Language confusion galore

[michiexile]

Something quite interesting happened to me yesterday at gamers night. We had a new girl in the gaming group - and she had spent 8 months in Lund and was very proud of her swedish. So she, naturally, wants to show it off. And greets me in swedish. I, preoccupied with my dinner, just turn around, smile and introduce myself with the swedish pronunciation of my name, and don't react in any way whatsoever at her choice of language.

In fact, I didn't notice her choice of language. At all. In my head, the meaning was conveyed perfectly, but I started out in disbelief as I was told she had not been speaking german. The other people present vouched for it, quoting among other things "I couldn't understand her!"

The same scenario even repeated a few times during the evening. As soon as I was preoccupied, focusing on something else entirely and she spoke swedish to me, a reacted in no way whatsoever. It was only natural, to my mind, that people would be speaking swedish, and as long as they didn't do it obviously broken, I had no reason to believe it to be anything else than what everyone else in my vicinity were speaking.

Comments

[arethinn]

The feeling of the words simply having meaning and not having to be translated, and perhaps not even noticing that they are one particular language or another, is pretty odd, yes. I hit a point in my fourth year of Spanish courses where I stopped having to translate to English in my head when I read Spanish text. It felt very queer the first time. I never got to that point with spoken language, but I once had a dream in Spanish where I had this kind of feeling you describe (that I simply understood, and didn't notice it was not in English until I woke up).