Post #3098858
2026-05-23 22:28 UTC
Replies (1)
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@AlsoPaisleyCat@tenforward.social 2026-05-24 14:56
@CaraBruar@sfba.social This is fairly typical. Once after a hiatus in work, I went back to focusing on using French — it’s a language in which I’ve been C or higher for many years and work in. But I had been studying and using another new and very challenging language for a couple of years. Suddenly, in the middle of my fluent French, I’d the odd word of this other language would pop to mind and I would stumble. Where I live in Eastern Ontario (where EN/FR bilingualism is high), people frequently talk about all the second languages, learned after early childhood, living together in another part of the brain. I recall that when the fMRI studies first came out in the 1990s, it was a surprising finding that languages learned after early childhood really do process and hold memories in the other hemisphere of the brain. So, those of us working on developing high professional levels of English or French as a second language were often reassured by our instructors that second language learning feels different and more exhausting because it really is cognitively developing other parts of the brain. The result is that when learning another new language after early childhood, that part of the brain is activated and the pathways to process other ‘second languages’ become available. You may wish to take advantage of this to pick your French back up once you’ve attained an early B level of Mandarin. @kaye@cathode.church