Bilingual Brain Shenanigans

Hello again everyone. After breaking my year-long silence on Hive yesterday, I knew I wanted to start posting again, and hopefully more often than just periodically :). I wasn’t expecting to be posting a whopping two days in a row though, but something happened today that made me think and then write this post about it.

Today I had one of those moments that made me really notice how my brain works when juggling two languages. I was trying to remember a simple phrase in my native language, Czech. And all that kept popping into my head was the English version. No matter how hard I tried, the Czech phrase just wouldn’t come to me. Eventually I gave up and tried translating the English phrase into Czech word for word. Of course, that didn’t work, because the two languages have different sentence structures, and I ended up sounding like a neanderthal.

When the initial embarrassment faded, I began to think about why it happened to me. Why did it feel like my mind was running two operating systems at once, and one of them just crashed? It really made me think about how our brains handle memory and language, because it feels to me like sometimes one language just hijacks the other, and even though you know the word or phrase exists in your native tongue, it gets buried under the one your brain grabs first. And since this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened, I’ve come to the only conclusion that made sense to me. I consume so much more media in English than in Czech - text, audio, movies, games... and thanks to the internet, I also have more and more everyday conversations in English with people all over the world. So it seems English is becoming a new default setting, slowly over-writing my very limited data storage, aka memory.

At this point, I’m kinda expecting my brain to start labeling Czech as "legacy software". 😅