What Language Do I Think In?
One Polyglot's Perspective
Imagine a dial in your brain that you can set at any given moment.
When I don’t actively put thought into it, it goes haywire and I start thinking in an unpredictable array of languages. The better I know it, the higher the chances of me thinking in it “just because”.
MattVsJapan describes the process as converting “mentalese” into words. Mentalese is the raw material of words but can’t communicate anything by itself. It has to be manufactured into words and then shipped out through the mouth (or, in the event of sign language or a written language, as symbols shipped out through the hands).
Mentalese also explains why multilinguals often can’t think of a certain word in the language they are speaking. Only yesterday I was talking to someone about relationships and I couldn’t think of the English equivalent of the Yiddish word “mayne-loshn”, but I did know a Norwegian equivalent (skjellsord).
The English word would be closest to “invective” or “abusive speech”, but here’s the thing:
Of those four words/phrase, one Yiddish, one Norwegian, and two English—their definitions do not TRULY match one-to-one with each other. As an experienced speaker of these languages, I understand the “edges” of the words or how each one makes me feel or conveys something, but also each fluent or native speaker is likely to have a very slightly different perception of each.
A younger version of me who had English as far and beyond his best language would have likely used “abusive speech”, but multilingual present-day me felt that “mayne-loshn”, even in English, suited the purpose better even though the person who I was speaking to had about as much knowledge of Yiddish as the average New Yorker (so, a handful of words and phrases made popular via Hollywood and pop culture).
Can I think in languages that I haven’t mastered very well? I can, but it is sort of like running a computer on very low battery and expecting it to work. It might work for a little bit, but then you get a warning and then it sputters out.
When focused on talking, I’ll think in the language I’m currently using. But there are times in which, like the incident described above, there is a word or phrase that better suits the moment. If it is an idiom, sometimes I will even tell the person I’m talking to about it. Such examples would be the well-known Yiddish idiom “a nekhtiker tog” (a day that’s also a night), meaning “not gonna happen” as well as the Hungarian “kötve hiszem” (I believe that when tied up), which is close to “I doubt it”.
When I’m doing a solitary task, the language selection dial goes haywire. It spends most time on the languages I’ve used the most frequently in the recent past, be that actively (talking with someone) or passively (watching a TV show). But it is FAR more likely to jump around between languages.
The one thing you CAN do to get yourself to think in a language if you’re already at a point where you can read and speak it fairly well is to firehose your brain with audio in that language. That way your brain will have a “viral load” that it can’t keep out and you’ll come down with the — nit far aykh gedakht — illness—of fluency in your target language (see? I used a foreign idiom again. To explain this one, also in Yiddish, it means “this shouldn’t happen to you”, which prefaces something bad happening. But like literally EVERYTHING in Yiddish, you can use it sarcastically).
If you can’t read or speak it fairly well, well, then see my previous post here and follow this list until you can.
Happy thinking in your target language!