I’ve spent the past 5 years saying mixing languages disappeared easily after a while. I didn’t know it but I was lying.
You see, the last time I heavily mixed languages was over ten years ago, in 2012. Back then, doing an exchange program in Japan, I had a better understanding of Japanese but was more at ease speaking Korean due to having already a few close Korean friends.
The end result was that some Korean words would often pop up in my Japanese sentences or, even more commonly, I would use some Korean grammar pattern in Japanese.
The most frequent mixup I did was the following:
The verb1 “to be easy” is kantan desu 簡単です in Japanese and kantan hada 간단하다 in Korean. The kantan means “easy” while desu is the verb “to be” in Japanese and hada means “to do” in Korean.
Yes, in Korean, people don’t say “to be easy” but “to do easy.” It’s a bit confusing at first but it’s such a typical feature of the language people get used to it quickly.
The problem? I would tell people in Japanese kantan shita 簡単した, with shita being the (informal) past tense of the verb… to do.
This happened constantly for the first few months but I slowly got over it.
After my exchange program I pretty much never mixed the two languages. It might have happened once in a while but it was never again a common habit.
Fast forward to this year.
I arrived a month ago to live for a year in Korea and I’ve been meeting up with Korean friends I met in Japan. Our typical language of conversation is Korean but we switch to Japanese when conversations become too complicated or if I want to tell a long story—because, while I could explain it in Korean, my speech is slower and I don’t want the other to fall asleep in the middle of it.
This allows me to stick to Korean for as long as I want and switch to Japanese for comfort if needed. Of course, I try to refrain from doing it too often.
Still, I have the comfort of being understood even if the two languages merge.
And that’s where the problem lies.
Because when I recently said uso an tsukji 嘘안つㅋ지, I didn’t even realize how much the two languages had merged.
You see, this sentence uses the Japanese expression uso (wo) tsuku 嘘(を)つく which means “to lie” and, in there, I used the Korean negation particle an 안, and the confirmation ending ji 지. In short, a whole mess.
Since my friend made me realize the mistake, I’ve been noticing these errors pop up throughout my speech when I speak to her.
Interestingly enough, this doesn’t happen when I speak to my friends who don’t speak Japanese so I’ve been thinking about why this happens and how to handle it.
That’s why this week we’re turning to why this happens and how to fix it!
Languages as a large room
As I just mentioned, mixing up languages doesn’t happen all the time.
You see, I see speaking languages as being in a large room surrounded by smaller rooms. The large room is filled with words and expressions to use while each smaller one is a language we can get access to once the door appears and gets opened.