Sunday, July 19, 2009
Calling All Brain Studiers
I'm starting to get a little worried. I've talked to a few other people about something I've been experiencing here, and no one else has experienced it, which worries me, despite my enjoyment of feeling unique. I frequently doze off while traveling on trains, buses and maxi taxis - not enough to be considered asleep, but enough to do the head-jerk thing every few seconds. When this happens, every conversation I hear is in English, even the conversations of my Romanian or Hungarian compartment-mates. As I start to doze off, the foreign language conversation will morph into English, but an unintelligible English. An example: Person 1 "The cat's bread went for hair but did it go under something yesterday?" Person 2 "Well I don't swim and there people break into holes and turkeys. Do ladders make songs with sidewalks taking pictures." and so on. It's very confusing. So confusing, and a bit startling, that I'll snap out of it and try to figure out what they're talking about. But, the moment I start paying attention and open my eyes, poof! Back to Romanian or Hungarian. The conversation's too hard to follow, so I drift back into doze mode and the weird English returns. "Becky's car split but your mom's drinking the lamps. They said wait without holding a note and I can buy the whole blue for reason." Stuff like that. Nothing that makes sense. I think it might be similar to how I saw people I knew in the faces of strangers when I first arrived. English is so imprinted on my brain that it takes the first opportunity to turn everything into something somewhat computable. Maybe my brain misses English, though I do hear it fairly regularly. Maybe it can't handle learning a foreign language. I'm jealous of all those volunteers gushing about the dreams they're now having in Romanian or Hungarian, or those who are speaking it in their sleep. I can't even hear Romanian when I'm asleep. What's wrong with my brain?
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4 comments:
Speaking of brains...
MWahahaha! Those are great sentences!
they took an alarming amount of time to fabricate, longer than the rest of the post all together, but i think they capture the bizarreness of what i hear decently. i kind of want to come up with more :)
Hi Erin!
I must admit that I've experienced this too! I am Romanian, living in the US right now. Whenever I travel from Romania to the US and I have to spend time in airports between flights, I hear people speaking Romanian all over the place. Which is statistically impossible, given my layovers are usually in Amsterdam or NY. So yes, traveling does weird things with my language comprehension too!
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