TrashBoatDaGod

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For someone that's bilingual or multi-lingual, Is it possible for them to know a piece of information in one language, but not another?

Like sometimes when I speak another language, it feels like I'm using aa different part of my brain so I'm curious if it's possible to have a bit of info locked behind a specific language.

Lemme give an example.

Let's say I go teach in Korea for a few years, and end up fully immersing and mostly speaking Korean during my time there. Is it possible to maybe forget some info I learned during my time in Korea without accessing the Korean speaking part of my brain? like maybe the birthday of a friend I made while I was over there. Seems far fetched, but I was curious if this was a real thing.


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in reply to @TrashBoatDaGod's post:

I feel that there are other factors at play (location, and the group of people you speak to in each language) but I have a similar feeling to what you are describing. I don't know if there is any kind of academic study on it, but there's a passage in one essay from a book called Violent Phenomena which touches on the same idea of a rift between the languages you speak - I quoted it here (and there's some discussion in the comments to the first post in that chain too) https://cohost.org/mojilove/post/847501-just-finished-readin

oh this is helpful. I've never learned languages in any full immersion context, Most of my language learning has been "self-taught" but I did have a stream where I was speaking english and Portugues due to my chat demographics that night, and I was sortareacting to difficult part of the game in portguese in what felt sorta like a different personality. Not crazy different from my english one, but i was sorta able to tell it was like another side of my brain was in the driver's seat.

My linguistics department narrowly avoided being folded into neuroscience. I was grateful at the time, though it certainly would have helped in thinking about this question.

I did a small project on this question, and while I don't have anything rigorous to support this, I did gather several anecdotal perspectives. In general, information isn't locked away quite the way you're positing, but it can become a bit buried under some interpretative work.

The clearest example I found was a common occurrence between English/Japanese speakers where they understood in-group/out-group and deferential/friendly relationships intuitively and concretely in contexts where they spoke Japanese, while analogous relationships in English speaking settings were hazier and took consideration to pin down. The information was still there, it just needed to be translated.

It might be like hearing "it's 30 degrees (Celsius) outside" for someone who's most familiar with Fahrenheit temperatures, or hearing what something costs in Euros when you're used to USD. You don't exactly grok what it means until you've done the mental conversation.

I often have the opposite experience, actually, where I remember a piece of information but not the exact words it was told to me with and cannot recall whether I learned of it in German or in English. But I do tend to have a mix of them in my everyday life, and they're very similar languages, to be fair