Does anyone else speak worse when tired?

17 comments

1. Hell my English suffers when I’m tired

2. Strangely, I find that I do better when I’m tired. Probably because the tiredness makes me care less about making mistakes than getting my thoughts out. Sure, it’s not the most eloquent thing in the world, but at the same time, I’m not letting fussiness slow down the conversation.

3. Yes, even in my native language this happens to me. Lol.

4. Get me drunk or sleepy and my speaking ability triples.

   Lack of second guessing and fear of failure.

5. It’s pretty normal. I even understand things worse when I’m tired. Native language is easier because it takes less processing power, so I’m sure that’ll happen as you’re more familiar with Japanese.

   Then again, I even get worse at english when I’m tired.

6. Well it’s pretty tough to get better as you get tired so

7. I forgot the word tempura this morning. It happens! My English also gets worse, lol.

8. Hell yes! Even in English (I am around C1-C2) I speak like a complete idiot when I’m tired, let alone Japanese – I can form sentences, I just don’t care whether or not they are correct, and I also have a hard time remembering words. I think the explanation is simply that the brain is tired and its cognitive functions are impaired a bit – using another language than one’s native one requires a bit more brain power.

9. Oh yes. English and Japanese. They both have a daily battery life. The English is a bit bigger naturally, but even after a long day at work, I’m stumbling over the thoughts themselves, not to mention the language.

   Even when I worked at a ryokan in Japan, lemme tell ya, I got about 3-4 hours of “good” Japanese everyday. After that point, there was no more complex speech happening. Just subject + verb lmao

10. Interesting story, there was a woman who was bilingual in German and English. She lived in the UK for most of her life but spoke German at home, so German was the language she first spoke, even though she was fluent in both. She had a brain injury. After the brain injury, she was no longer able to speak English in the evening. The simple explanation was that when she was tired in the evening, she was no longer able to access her non-native language.

    In short, I think it’s normal. Speaking in your non-native language will always take more energy and you have less to spare when you’re tired.

    [Here’s the full story on the German thing](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-45804613).

11. >Anyone else has this issue? Any explanation for this?

    Yes. You’re tired. Generally speaking, our performance at pretty much anything suffers when we’re tired.

    Unless you’re the rare human being who magically gets *better* at doing everything else when you’re utterly exhausted and somehow your Japanese speaking ability is the only thing that suffers, I don’t understand why this would be such a mystery.

12. My Japanese turns into Mandarin when I’m siper tired. Damn you common characrers!!!

13. Such a strange question. Thinking requires energy (doing literally anything does, btw). You have less energy when you’re tired. So….?

14. Usually by the end of the work day I have to beg my Japanese friend to switch to English because I’m mentally exhausted.

15. I experience this with all my 3-ish languages

    If I’m very tired or sick, Japanese goes to zero, Spanish goes to gringo status (varies from ehh to almost nothing), and English goes to drunk school-age kid level

16. And it gets better when drunk… According to me not to people listenning to me

17. I had the opposite experience, my girlfriend brought her Japanese friend to karaoke and was encouraging me to talk a little bit with her. As soon as I had a Japanese person in front of me who wanted to talk, all the words left my head. I had a few drinks, we were driving home and once I was very sleepy, all of a sudden I didn’t care about mistakes and I was relaxed enough to remember a lot.