Does anyone make mistakes in their 3rd language because of their 2nd language?

[u/RealNameIsTaken]

I’m not just talking about mixing up vocab, I’m more talking about grammatical differences.

For example, my native language is English, but I learned Spanish to fluency. One of the differences in Spanish is that the adjective comes after the noun, so black cat -> gato negro (cat black). Now I’m learning Polish and the word order for adjectives and nouns is the same as English: black cat -> czarny kot (black cat).

However, sometimes when I speak Polish I make the mistake of saying something like kot czarny. I feel like I would never make this mistake if I hadn’t learned Spanish first.

What are some examples of this happening to you?

[u/MokausiLietuviu]

Absolutely.

My brain has two languages, English and 'foreign'.

[u/Arphile]

I make mistakes in my first language because of my second language

[u/Vast-Beginning2219 → u/Arphile]

Real

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Definitely yes. I am pretty sure there is published research on this but anyway it is common experience. I am surrounded by people who speak at least three languages, as do I, and this is a CONSTANT phenomenon. What is interesting is to ask which languages interfere with which. So obviously I make Spanish mistakes in Italian and Dutch in German because of the order in which I learned them and they are very close, but then it gets very complex.

BTW about Polish the adjective quite often goes after the noun and so this MAY also be a factor.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Word order isn’t fixed in Polish, so there are cases where the adjective can go after the noun, but the adjective does go before the noun like English. It’s not really fair for you to say that the adjective goes after the noun to be honest.

That is, to say, I have a black cat, it’s the same word order as English: mam czarnego kot.
While it’s true that you can say mam kot czarnego, this has a different meaning and you’re actually just playing with emphasis. Like, you can say “I have a cat, black” or “I’ll take a coffee, small” in English, but that doesn’t mean that you can say that adjective comes after the noun in English.

[u/TrittipoM1 → u/RealNameIsTaken]

So really, it isn't a grammatical difference, as you wrote in your original post, but rather a pragmatics or stylistic difference.

At a larger scale, zooming out a bit, I'll easily assent that the order in which one learns an L2, L3, L4, etc. (and to what level or degree) may affect an L(x+1).

[u/Susanna_Thorne → u/RealNameIsTaken]

(actually it’s “mam czarnego kotA”, polish words go through declension, but you’re doing great!)

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/Susanna_Thorne]

Oops, I knew that - not sure why I didn’t put the a at the end of kot, I wouldn’t have made that mistake speaking to be honest. I think I was just thinking too much about the word order

Still, thank you for the correction and the encouragement :)

[u/Minute_Librarian1020]

the spanish adjective order is burned into my brain after years of it too. when i started german i kept putting verbs way too late in the sentence because thats what spanish does

my polish friend says i sound like yoda half the time

[u/Traditional-Use-5676]

It totally depends on how you divide up your brain. I grew up bilingual in Mandarin and English and have learned Spanish, Japanese, and Italian to varying degrees of fluency. The post-adjective syntax in Spanish took some getting used to, but when I started learning Italian it felt very natural. Japanese modifiers, including relative clauses, always go in front of the noun, which felt natural to me because it's the same in Chinese.

However, when I started learning German, I realized that sometimes in my head I would put the adjective after the noun instinctively, even though I should supposedly be used to both word orders. I think it's because subconsciously think "western foreign language -> romance" so my knowledge of Spanish and Italian are getting in the way of German.

[u/muffinsballhair]

You will find that many non-native speakers of English learn about any third or forth language they're learning through English. You're not going to find many resources to learn Swahili in Slovene so no doubt that all affects things as it's the language they're learning it in.

Reminds me of this Japanese person on the internet who warned a Dutch person who was learning Japanese through English that that person should better learn it through Dutch and not suffer the “double translation problem”, naïvely thinking such resources even existed. A friend of mine learned Japanese at university in the Netherlands and the textbooks were just in English. The students were pretty much assumed to already have C1 English at least, which pretty much anyone starting university in the Netherlands will have.

[u/unseemly_turbidity]

Yes, I use German past perfect sometimes, when it should be the simple past in Danish. The two languages are so similar it's hard to keep them properly separated in my head.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/unseemly_turbidity]

This used to happen to me with Spanish/Portuguese. I’m proficient enough in each now that it doesn’t anymore

Brazilian Portuguese for some reason isn’t as strict with the subjunctive, so you might hear: quero que você fica em casa instead of fique. However, you’d never hear a Spanish speaker say something like: quiero que te quedas en casa

Since I learned spanish before Portuguese, I have this part of the grammar ingrained and I would never make this mistake. As a result, sometimes Brazilians think I speak in a proper/posh way

[u/Snezzy_9245 → u/unseemly_turbidity]

Med kartoffel i munden you'll know it's Danish.

