randomness: Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea), photograph by Malene Thyssen, cropped square for userpic. (Default)
Randomness ([personal profile] randomness) wrote2011-12-27 12:14 am

The little hiccups of my bilingual brain.

digitalemur thinks it's amusing that I sometimes lose English words when the word in Mandarin immediately pops into my mind. Just now it was having "能干" (nénggàn) right away when I simply couldn't come up with "capable". I flail for a bit searching for the word in English until I find it.

To be fair, it happens a lot more the other way around but obviously non-Mandarin speakers don't hear that. It happens much less often with words in French. Unless of course it is a word without any particularly easy translation into English, but I think that's a different situation.

(Googling for "bilingual aphasia" got me The Implications of Bilinguality and Bilingual Aphasia.)

I guess I should bring this up with bloodstones.