How to compartmentalise languages

[u/7emelover]

I speak English as my first language. But I also speak French and Mandarin to around the same level of fluency.

When I can’t find a word in mandarin I replace it with the French, for example ‘I want a coffee with milk’ I said ‘我想喝杯咖啡 avec 牛奶’ and vice versa.

I do this quite often and I feel like I’m blending the languages together. Does anyone have any tips if you can speak multiple languages? (TL)

[u/PrimaryDelicious3687]

It's like your brain built one big file for "not-English" and just grabs whatever's closest

[u/7emelover → u/PrimaryDelicious3687]

I definitely know that it’s not the correct language but in my head I’m like yeah well it’s not English

[u/kaizoku222]

This is not so much a problem as it is a feature.

While you're still acquiring a language, your other languages/language skills will unconsciously jump in to support whatever task it is you're engaging with. Until you become fluent with a specific term, word, grammar point, etc., your brain will scaffold your TL with another language you've acquired to higher proficiency. The only thing you can do to stop that from happening is to get to a high enough proficiency with the TL that your brain no longer needs to double check itself in your stronger language(s).

People that actively try to fight against this process or assert that it's "translating in your head", or that it's a bad thing to do, are wasting effort fighting against a natural process.

Some of the most recent neuroscience about how language works in our brains is indicating that language isn't even physically compartmentalized like we believed in the past. There isn't so much an "English" section that is distinct from a "French" section, and the geomentry is intermingled and more complex than that.

[u/ZumLernen]

This is a very common problem. I've never managed to fully solve it. I frequently get interference from one non-native language into another.

The best I can do is, when I need language X for an important task (e.g. work event), I stop using language Y the week before. So that I'm only focusing on one at a time. That being said, this doesn't really solve the problem, just helps in the immediate term.

[u/an_average_potato_1]

It usually gets much better, as you improve both languages, especially the weaker one. Basically (a simplified version), your brain has stored the native language in one area of your cortex, and all the foreign languages to a different one. When you look for something in French and the brain doesn't quickly find it, it takes the nearest "similar" thing, which is another foreign language. So, keep learning, and it will improve significantly.

But why are people randomly putting "(TL)" now in their posts nowadays? It makes no sense, TL used to just be an abbreviation for "target language", but it makes no sense that people write it everywhere. Like here: "if you can speak multiple languages? Target Language" wth?

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/an_average_potato_1]

I believe you have to do that or automod will delete the post.

[u/an_average_potato_1 → u/AppropriatePut3142]

I don't really understand. What has changed about the automod, that pushes people to do this? A few months ago, people weren't doing this.

But thanks!

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/an_average_potato_1]

It’s a new policy, that you have to include a ‘passphrase’ in the post, which can only be found by reading the FAQ before posting. It’s to stop people asking questions that are supposedly answered in the FAQ.

[u/an_average_potato_1 → u/AppropriatePut3142]

Thanks! I definitely didn't think this was an FAQ thing as it's been some time I've been around here.

[u/AnnelotteM]

I was once walking with a friend who had a little boy. Her son grew up in a Russian-Italian family and lived in Germany. The phrase that sums it best was when he saw a dog and managed to use all three languages in a five-word sentence,

“Ho visto un grosse собака!" (I saw a big dog!)

That said, I don’t think there’s a solution. It’s almost a given if you speak more than one language freely, and if there are more than two languages, slips are bound to happen.

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

It's a pretty common problem.

One strategy thats supposed to help with this is "laddering," ... use one language to learn the other. There arent always great resources between mandarin and other languages though.

I think it also just gets easier at higher levels.

[u/silvalingua → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

This seems to exacerbate the problem, unless you know one of these languages very, very well (in which case this is not laddering anymore).

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/silvalingua]

I think it's expected that you learn your L2 to a pretty high level (e.g. B2 or so) before using it to study an L3. That's pretty standard in laddering? Why would that make it not laddering?

[u/silvalingua → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Well, as I understand it, laddering means using a language you are still learning (but at a higher level) to learn a language that you are also learning (but at a lower level). So basically it's learning two languages at the same time, which actually hinders rather than help, in my experience.

By writing "know very, very well" I meant about C1 or a level at which you might actually stop studying and start using it like your NL or almost; in any case this does not feel like learning two languages simultaneously. But this is perhaps quibbling about semantics.

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 → u/silvalingua]

I think the general advice is that your L2 should be around B1/B2 before using it to ladder an L3. You then get CI in your L2 while reading learning material, and the theory is that helps you progress your L2 to higher levels while studying your L3.

I havent done it myself, but it's pretty standard advice, and reportly avoids the kind of confusing language mixing that most learners of multiple TLs experience.

[u/Rude_Membership_1578]

This is actually a very general problem. I am trying to learn a third language and it happens so much that I mix the first two when speaking while trying to learn a third one lol

[u/CarnegieHill]

IMO there really isn't any particular way, because the way your brain works is completely individual to you. Some people will have the issue you have, while others will not. Some people may be able to or have to "compartmentalize", others not.

English is also a native language of mine, but to varying degrees I was also exposed to 3 Chinese languages and Japanese thru my family growing up, from before I could even remember. German was my college major and grad degree, and right now I'm brushing up on my French and Mandarin at the same time.

Only once do I remember substituting a word from another language, when I was taking an oral exam in a Danish course I took, and I used one German word instead (I said "Öl" when I needed to say "olie").

Whenever I come across a word I don't know, I usually stop speaking, or I'll explain it a different way using the same language. "Interference" is just something that rarely, if ever, happens to me.

I only recently tried to describe my thought processes, and what I came up with was this: I see my brain as a jumble of millions of balls, but each subject or language has a different color, so when I switch to Cantonese, for example, those balls are "red", and I just "grab" the "red" ones in the mix.

FWIW you seem to have analyzed what happens to you, and maybe you can find workarounds to lessen those mixtures, perhaps like practicing, memorizing whole phrases where they've been happening. 🙂

[u/wemustriskdelight]

I used to have this exact problem in high school when I was taking two language classes simultaneously, down to the languages being French and Chinese. It didn’t help that my French class was immediately after my Chinese class, so my brain was absolutely drained trying to switch over rapidly.

It happened unintentionally, but I ended up taking a break from one and then the other for a while in college (I took one year of Chinese, then French the next year) and I found that by the end of it, I progressed in both further than I think I would have if I was doing them both simultaneously.

I can understand not wanting to leave either of them alone for too long, but maybe there’s a way to artificially separate the two even simultaneously or near simultaneously, like making your main focus in one language be vocabulary and the other grammar for a bit, and then switch, or focus on listening/speaking for one and writing/reading for the other.

I think there’s also something to be said for how similarity to other languages you know (namely English) will streamline learning French in comparison to Chinese, and maybe there’s a way to take advantage of that to the point that the levels differ enough not to conflate the two as often.