Why is it that it takes no effort at all to think of and use your first language, but you have to constantly think about it and translate for your second?

Question

I’m taking a German class and despite knowing a solid bit of the language, I still have to constantly think to speak and understand it. Why is that?

In: Culture

Answer 1

Think about how much language exposure you’ve had in English. Essentially the language centres if your brain are huge, efficient analysers and computers of English language. I’m talking the knowledge around individual words in terms of meaning, associations, grammar rules, level of formality/social use etc etc but also all the sound components for those words. You’ve also got the broader knowledge around how words are combined, due to such extensive exposure the language centre in your brain has learnt so many extensive rules on how you combine individual words and units of language to create infinite meaningful sentences. For example there’s rules around how multiple adjectives are ordered based on what quality they describe, this isn’t necessarily explicitly known by English speakers but generally followed as that is what ‘sounds right’.

Essentially to gain and portray meaning through German you are making sense of the words and sentences through mapping them to your established knowledge base of English.
The way we combine words in a language is complex and alters meaning extensively. To really understand this you need to be exposed to so much of the language for your brain to essentiakly learn through statistics what is expected of a sentence and the different roles words play in a sentence across contexts. Language learning is easier for children because the system of their native language is still going through this development so they are less “glued” to the learnt rules of english and have higher neuroplasticity for laying down the pathway for learning these rules.

It tends to be when people have high exposure and a deep understanding of the syntactic (grammar) rules of a new language they are able to produce and process the language as it’s own with meaning. Although the dominant language is often relied on for a long time.

TLDR; The language centre in your brain is so established with a shitload of knowledge on how to process and produce meaningful English language that your knowledge base of German cannot compare and you’re therefore relying on the framework you have of how language works (in english) to understand German.