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by thaumasiotes
361 days ago
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> I still think (as a native English speaker), it's fairly routine to stop and re-think what you are saying because you're grasping for the right word. When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly. Now you have two problems: 1. You need to retroactively rephrase your whole sentence to present the same information in a different style, because that's the way this language does it. This works best if you can change the past. 2. You probably don't know the correct thing to say, or you wouldn't have made that mistake to begin with. |
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Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.
I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.
Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.