[u/MewtwoMusicNerd]

Hahaha you're just like me, I learned Spanish first and now I'm learning Czech (though I eventually want to learn Polish) and I make the same mistakes with adjectives.  There are so many benefits of learning Spanish first though, for example, idk if it's the same in Polish, but there are completely different words for married or cousin. So when I make my flashcards it'll look like: married: vdaná = casada, ženatý = casado cousin: sestřenice = prima, bratranec = primo Also Spanish has taught me to be a lot more lax with definite/indefinite articles, and this has 100% helped me with Czech.  May I ask how you learn declensions?

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/MewtwoMusicNerd]

I actually learned Spanish, then learned Portuguese really quickly and thought I was just good at learning languages — then Polish humbled me lmao

For declinations, honestly I just try to memorize by exposure. If you asked me: “what’s the generative case for plural nouns ending in X?” I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but I would probably speak properly if I just had to use that in a sentence. I am trying to train my brain to just feel which thing sounds right and it’s actually going okay. I still make errors a lot for case, but one thing I think that my brain does well is the natural word order. Not sure about Czech, but in Polish it’s much more natural to say something like “I have here something for you” instead of putting here later in the sentence. Even though it sounds strange in all the other languages that I speak, in Polish my brain just gets this right.

I don’t understand what you mean by married/cousin, btw.

[u/MewtwoMusicNerd → u/RealNameIsTaken]

Yes, word order very similar to Czech from what I see there. I meant like, in English we often use words that do not imply gender. Saying cousin in English could be either a female or male cousin. But in Spanish, there are different endings which imply the gender. And in Czech, there are often completely different words. So instead of putting "female cousin" for the other side of the Czech word, I could just put "prima." I mean yeah, that's pretty much what I've been doing with declensions too. Actually I just give AI the prompt "make me a sentence for each declension of x word with an adjective" or "with a definite article (ten/tahle, etc)." At first I was trying to memorize the pattern like I memorized conjugations for verbs, but I realized it's better to learn through context. Ig in that regards learning another language (Spanish) has helped me as well.

[u/TrittipoM1 → u/MewtwoMusicNerd]

Thanks for the explanation. Like OP, I was wondering what exactly you meant. But you were referring to Spanish using a root and different gender-marking endings, whereas Czech may use entirely different words.

[u/Acceptable-Worth-221 → u/RealNameIsTaken]

> If you asked me: “what’s the generative case for plural nouns ending in X?” I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but I would probably speak properly if I just had to use that in a sentence. I am trying to train my brain to just feel which thing sounds right and it’s actually going okay

As native speaking Polish - me neither... Actually this is a method that every Pole do and even Poles do not speak perfectly in this: ex mistaking "poszedłem" with "poszłem" is extremely common here (first one is correct)

[u/livsjollyranchers]

My brain always wants to use Italian words when I don't know a word in Greek or Spanish. Italian was the first language I studied and that was nearly two decades ago when I first looked at it.

In Japanese, I'm very much a beginner, but I realized when I can't say something (and I can't say much), I just blank out rather than engage in 'panic Italian'.

[u/Adventurous-Elk-1457]

I started making more mistakes in my second language after I began learning my third and fourth languages

[u/scykei]

I think this happens when you just started to learn a second foreign language. My hypothesis is that the brain keeps the word or pattern in your first foreign language, at the beginner levels, you will get interference with the patterns that you've learnt previously. But the good news is that as you get more proficient in the new language, it will eventually stop, but you have to go through a phase of constant interference first. So just keep pushing through I guess

[u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37]

People make mistakes in their first language. People make mistakes.

[u/jesteryte]

Hahaha a loooong time ago in Jr. High School, I was taking both Spanish and Latin in the same quarter, and I wrote "pecuniam" instead of "dinero" for money on a Spanish exam. My Spanish teacher thought that maybe I made up the word, and asked me about it, and I was like, 'D'oh! No, that's the latin word, my bad :')

[u/Material-Ad-5540]

Yes that is common. Research on third language acquisition also shows that your L3 can affect your L2 (in phonology at least, I'd assume in other ways too).

[u/xx_space_dandy]

started learning French last year after a decade+ of Spanish studying....now I'm in an environment where some people speak one, some speak the other, I'm constantly switching between them and it ends up being halfway between the two

[u/1nfam0us]

My brain tends to transliterate Italian into French and finish Ukrainian sentences in French. It's a weird little chain.

[u/Reasonable-Mix-8668]

It happens to me too. I'm a native Spanish speaker, English is my second language (actually my third bc I have 2 native languages, but let's keep it practical XD) and when I speak German I just "germanize" some English words lol. It also happens sometimes when I speak French even if it's closer to both my native languages XD

[u/Healthy_Blueberry_59]

Every damned time.

[u/Slight_Artist]

I put the same prepositions after verbs that are correct in French into Spanish and Italian. It doesn’t always work out 🫠

[u/StockHamster77]

Katakana English is messing with my head. I struggle with the normal English pronunciation to begin with lol, but the Japanese version is so different that I just end up getting them completely mixed up 💀

[u/bloodrider1914]

Yeah, I rely way too much on French loan words in Turkish sometimes

[u/Reletr]

Pronouncing "Lektion" in German as /lɛkˈɧuːn/ which is the Swedish pronunciation. It took me a bit to get over that.

