Substitutions

I opened my mouth, and shut it again. Recalibrated. Opened it again. "Careful!"

It happened first with the ubiquitous "mmn"; then "thank you," I think, and spread quickly to "really?" and "yeah!": in my mind, they existed first and foremost in Chinese. Someone gives me something? 謝謝 (Xie xie)! Someone says something unbelievable? 真的嗎 (Zhen de ma)? I need to confirm that something is correct? "mmn" or 對阿 (dui aa) will do the job just fine.

小心 (xiao xin) as my go-to word is new for me, though, and it has the advantage (?) over the others of concerning situations in which you really don't have time to translate before speaking. If you're telling someone to be careful, you usually need to do so immediately--and, really, that's the reason why 小心 made its way into my vocabulary in the first place: being an elementary school teacher gives you ample times when you need to caution people quickly, and be sure that they understand you.

We talked in our Fulbright sessions earlier this year about the tenets of language learning; one of the goals towards which we strive as English teachers is for English words to come naturally. This is referred to in the language teaching community as automaticity. And yes, automaticity is great, and yes, I'm more than a little excited that, for some words at least, Chinese has supplanted English in my mind.

But when, as happened in Australia, I found myself about to caution someone in Chinese, I started wondering about the dangers of these substitutions. No wonder second (or third, or whatever) languages are lost so easily if you don't use them! Seems to me like a natural defense mechanism: if you hold a rarely-used language at the forefront of your mind, you run the risk of not being able to communicate with those around you at a moment's notice--and that is, after all, the main purpose for which language was developed.

I'd just like to take this moment to apologize in advance to all my friends in America, for the moments when Chinese will almost certainly slip from my mouth instead of English. Just give me a few months and, I'm sure, I'll recalibrate.