As a native English speaker, I speak primarily Spanish in my day to day life (Spanish speaking wife and children) and have done so for about 15 years. I’ve had to purposefully build relationships in -both- languages in order to feel normal when speaking English with them.
I can’t even describe the absolute weirdness of saying “I love you” to my wife after building our relationship over years in only. Spanish. There is definitely some kind of personality disconnect when I learn language and culture by immersion as an adult.
And yes, numbers are problematic. Spanish me really, really, really sucks at math. Even trying to do basic subtraction or calculate a trivial tip ends up with internal translations to work out.
As a bizarre aside, Once in a while I can be nudged into a temporary unresponsive state by the right timing of a language change by my speaking partner.
When I “snap out of it” it’s like the words went into a que but nobody fetched them so I went into some kind of waiting condition. It’s really weird and makes me wonder if there might not be a lot of ways to trigger altered states through similar hacks.
I can’t even describe the absolute weirdness of saying “I love you” to my wife after building our relationship over years in only. Spanish. There is definitely some kind of personality disconnect when I learn language and culture by immersion as an adult.
And yes, numbers are problematic. Spanish me really, really, really sucks at math. Even trying to do basic subtraction or calculate a trivial tip ends up with internal translations to work out.
As a bizarre aside, Once in a while I can be nudged into a temporary unresponsive state by the right timing of a language change by my speaking partner.
When I “snap out of it” it’s like the words went into a que but nobody fetched them so I went into some kind of waiting condition. It’s really weird and makes me wonder if there might not be a lot of ways to trigger altered states through similar hacks.