Quote:
Originally Posted by queentess
There comes a point in learning a foreign language when you begin to think in that language. That's when you know you really have it.
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I remember the first time I dreamed in a foreign language. It was a rather weird experience. I was in Panama, and for the first time I was actually speaking Spanish regularly instead of just studying it in school, and I dreamed in it a couple of times. I think it was a kind of hyper-awareness, the way a student driver twitches their feet when they're a passenger after a lesson.
Now, what's
really weird is that not all that long ago, I dreamed of being able to speak German. I can't; I can understand enough of what I read to make out the sense of it a lot of the time, as a side-effect of some research, but I can't actually communicate. But I dreamed I was talking to someone in German ... and when I woke up, I couldn't understand what I remembered of what I'd been saying. Unfortunately, like most dreams, all the details vanished like snow in San Diego, so I don't know if my subconscious has actually learned more German than my conscious mind can access, or if I was dreaming in gibberish and remembering it as German. It made for a weird dream and a weirder awakening, to say the least.
Reading has to be as internalized a process as speaking. You can't read "the book" and first sound it out ... "thuh ... buuk..." and only then recognize what those sounds mean, not if you want to be able to read even one language like my former co-worker could speak two. You have to see "the book" and think "pages and covers and words", not think of the sound that means that to you.
Or, of course, you could move your lips when you read, and never really know whether it was "their" or "they're" or "there" you meant when you write ... but hopefully, we can do better than that.