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My “thinking language”

When I went to Japan from China at the age of 5, my parents weren’t sure how quickly I would fit in there. Their worries disappeared the first time they heard me “sleep talk” in Japanese - they knew there and then that I would be ok.

By the age of 12, my “thinking language” was certainly Japanese and my Chinese was pretty basic. Then I went back to China, and the Chinese language started dominating more and more parts of my brain until the age of 19 when I moved to the UK.

If we forget about the science of the brain, for the time being, I can almost picture my brain with different territories occupied by Chinese, Japanese and English, perhaps with a national flag flying on top of each territory.

The basic rule is that I don’t activity “convert” from one language to the other unless I’m specifically asked to. It means that it’s hard for me to say what my dominant language is. Here are a few examples:

• Daily life: I live in London, and English is the easiest language for me to think about what’s going on around me.

• Things in the kitchen: Chinese is the only language in which I know the names of kitchen stuff more or less accurately. Living with four English girls while at university helped “improve” my kitchen vocabulary in English, but didn’t perfect it.

• UK taxation: English is the definitely the easiest, although I have used both Japanese and Chinese while working as a tax advisor.

• Japanese cartoons: I still love watching the cartoons, like Sazae-san and Detective Conan, and obviously Japanese is my only language for cartoons.

• Maths: See my post “The ‘primary language’ of mathematics”.

Do multilingual people always have a “dominant language”? The answer based on my own experience is that I do have a dominant language for each topic area, but not necessarily an overall dominant language.

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