The weirdest experience I’ve had with language mixups so far is that my brain apparently seems to conflate anything not English. English is my first language, and I used to be able to speak German pretty well — not fluently, but well enough to hold a fairly natural conversation. I have unfortunately let it slip away now. I’m now learning a different language and for some reason whenever I don’t know a word for something but I do remember the German one, my brain just picks the German one. It’s quite frustrating.

Hard disagree. Some languages are so wildly different that it would be really hard to confuse them like that. Like where the grammar structure is different so it’s not like you’re just substituting a word in one language for a word in another.

I speak 3 languages daily and as for my case it’s only when i speak it’s tough to remember the word of that language i want if the code switch isn’t quite “right” so sometimes a word or two from another language will seep through. Never get confuse on what language is spoken by others though

I speak English and japanese on a daily basis and don’t think I could ever confuse the two. The grammar and phonology are extremely different.

Even with German and french thrown in (neither of which I remember well enough to do more than travel with), I don’t see this problem. Maybe closely-related language in the same family (I’ve. Italian and Spanish in the romance family)?

I know some Japanese, and I can usually recognize Korean because it sounds kinda like Japanese but I can’t understand anything.

Depends on the language? I mean, Portuguese and English are wildly different, so it’s very easy to tell them apart. Now, if it was Portuguese and Spanish, I think telling the two apart could be harder more often

Usually it’s easy, but when I role played that I don’t know one language and I know the other. It was super hard.

I was making a game for kids where they need to use some english (second language) to progress the game, and I slipped and reacted to the native language.

That is a genuine new thought for me, I only speak one language but it never occurred to me that if you are fluent in two or more that they might start to merge in your head into a single language, forcing you to work to isolate one as you speak it. All languages are a mix of others but I can’t imagine having to differentiate the root of each word before it is used to ensure its applicability.

My native French speaking mom will occasionally address my non-french speaking husband in French without realizing unless I tell her and even then she only knows because I’ve told her.