Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Apr 04, 2019 6:00 pm
That virus or whatever it is came back, so I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. He probably can’t do anything, but it doesn’t hurt to try. (If nothing else, I can enjoy the view.)
The virus came back on Tuesday, just in time for my conversation with Zenmonkey, who had to suffer through my being practically incoherent. I ended up letting him do most of the talking. My Spanish and German abilities go up and down like a rollercoaster. It seems like I can only speak every other week. I wouldn’t mind my digestive problems so much if my brain kept functioning, but it seems to be directly connected to my stomach.
On Wednesday, I was still feeling sick, but not so exhausted that I couldn’t do anything, so I went to Norwegian training. I was feeling well enough and my Norwegian is strong enough that I could still manage to converse reasonably well in Norwegian, although I do notice a difference. Even my English gets more confused and rambling when I’m sick. It’s a bit of a struggle just writing this.
One of the “students” at Norwegian training is very friendly and nice, but sometimes his friendliness can be almost a little pushy. He’s seen me reading Spanish novels before, and he was very excited to tell me that there was a Spanish speaker at his table and he wanted to introduce me. I was a bit busy at that moment, but he was trying to point us out to each other and the Spanish speaker asked me from the other side of the room if I spoke Spanish and I just said (in Spanish), “a little.” -- I don’t like to get anyone’s expectations too high, especially considering my inconsistency. -- Anyway, I finished what I was doing and went over to the other side where the Spanish speaker was. I suppose I did it in part because the other guy was so excited to be able to introduce me to someone that could speak Spanish and in part because I just felt like I should. I guess it’s the influence of all the people that always say you have to get out there and speak your target language and just be brave and talk and so on. Anyway, I went over to him and tried to ask in Spanish where he was from and he either couldn’t hear me or couldn’t understand me, so I ended up having to ask three times. And it just went downhill from there. I kind of also had the feeling that maybe he didn’t want to speak to me or perhaps just didn’t want to speak Spanish, which is understandable since he’s there to learn Norwegian. So, I just told him I was from the US and then I went back to my own table.
It was kind of embarrassing and uncomfortable though, especially since I could hardly speak. My pronunciation was terrible. I tend to stumble over words a lot when I have this virus-thingy. I guess it makes sense since the tongue is a part of the digestive system and if the rest of the system is out of order, maybe it makes sense that it would be too. The other part of the problem is that I usually have trouble using a language when I’m not expecting to use it. In a way, that might even be a good thing. My languages are fairly well compartmentalized and I mostly keep them apart, but that means it’s a little harder to call up a different language on the spot. And I find it can cause problems when I force myself to switch to the “wrong” language. For example, I once had a conversation with an Italki tutor for Spanish. We were speaking together in Spanish just fine and then she did that annoying thing where they say, “Say something in…..” and asked me to say something in Norwegian. First, I went completely blank. I didn’t know any Norwegian. I looked up in my brain and it was empty. Nothing there. Finally, I managed to dredge up some Norwegian, but when I tried to say it, it came out all strange and awkward like I’d never spoken Norwegian before and was trying to learn the first phrase in my brand-new Norwegian textbook. I mangled the pronunciation completely. And then, having told my brain I want Norwegian, it switched and I couldn’t get it back to Spanish. So, then my Spanish ended up all weird, mispronounced and with a few random Norwegian words and Norwegian syntax. After a couple of sentences, I managed to switch back to Spanish, but it was difficult. So, maybe it’s best to just let my brain keep control over these things and not take out random languages just to show someone if I don’t intend to use that language with them regularly.
I felt a little bad yesterday when I made such a mess of Spanish, but now that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it, I feel better. As I said, part of the problem is that I’m sick and this illness greatly affects my abilities to communicate. The other part is that my brain tries to keep me from speaking the wrong language to the wrong person by creating rules about what language I should use. I can switch fluidly between Norwegian and English with my ex because I associate both those languages with him. I don’t switch as fluidly between German and Spanish with Eugenio, but now that I associate those two languages with him, it’s gotten a lot easier and as my abilities in those languages get stronger it will probably get even easier. And I’m sure if I were to start regularly speaking Spanish with the guy from Norwegian training, I’d have little trouble switching between Norwegian and Spanish with him.
6 x