Three language problem

While sitting through quite a nasty hangover, the love and punishment of destiny for all the earthy pleasures I've enjoyed the last couple of days, I figured one thing: most of the people on Earth don't even speak a single foreign language. ChatGPT says it's 50%. Here in Amsterdam de Pijp or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, the bubble of the bubble, you slowly succumb to the idea, that everyone at least in Europe would know English and therefore have access to the same sources of knowledge and news as you do.

But it's not true. Language defines consciousness the same way a vessel shapes a liquid inside. I realize that when I speak German, I'm a different (not very pleasant) person, than when I speak English or Russian. The average pitch, facial expressions, posture, gestures, all suddenly change to form that persona. The language is a mirror of the society and reflects its mentality in different ways.

Mother tongue and foreign tongues live in different areas of the brain. The later you learn the language, the more different domains of the brain are involved in operating the heavy machinery. When I just moved to Germany, I barely spoke English and almost no German at all. My first husband was German, and so I quickly developed the necessary conversational skills, and there the price came: I forgot how to speak English. I tried to form sentences, and everything I came up with was German syntax with English words instead of German ones. "Want you come with me, eat go?". The Schiller of drag race herstory is Ady not.

It took me years to recover the skills and three years later, when I started working for an Australian company and had to mix German and English on an everyday basis, things started getting better. As if the brains would only make several languages available if both are used in the same context. The hardest task is always the switching between those two because your brain spends a significant amount of computational power to suppress the competing cognitive signals.

When we moved to the Netherlands, I started learning Dutch and at the very beginning, knowing both German and English seemed to help a lot. The sentence structure is quite similar, many words have the same origin in a common ancestor language originated somewhere in the first millennium. If you don't understand a word, you can probably guess based on English or German words that are similar. Möglich and mogelijk, further and verder, schließen and sluiten. But the more you progress in learning the language, the more competitive the knowledge becomes and more and more false friends you need to resolve, and with such closely related languages like German and Dutch, the overall picture can get really confusing.

Wie in Dutch means "who", not "how", like in German. Hoe that you pronounce exactly like "who" means "how". Verstaan is not verstehen. See is not zee. Bellen means call in Dutch and bark in German. Spreken means to speak, which is similar to sprechen, but to speak a language, unlike in German where you would use it to describe the fact of exchanging information with sprechen. The list is long and perplexing. I wonder if it was easier to learn Chinese in such circumstances.

And there is also my mother tongue, which is Russian, and it's an entirely different language family. Every time we speak with North Fox, we use all three languages, depending on which one fell first into your mind. "Hi sweetie, did you pokushal already? Or should we runtergehen and have a lunch in the restaurant popozzhe?". What I've noticed is that there is always a canvas language that lets other language words to fill in the gaps and form the pigeon. I and the huzzy call it faciliteitit expectationy (фалистейтить экспектейшны): quite an intellectually unsanitary act of mixing multiple languages, the name came from a dialog our friends once had to describe their daily activities as managers. Pushkin and Dostoevsky spin in their graves.

Sometimes the words we add in are just there because we are just too lazy, but sometimes it's hard to replace with the word from the operating language. The German word Termin is so universal, there are no really fitting analogues in English or Russian. Spießig is the most insulting and genius way to describe an annoying villager. Prollig is something between a redneck and a hobo, but not quite. But what is really resilient are Russian swearwords because you can't replace blyat, pidaras yebany or tupaya pizda with anything.

Citing the classics, smortya kakoy fabric, smortya skolko details. Don't hate people for their language mistakes and accent, they are trying!