Lilac Colored Glasses

I was walking to a tram stop this afternoon when a large German Shephard going on a walk with his owner came at me. I flinched back, the dog went the other way and as I continued on down the street I thought to myself, “amai!”

Amai is the equivalent of “oh my” in English, but also a common Yiddish phrase, “oy vey”. I’m typically an “oy vey”er, so much so that I’ve turned gentile friends into users of the phrase. I was sincerely surprised that the Dutch word came into my head before the Yiddish or even the English.

Perhaps some of you out there have had this sort of experience before. I asked CB about it but he’s been speaking English so long that I don’t think he recalls the early stages of becoming fluent. See, lately I’ve been having moments where I can’t think of some words in English, but I can think of the equivalent in Dutch. Or I often start thinking half and half, with some words coming out in English, and some in Dutch. I imagine this is because I’ve made it a habit when I’m alone (which is often) to try to translate my thoughts as I’m thinking them into Dutch. It usually works something like this:

Me, thinking to myself: Ugh, I’m thirsty and I’m out of water. I wonder if there’s a shop nearby so I can buy another bottle of water…
Then I propose the question to myself in Dutch, in case I would want to ask someone: Excuseer meneer/ mevrouw, is er een winkel in de buurt? Ik wil een flesje water kopen.

And most of my thinking goes along those lines. I’m constantly trying to think of how I would say what I’m thinking in Dutch. Most of the time I can think of how to say things, but when I can’t I try to remember what words I was lacking or what expression I didn’t know so that I can ask CB about it later. But the end result is that I often mix both languages when I think to myself. And actually, when we get together with CB’s family it comes in handy because half of his relatives will speak in Dutch, the others in English, or they’ll throw in a Dutch word if they don’t know the English or an English word if I don’t know the Dutch, so much of my conversation with others is often mixed as well.

This isn’t a bad thing, by any means. In fact, I find it encouraging that the lines between the languages are blurring more noticeably for me. Lately I’ve even noticed that when someone tells me something in Dutch, when I try to recall it, I hear them speaking in English. It’s strange, because I know for sure I was spoken to in Dutch, but I recollect it very clearly in English. It’s an interesting process, this whole learning another language thing.

I wonder when I’ll be ready for French…