Do you speak any other languages? When you speak more than one language fluently, it starts getting a bit weird upstairs. They way I think of it, there are a couple of phases of "fluency":
Beginner: You're past the basics of the language, but you still have to look up words every now and then. It's not true fluency by any stretch of the imagination, but you can follow conversations, given time to translate.
Effectively Fluent: You know the language like the back of your hand, you can follow the conversations, but your head still does the automatic translation back into your native language. However, it no longer slows you down because the transition is so automatic. You start having dreams in the other language around this point :P This is interestingly enough, the point at which I think one makes the best translator - you understand everything perfectly, but because you're still doing the automatic translation you can easily translate for someone else too.
True Fluency: This is where it gets hard to explain. In my experience (with Irish), there's no longer any transition, you simply... understand, in the same way that you understand English perfectly without someone having to explain it. It's like the difference between understanding a sentence because you know all the words that form it, and understanding the sentence...because you understand the sentence. It starts getting harder to translate for others at this point, because the inherent and subtle differences between languages start to mean more and more to you, It's no longer such a simple thing to switch between them.
Curiously enough, you hit a bit of a bullseye by saying that his mind might still be working in Serbian. I went to school through Irish, but all my memories of my time in the school are in English. I would imagine that if Irish were the language I was speaking more, it would be the other way round.
__________________
"I found it eventually, at the bottom of a locker in a disused laboratory, with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Ever thought of going into Advertising?"
- Arthur Dent
|