Seven lessons into my beginners’ Mandarin course, I was contemplating how the brain deals with different language. We were doing a role play of a fruit stall and as the shopkeeper I asked “hái yào?” (“Anything else?”). The customer wanted to say “Nothing.”<\/p>\n
“Just say ‘rien’,” someone else suggested, and that desire to pluck a word from a different foreign language makes me wonder if the brain has one section for native language and another for all others.<\/p>\n
It was the same when I was in Germany last year. If I didn’t know a word, it wasn’t the English that came straight to mind but, if I knew it, the French. Sometimes German words pop into my head when I don’t know the Chinese. Probably, though, on more occasions than not it’s the English word that I think of first, but I don’t notice myself doing it because it’s so natural. In that case, each word (as a concept) would have its own cubby-hole in my memory with a version in each language, including English, attached to it.<\/p>\n
This is rather unscientific, of course. Is this psychology or linguistics? Either way I’m sure people with PhDs have investigated this in great depth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seven lessons into my beginners’ Mandarin course, I was contemplating how the brain deals with different language. We were doing a role play of a fruit stall and as the shopkeeper I asked “hái yào?” (“Anything else?”). The customer wanted to say “Nothing.” “Just say ‘rien’,” someone else suggested, and that desire to pluck a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[520,519,518,451],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geeklife","tag-brain","tag-language","tag-linguistics","tag-mandarin"],"yoast_head":"\n