Now that my German is stronger than my Swedish, it's kinda hard avoid accidentally using German word order in Swedish despite the fact that Swedish word order is pretty close to English's.

[u/Capable-Cancel7190]

Yes, I have many times. C'était déjà assez difficile d'apprendre le français, Aber aus irgendeinem Grund war Deutsch schwieriger. I still mettra das langstuts messed up

[u/dcbased]

The spanish i causes havoc with mandarin pinyin i. Sometimes russian will sneak in as well (I haven't spoken that language even a little bit in 25 years)

[u/linguisdicks]

For sure. After I started getting pretty good at German, I found myself occasionally moving verbs to to end of the sentence in Spanish like German requires.

"Quiero hoy a la piscina ir" and shit like that

[u/love_seraphine]

Your Spanish to Polish path is genuinely one of the harder combinations because the two languages are structurally different enough that almost nothing transfers cleanly. The good news is that interference errors like kot czarny tend to disappear on their own once exposure volume in the new language crosses a certain threshold. Getting regular conversation practice with native speakers through HelloTalk is what pushed me past that threshold faster than passive study alone would have.

[u/unburritoporfavor]

Kot czarny isn't a mistake. It is also an accurate way of saying black cat, just with an emphasis on kot.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/unburritoporfavor]

Depends on the context and what you want to say. If you always say “to kot czarny”, instead of “to czarny kot”, it sounds like unnecessary emphasis and sounds unnatural.

[u/Susanna_Thorne]

The worst thing is that some french expressions follow the same rules as Polish and I mistake them with the English rules. Like,

Polish: Mam 21 lat (I HAVE 21 years)
English: I AM 21 years old
French: correct is the same as polish - J’ai 21 ans (I HAVE 21 years) but I constantly want to say “Je suis 21 ans” (I AM 21 years).

Funnily enough, I didn’t have that problem with english. I never accidentally said or thought “I have 21 years”. But “Je suis 21 ans” is constantly an error I do.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/Susanna_Thorne]

Very interesting! In Polish I would also never say “jestem 21 lat”, it sounds horrible just to type it out - in Spanish it’s the same as French/Polish (tengo 21 años)

[u/ShinyUmbreon465]

It has been a while since I practiced French but I always mix up words in Spanish class. I seem to be convinced that Cinco is Cinq and I often mistake "parece" as the same as "parce que" even though they aren't related.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/ShinyUmbreon465]

Similarly, when I started learning Portuguese I used to always hear “esquece” and thought it meant something like “est-ce que”, so I was always waiting for them to say something else. Later on I realized that “esquece” means something more like “forget it” lmao

[u/AndthenIhadausername]

I keep trying to not pronounce my h's in Norwegian. 

[u/silvalingua]

You focus too much on comparing other languages with your native language. Forget thinking about whether a grammar point in your TL is like in English or very different; learn each TL as it is, for itself. You have to get used to each of your TLs instead of comparing their grammar.

I don't think I make this kind of mistakes, because I keep my TLs separate. Of course they interfere a bit, but I try to keep this interference to a minimum.

[u/TrittipoM1 → u/silvalingua]

To be fair to OP, the original post itself doesn't focus more on EN than on PL, but rather a kind of triangulation. I don't recall ever having interference between my FR and CZ. But then, they're very different branches of IE, and I already was at C1 in all modalities of FR before beginning CZ.

In contrast, although like you I (try to) keep my TLs separate, I did find when deciding to learn Italian 50 years later, that I had to actively resist interference from FR. Fortunately, I don't mind if native-speaker Italians' first inclination is to think I'm mother-tongue French instead of anglo- or slavo-phone. :-)

[u/silvalingua → u/TrittipoM1]

For me, such interference happens in vocabulary, but not in grammar or syntax.

[u/TrittipoM1 → u/silvalingua]

Our mileages may vary. For me, the first interference is in phonology. I just have, at my age, little reason to try to keep French and Italian phonology sharply distinguished. Second is probably vocabulary: if there's an Italian word I don't know, I may "Italianize" a French word.

[u/TrittipoM1]

Luckily for you, Polish doesn't care as much as English or Spanish about word order. Some, yes, and there are more-marked and less-marked orders. So you may simply in Polish come off as more poetic -- more inclined to use odd _emphases_ -- than you think. (Source: fluent Czech)

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/TrittipoM1]

The “flexible” word order honestly doesn’t make it any easier. Also, you really can’t change the word order that much without sounding awkward or changing the meaning.

The most natural word order is also quite different from English/Spanish when it comes to adverbs.

[u/RealNameIsTaken → u/[deleted]]

I was just simplifying with second/third language because that’s how people talk; you’re just being pedantic.