It's been a week since I registered "Lang-8" and it's going well so far. Native English speakers are kind enough to correct my journals or put comments and it's very useful. Besides many people access my site even if they don't correct or put a comment, unlike this blog. haha.
So I'm also trying correcting other's journals in Japanese as much as possible.
Then I found it a bit difficult to figure out appropriate Japanese sentences.
Usually I speak Japanese unconsciously. I don't think about Japanese language when I speak. When I try to correct journals in Japanese, I know those sentence are unnatural or wrong. But I sometimes have trouble finding appropriate sentences. I often wonder what I always say in that case. Then I try to say myself repeatedly.
Whenever I speak English, I always think about English language. It's too bad. According to the experiment in the brain of bilingual people, they use different part of their brain between when they speak Japanese and when they speak English. And people who are not so good in English speak English using the Japanese-speaking part of their brain. The same must be true for me.
When will I be able to speak English unconsciously like my mother language?
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4 comments:
Yeah I know exactly what you mean. I think the same is true when listening to a foreign language. When I listen to Japanese, I am kind of like monitoring the Japanese while at the same time trying to put it back in English, or I have to pause to think about what it means. Whereas when I listen to English, I know what it means naturally. I never think "what does that mean," and I don't have to try to convert it into something else, I just know what it means . . .
I think a good thing to do is to pretend that you are a native speaker of your target language. Sometimes I will pretend that "I am Japanese, am fluent in Japanese, and don't know English" (as ridiculous as this may sound) when listening to Japanese to kind of force myself to gain an intrinsic understanding of what I am listening to, without translating it back into English.
LOL. I hope that makes sense. Not exactly the smoothest piece of prose, but I tried.
herm,
Thank you for putting your comment.
It's a good idea to pretend to be a native speaker!
I'll try to do that from now on!!
Hi, this is Edward. I thought you have joined Lang-8 for a long time.
I have the same feeling while I'm correcting the Chinese articles. I know nothing about the Chinese grammar, so I just try to correct them into the sentences I would say.
Do you know the LingQ (www.lingq.com)? If you don't, I suggest you can sign up a free account. You can find tons of English contents both available in MP3 and text. The most important thing is to read some articles of Steve Kaufman, the founder of LingQ, he also speaks more than 7 languages. (http://www.thelinguist.com/en/en/library/category/258/)
Thank you again. You really encouraged me to decide to write a English blog seriously.
Edward,
Thank you for visiting my blog and putting the comment!
I don't know about LingQ. I'll check it up right away. Speaking more than 7 languages?! Wow!
I'm looking for reading your blog!
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