Saturday, November 15, 2008

Language dreams

My French professor told us one time that you know you are fluent in a language when you dream in it. So what does it mean when I dreamed that I was fluent in Spanish? I carried on a whole conversation with someone in my dream, with only occasionally getting lost for words and having to use English to explain what I needed to say.

I have been around Spanish a lot, but I took French in high school and Italian in college. I even tried to recite a series of numbers to one of our Spanish-speaking janitors at work the other day and she just kind of laughed at me.

Oddly enough, this made me remember when I was in Italy with my class (at the Vatican in fact) and a British nun/nurse thought I spoke Italian fluently and kept insisting that I translate for an Italian man suffering stomach pains. I kept trying to tell her that my Italian was limited to my phrase book, but she just didn't believe me.

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