Just curious. Been back in the states for over four years now. I lived in Japan for 3.5 years but moved back for personal reasons. Thought I’d be back in Japan by this point but covid happened and my priorities shifted along with that so yeah… things change.
But I digress… I’ve done interviews stateside in both English and Japanese since coming back. I also have friends living in Japan I speak with who are above N2 level Japanese, though our conversations are always in English.
I’ve noticed that if I’m speaking with someone in English and try to speak in Japanese (either as a joke or because I know they’ll understand) I stumble over everything. Literally everything. Makes me feel like my Japanese is utter shit.
But if the conversation is in Japanese from the get-go it’s like my mind activates a switch and I can speak the language a lot better. It’s weird and annoying.
Anyone else experience this?
Edit: I made that point about my Japanese being utter shit… but even though I’m prepping for N2 this December I still feel like my Japanese is garbage. Somehow, I feel it would be if I even, by some miracle, passed N1.
3 comments
Takes me about 3 weeks to convert from my primary language fully to my second one and back.
Simple answer is everyone is different and what you feel is valid. If you have trouble dipping into Jaoanese here and there then you have trouble doing that, whether it’s common or not.
An answer that might be a little more towards what you’re looking for is that there’s some interesting research in the realm of “the L2 brain” which looks at how language learners exercise cognitive abilities in L2 (second language, or third or fourth or whatever) contexts. In *extreme* brevity, sometimes our cognitive capabilities can be a little (or rarely, a lot) different depending on the language we use. Not just our ability to express our ideas, but the ability to think in our L2 as well. Perhaps you’re simply not practiced in quickly switching your language of use, or talk in ways that are easy for you in English but hard in Japanese. If this sounds at all relevant to you, definitely check out some scholarly articles.
Who knows if it is on topic to you, but my related thoughts:
CASE ONE: When you have to code switch, and you have learned a language as an adult, you are sometimes not aware of which language you are speaking, meaning you often speak the wrong language to someone without noticing it, and only realize it when they make that vaguely panicked look all people get when someone is making random noises at them. But you can consciously swap back without TOO much effort. The mental gear grinding rises to a conscious level at that point though, and it can take a bit to make them mesh
There are many things which are harder to do well consciously than they are to do without thought, and thought itself, constrained as it is by language, might be the most basic one.
CASE TWO: However, bilingual from birth people simply switch as they evaluate the face of the person they are talking to. The kids will see me and my SO and even though we are all talking in Japanese, when they look at me, they speak English, and when they look at the SO they speak Japanese. To them, it is all just one conversation, and there is no conscious thought in their code switch, and they have socialized it to the point that they rarely actually misjudge the language to speak. Which often means I have to translate their English spoken to me, into Japanese for the benefit of the SO, when the kids could have just said it in Japanese to me, and saved the steps. But they have internalized that code switching. It is difficult to get them to undo the from birth patterns of (mom native Japanese face speak Japanese, dad foreign face speak English).
As I am not “the Nagelian bat” in this situation, I cannot speak to their experience of what it is like.
For me the interesting case would be whether the raised overseas bilingual kids of two Japanese parents have an experience that more resembles the first case or the second case. Do they simply do that unconscious code switch as they leave the house? Do they evaluate the Japanese-ness of the face on an unconscious level to choose a language?
The Nagelian Bat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?