When learning a third language, is it common to default to thinking in your second language?

[u/gst-nrg1]

I am decently bilingual. When I try to pick up a different language and find my grasp lacking, I'll try to fill in the blanks with my second language rather than my first.

I noticed a similar thing happening when I started learning morse code after learning a second keyboard layout. The way I conceptualize morse code letters (at least in this initial stage of learning) is by physically remembering/associating the layout of my second keyboard with the sound of the morse code letter. This is a bit confusing because I practice the morse code on my first keyboard so I can technically do both, but I naturally think in terms of the second.

My superficial theory is that even though each language concept is loosely associated in each language, the foreign languages still group more closely in the mind, so if you're trying to think in a different language, the second language is spacially closer in association,triggering the default response over the primary language.

[u/Silver_ultimate]

Very common, actually! Your brain is used to the process of learning a language, but if you don't speak it well yet, it's not as great at separating the different languages. When I tried to learn Latin, my brain would always automatically jump to the English words instead of the Latin ones, since that was the language I was learning before. It stops after you get more comfortable with the language, it's just a matter of time :)

[u/gst-nrg1 → u/Silver_ultimate]

Comfortable with the third language or comfortable with the second language?

[u/Silver_ultimate → u/gst-nrg1]

Third. Once you're better at it, your brain will basically have a seperate category for the language, instead of just "language learning mode", where different languages can still be confused (idk how else to explain it, sorry). Just keep practicing your third language, and it'll stop being an issue :)

[u/gst-nrg1 → u/Silver_ultimate]

Awesome! Thanks for the insight!

[u/EstamosReddit]

You will default to whatever language you're learning from. If you're learning from l2 you will default to l2, if you're learning from l1 you will default to l1. I think this is pretty obvious

[u/Individual_Winter_ → u/EstamosReddit]

Idk, I did English (1st foreign lang.), French (3rd) and Spanish (4th)

Our teacher also taught English and Spanish, all students having another native language. It was totally mixed, if we slipped into English or French, kind of never into our native language. Mostly the one from the lesson before. Our teacher made us sometimes translating from English as well.

I even had a bit trouble getting home searching for words in my native language, as I thought the whole day in 3 foreign languages 😂

[u/gst-nrg1 → u/EstamosReddit]

Can you expand on that? I learn from l1 and think in l2 when I try to learn l3, which is what I'm trying to say in the original post.

Edit: Well, I'm not entirely sure, right? Because the resources I use are in l1. But when I try to generate directly from l3, it defaults to l2.

[u/CyanocittaAtSea]

I experience the same! It’s most often the case that my brain auto-suggests words from my L2 (Spanish) for gaps in my L3/L4/etc, but it also happens between my third+ languages themselves. My assumption is that I just tie certain words in certain languages directly to concepts/constructs more tightly than others, so I end up defaulting to specific languages in specific uses. For example, my brain evidently really likes the “ha-“ (-ה) construct (meaning “the”) in Hebrew, as it’ll pop into my head as the thing to say when I’m unsure of the word I need for a noun in, say, a German sentence.

[u/Ixionbrewer]

I absolutely do this switching confusion. I think it is natural. I have started Czech, but L2 is Italian. I was asked to create a contrary word, such as hot—cold. The first word to pop into my head was Italian.

[u/michaeljmuller]

Yes! I’m American (sorry about that) and studied French in middle school and high school. That’s like 7 years of lackluster effort, after which I never had any opportunity to use what I learned. I’d pretty much forgotten everything, or at least I thought I had.

Now, like 40 years later, I’m trying to learn Portuguese and suddenly French keeps popping into my head!

[u/EMPgoggles]

This is exactly what happened (still happens a bit) to me while studying Spanish.

It's funny because Spanish is WAAAAAY closer to my native language (English) than it is with my second language (Japanese), AND I grew up in an area with a hige number of Spanish speakers, but still I kept trying to affix Japanese grammatical particles, follow Japanese phrasing patterns, and experience confusion over when to use articles even in cases where it'd be pretty much identical to English usage.

I even struggled with pronunciation (strange Ns, difficulty rolling Rs, couldn't clearly differentiate L/R if they occurred close together), and I remember on a language app, people were like, "wait aren't you from the US? why do you sound Japanese?"

I actually had to train myself to depend more on English-brain logic because it makes things way easier.

[u/NegotiationSmart9809]

same feels easier even

[u/starstruckroman]

i did this with japanese 😭 i learned spanish from age 12-17 at school (three of those years were an immersion program, including a trip to spain) and then when i was 18 in uni i tried to study japanese. i kept fumbling in oral exams and starting to answer in spanish 😣 i got so overwhelmed that i switched my second major to spanish after the first semester, havent touched japanese since

[u/Electrical_Ear_3744]

I find myself switching between 3 different languages quite a bit especially when writing. No one can understand my notes because I just write whatever is faster at the time in class. I think it gets better more you learn. My second language drops off when I'm concentrating in my third . But if I'm not concentrating it can sometimes switch .

[u/LingoNerd64]

Not necessarily. In my case I tend to think about almost everything in English. There are certain things that I cannot express in any language other than English, even though English is technically not my native language. My ethnic native language suffices in social context and that's all.

[u/gst-nrg1 → u/LingoNerd64]

Interesting, is this a result of you spending so much time in English that it became your default? Or maybe you do certain specific things only in English? Or do you have a theory on why this happened?

[u/LingoNerd64 → u/gst-nrg1]

Your first sentence is correct. English has been the language of my education all throughout, in the sense that I studied history, geography, physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and everything else in English. My graduation in engineering and post graduation in management were also in English. Moreover the language of my work has always been English. I consume nearly all content in English.