The little hiccups of my bilingual brain.

[randomness]

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.

Comments

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

I know nothing about this type of aphasia, but I do like thinking about what being bilingual does to ones brain, so I would like talking about it.
I also have a story about a different, but related brain hiccup that's funny because it involves the NSL word for virgin.