language centers

I remember my first days in Beijing, as I thought about what I would say to my first class, I found myself worrying how the hell I was going to explain myself in Spanish.



Storing languages learnt after puberty is a tricky business, and Spanish comes burbling up at the strangest times. I nearly said "cada dia" to the lady in the supermarket, and when I intentionally try to remember Spanish I find the articles replaced with "wo," "ta" and "ni" (me, he/she/it, and you, respectively). Luckily articles are pretty much the only thing that suffers from this insidious substitution, as the grammar is so much simpler in chinese that few other structures look anything alike.