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I had an interesting experience in my French 2 class this quarter. My teacher was retelling a story in French (Jean-Paul Sartre’s "La Nausée") and I noticed that I was not processing her speech the way I normally process French. Usually, my brain does a translating step :
French -> English -> Mental Pictures
But this time, her words were making a more direct connection in my brain:
French -> Mental Pictures
I was seeing the story play out in real-time, as she told it. I was pretty surprised -- but I think this might have been happening before, from time to time, and maybe I just was not aware of it. It happens more and more frequently now. I’ve heard that when you become fluent in another language you can "think in it". I don’t suppose I’ll ever get that far, but I am getting a little taste of what this is like.
The only thing I can compare this experience to is something that happened when I used to play piano. At first, when I wanted to transpose a piece to a different key it was very laborious. I had to think before every note. After a while, I became so comfortable with sight-reading that I could transpose any piece to any key on the fly. No thinking involved!
Have you had any experiences like this with automatically transposing one thing in your mind to another? I was thinking artists possibly do something like this when they scale drawings from one size to larger or smaller.
French -> English -> Mental Pictures
But this time, her words were making a more direct connection in my brain:
French -> Mental Pictures
I was seeing the story play out in real-time, as she told it. I was pretty surprised -- but I think this might have been happening before, from time to time, and maybe I just was not aware of it. It happens more and more frequently now. I’ve heard that when you become fluent in another language you can "think in it". I don’t suppose I’ll ever get that far, but I am getting a little taste of what this is like.
The only thing I can compare this experience to is something that happened when I used to play piano. At first, when I wanted to transpose a piece to a different key it was very laborious. I had to think before every note. After a while, I became so comfortable with sight-reading that I could transpose any piece to any key on the fly. No thinking involved!
Have you had any experiences like this with automatically transposing one thing in your mind to another? I was thinking artists possibly do something like this when they scale drawings from one size to larger or smaller.