Alien Romance, the daily comic strip

[gs_silva]

It was long, so I left the art unfinished, as usual. And it has everybody in it! Maurice on the phone. The tall, quiet guy is Ren. Jon is the blond in the wheelchair. Ella serving food and Cathy is the little one with the headband. It's like a character guide!

Translation:

Maurice, in Vietnamese: "Only English. There's no French."
"Oh! I'll ask her."

Maurice, in Spanish: "Cathy, do you speak Spanish?"

Cathy, in French: "I understand a little, but can't speak it."

Maurice, in Vietnamese then switching to English: "No go, Ma. Okay, I'll find out more and call back later. Bye, Ma!"

Ella: "How do you switch languages like that?!"

Maurice: "It's not easy. Everything gets mixed up in my head and I have to sort it out before I speak."

Ella: "Well, I'm impressed. You're like a one-man UN."

Maurice: "I swear I'm not."

Comments

[moth2fic]

I feel for him. My worst experiences, linguistically, have been when I've been out with my German friend who has a holiday house in France. I can never remember whether she and I are speaking English or German but when it then comes to e.g. ordering in a French restaurant, despite being reasonably fluent in French, all three languages (yes, that includes English) completely desert me!! My brain can clearly only cope with two at a time.

[gs_silva]

Oh wow, yeah, I can imagine that!

*laugh*

[ysabetwordsmith]

That code-switching is awesome.

I've known people who do it without thinking. Me, I tend to switch around if I don't know all the words I need. Hilariously, my brain files all the non-English stuff in a related area, meaning that if I don't know a word in Spanish, a Russian or Japanese or some other foreign one will pop into my mind before the English. And if I've lost my voice, my brain keeps wanting to switch to the bits of sign languages that I know.

Re: *laugh*

[gs_silva]

Haha, nice! I'm a little like you - at least, in Vietnam I could stick to Vietnamese, but when I tried French, it kept turning into Vietçais. (Tieng VietPhap maybe?)

I figure that the phenomenon is probably more likely in someone who has a good foundation in one language before learning other languages later, which wouldn't be the case for Maurice. He would've learned a small amount of Vietnamese first as his mother settled into life in the US, and then English would overtake it later.

Re: *laugh*

[gs_silva]

Trời Ơi, I just noticed that I forgot to edit one line of the Vietnamese! I have to use Google Translate to refresh my memory and get all the special characters right, but then I have to edit the results to match the context of the scene. Tôi should've been con because he's talking to his mother. This is why plugging stuff blindly into the internet and trusting the translation isn't always the best idea! I'm glad I remember pronouns as well as I do. They don't work the same at all!