In the Stairwell

[steepholm]

I'm currently in Antwerp - the first time I've set foot on the continent since 2019, and that was only to change planes. I'm in a hotel near city's impressive basilica of a railway station, with an anchovy-laden pizza decocting quietly in my stomach. It's only a brief visit, though, to give a lecture; tomorrow, back to Birmingham and thence Bristol.

It's really embarrassing a) how little I find I'm able to use French (I never had Flemish) and b) how little it matters, everyone else being fluent in English. I seem to have the kind of brain that can only hold one foreign language at a time, and of course that's currently Japanese. I thought I was doing okay when I arrived at the hotel and introduced myself as Catherine Butler in a half-decent accent, but then heard myself add involuntarily, "desu" - a real confidence knocker.

Actually, most of the French I need is hidden somewhere in my head, but to get at it I need to heave the Japanese out of the way, and more often than not a residual layer of German too - and by then the moment's passed. A few seconds too late, I remember what it was I wanted to say, but now it's no more than a case of l'esprit d'escalier.

The irony isn't lost on me.

Comments

[flemmings]

Oh god, yes. It's not merely that I get Japanese vocab when I want French, I get two kinds of Japanese vocab. So while I'm reaching for French, please French, my brain is waffling between desu-masu and keigo.

Seriously, how do the Swiss manage to be trilingual?

[calimac]

I found in Germany that when I ran out of German or was too exhausted to remember, I reverted to Spanish which lay further down in my brain memory than German.

Then I learned a little Italian to go there, and found that my reversion was to German.

[steepholm]

It's a mystery. I remember visiting friends in Luxembourg, and seeing my hostess speaking Luxmebourgish to her husband, English to me, German on the phone to her father, and French to her cleaner - all fluently and without missing a beat, in the space of about ten minutes. I could no more do that than run a four-minute mile.

[heleninwales]

If you're using more than one (or two) languages all the time, the brain keeps them all current and will happily switch between them. But if you learn them sequentially and only use one non-native language at a time, the previous ones seem to go dormant. Not that I ever could speak French, but it's well buried now, but I'm doing OK learning a bit of Spanish while using Welsh and English every day.

[steepholm]

That's good to know. And I can confirm that by the time I made it to Brussels Airport last night, the words "Un autre bier" (sp?) were falling quite naturally from my lips.