I am fully bilingual but I mostly read in English.
How is my brain capable of reading English and directly provide me with images and feelings instead of trying to translate into French (the language I was born with) beforehand?
Thank you.
In: 18
The same way the first language does. At your most basic levels, you aren’t learning about the world because of your mastery of language. Although it may not seem that way, language is just one of the many, many things that you use to understand the world. Language is a just a very deliberate method we use to cue feelings and memory in other people’s (and our own) brains.
I’m also just talking out of my ass and have no knowledge on the subject
When your ability in a non-native language gets good enough, your brain treats it pretty much the same as your native language. “Car” and “voiture” both have similar neural pathways and invoke the same thing because you just know the words have the same meaning.
People with worse language skills might form a sentence in their native language first and sort of “manually” translate it, but when you’re what could be considered fluent in a language, there’s no mental “detour” like that.
In your brain cortex there’s an area filled with neurons whose purpose is to understand speech, and send whatever you understood further into the brain.
When you become bilingual, that area has neurons for both languages, meaning you don’t need to translate in your mother language anymore.
The english neurons understand english, the french neurons understand french, and then they both send the understood concept to the same areas of the brain.
The longer I am “immersed” in another language, the more common it is for my internal voice to switch over and also dream in my non native language
You get two different inputs: Car-Auto (English-German). It is like reaching the same answer two different ways. 3-2= 1 same as 5-4= 1
Kinda weird learned basic French, never used it, but as it was used when I was in France, brain was like, oh yea this is this
Why do you think your brain doesn’t translate it into French and then back again before it gives you the result? Because that’s exactly what it does. You simply don’t notice this happening.
The less fluent you are in a language, the more you notice it happening.
I just get the meaning of the words without translating them first in my mind and also imagine what is said es. Car
I’m Italian and I’m talking about English
Your brain “learns” to link the sounds/letters with something specific it’s the same for your native language or any other you learn after so when you speak/read you just know what things are, at first you still don’t have those connections so you have to “find” the translated word
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