Have you experienced this while learning a foreign language?

Yes, definitely. My first language is German, and I learned English when I was eleven. Ever since then, there have been moments when I couldn’t think of the German word for something. I often just use the English one instead, when I’m with my family. Sometimes I change the suffix, creating an (apparently) German word.

I notice this gets worse when I read a lot of English books, or watch English TV series. I consciously cut back during the weeks preceding exams, reading German newspapers to get into the “style” I need to write well.

“I would never had made the mistake in the first place.”? Heehee.

Yes, but mostly for me the two languages are pretty separate in my brain, while also being a huge conglomerate of words. Spanish helped me a lot with English, but at the same time it made some things a little more difficult. Spelling is one, although speling was pretty minor, and I would say my spelling is more affected by seeing British spelling constantly on places like fluther. Spanish happens to be a language with very very easy and straight forward spelling, maybe that affects whether the spelling will interefere with the primary language? Not to mention spelling in English is a mess, so it is pretty simple to screw it up. Let alone all this texting we do now. Constantly abbreviating words.

The more I speak Spanish the harder it is to know when something sounds right in English. Although, similar to what I said above, I think what affects my English more is hearing bad grammar by ESL people or even people who speak English as a first language and have really poor grammar.

The positive, which I alluded to initially, is Spanish helped me know parts of speech better in my first language and sometimes Spanish helps me with vocabulary. For instance, the first time I heard someone use the word pensive in English I had never heard it before, but I easily could figure out what it meant by combining the context of the sentence along with knowing pensar in Spanish means to think. The state name Vermont now looks to me like verde (green) mountains, which is exactly what it is. Since Spanish is a Latin Language, and quite a bit of English comes from the Latin, it helps me to know Spanish much more than it hurts.

Yes you start thinking of words in the other language by association. Normal.

English is my mother tongue, but I will be doing an English crossword puzzle and find that the only word I can think of for the clue is often in Swedish—and it’s been over twenty years since I spoke Swedish on a daily basis. Also, my English grammar is permanently damaged. Constructing grammatically correct compound sentences is often a challenge whereas it never was before.

Interesting. I can totally see how that would happen though.

”...would never have made the mistake…”

I found the opposite to be true, at least while I studied Spanish for four years in high school, decades ago: Learning Spanish made me a much better speaker of English, as I noticed more of the Latin roots for both languages, the cross-pollination of each to the other, and words that were foreign to each, and how they affected the languages, too.

I’ve never had trouble with this in the context of writing – although in my province, parents always worry about the effect that learning a second language might have on the first language. Or at least they did when I was a kid – maybe that’s passé now.

And I also had the experience @CWOTUS describes, of becoming more aware of the roots of English words, and even knowing more about sentence structure and other grammatical “stuff” because the French teach it so explicitly, whereas my English school never did. It all gave me a new perspective on my own language.

I do sometimes have trouble coming up with an English word in conversation, because all I can think of is the French word. The same thing can happen within the same language – where all you can think of is the wrong word… and the right one can’t make its way to the front of your brain… but I suspect that this is because knowing two languages gives me more words to choose from.

On balance, (and unsurprisingly), I agree with both @CWOTUS and @gacial. i had started with HS Latin in additiont to 5 years of French and then a summer living with a French-speaking family in Burgundy before i entered college.

At college I took several years of Spanish while continuing with advanced courses in French lit, language (and conversastion. I did confuse Spanish and French at times since the grammar, the genders, the cognates and many of the idioms were almost identical.

I only made it up to intermediate French Reading at university, but I did notice a small shift in my own language patterns. For me, it wasn’t spelling, grammar, or diction—it was pronunciation. Sometimes I would look at words that have the same spelling in French and English (such as “excellent”), but the immediate pronunciation that came to me was the former. I rarely spoke the word out loud in that way, but in my head I would have this split-second confrontation of the two ways to pronounce words.

I have attempted to learn a third language, but every time I try French always gets in the way. “Well, I don’t know what this word is in X language, but I remember how to say it in French…” My English hasn’t degraded, but French definitely fought over rights to my tongue.

Edited so gail will no longer have fun with my word choice~

^^ Laughing, sorry. Are you sure you mean that your English “hasn’t dissipated”? That makes no sense to me

@muppetish I have a similar experience that if a word is a Spanish word, but being used in an English sentence (actually, it happens with names more than anything) I read it and hear it in my mind in Spanish. For instance if I saw the name Jimenez, I think of the Spanish pronounciation, not the English. In America words that have been incorporated into our language from French tend to be pronounced very close to the French from what I can tell, but my French is terrible so correct me if I am wrong. For instance, we say filet, fil-ay, and Cartier, Car-tee-ay.

Yes. My native language is Danish and I’ve been fluent in English for a long time now. I am learning Spanish and it feels like I’m becoming more insecure and confused in English. I have to think more about the sentences and words. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I guess it’s a normal brain thing.

@longgone @CWOTUS Ha, naturally I would make a typo right in the question. That one’s just from lack of sleep, since I’m currently in the middle of finals week and I wrote the question at 4 AM. ;)

Absolutely. I spent years learning French, and I found myself occasionally forgetting how to spell words in English, or I would switch out a random word in English with a French word in ordinary conversation, which got me some strange looks at times.

I haven’t really gotten too far into studying Spanish, but I have yet to encounter this. It’s probably because I’m still at the stage where I’m forgetting the Spanish words haha. I speak Spanglish, if anything.
But when I’m speaking with my family in the limited amount of Italian words & phrases that I know, I sometimes have to take a second to “reactivate” my brain into English mode. If this doesn’t completely happen, I’ll end up throwing in random Italian articles with an unnatural Italian accent.