").  It is somewhat disconcerting to realize that your mouth has been doing something that you didn't mean to tell it to do.

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