I have noticed that when I speak Japanese (currently my weakest language, A1) and try to fetch some words, at times my head turns to my second weakest language (currently Finnish, B1).
And it's not the first time! Back in the early days of Finnish, I would revert to French; and same thing happened with German when I was learning French.
Have you noticed a similar pattern when speaking your weakest language?
@linguistgoneforeign Yeah it's always the previous one that slips up, and it's like independent of how familiar I am with the language. I'm at A1 with Cymraeg but I still think back to it when I look at Esperanto.
I've seen people talk about it as the native language mode and the foreign language mode. You can get into foreign language mode, but then it's a jumble.
I'm hoping that getting my Spanish to B2 before starting Italian will keep me from saying Italian things in Spanish. Like, there should be enough Spanish in there to avoid the gaps that other languages jump into, but we'll see.
@linguistgoneforeign I used to involuntarily say a lot of English words during my early days in German. When I started French classes last year, I was suddenly thinking/saying things in German when attempting a sentence in French. I always say my brain has two modes: Spanish and non-Spanish. Whenever I’m not speaking Spanish, it’s like I reach for a drawer filled with words and anything might come out.
@edraac Qué curioso esto. Me pasó algo similar con el francés cuando empecé a reactivarlo después de 15 años sin usarlo. Mi cerebro buscaba palabras e incluso sintaxis en alemán (en aquella época la segunda lengua más débil), aunque tenía ahí el español para apoyarse, pero ni caso. 😅
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