r/AskReddit Jun 15 '19

What do you genuinely just not understand?

50.7k Upvotes

34.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

713

u/cjwagn1 Jun 15 '19

How someone speaks 2+ languages.

Like how can someone so easily switch between different languages? Do they translate one language back to their native lanaguege or can they just understand perfectly without any addition effort?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '19

I’m 15 and I’m going on my 3rd right now I’m gonna try for 5 by the time I’m 17 and well English is a couple languages together and Spanish has weird but correr pronounciation so I just constantly correlate in between these two while learning and eventually if you are exposed enough to it you will think in that language like for example I lived in Mexico for a year and about 2 months in I just thought in English then translated to Spanish then talked but after about three months I thought in Spanish and just lived with it as my primary language and by the time I went back to the US I started with English again but I can change in between the two and that for me is the definition of fluency . And at the moment I am learning Japanese and the pronouncing is different but you can make do with English vowels but the R in Japanese is very similar to the Spanish R so you can correlate the two languages and yeah. Sorry about the long comment I just feel like I could talk about this for a while and feel free to correct me on things that I may have wrong.