span-eutch

my brain is a strange place.  it doesn't learn like most people's brains do, especially when learning a language.

when i was in germany learning to speak german, i did not learn most from having stickies with the german word on items throughout my apartment.  i didn't learn best from listening to tapes or even from studying vocabulary lists.  no, i learned from studying a book on german grammar.  my "cheat sheet" was a chart of definite and indefinite pronouns for each part of speech and tense taped on my bathroom mirror.  yep, strange place.

i discovered then another language oddity of mine.  i have a "language switch" in my brain.  it wasn't "English/German" however.  it's more like "English/non-English".  when first learning german, i kept coming up with spanish words for things, having had years of spanish in school.  now if i try to come up with a spanish word, i can mostly only come up with the german.  i've almost completely lost my spanish, despite 6 years in school and a semester at college.

now that i'm hoping to be accepted into the Peace Corps and planning for placement in central or south america, i need to get that spanish back.  the words aren't all gone – if i hear or see one, i can often tell you what it is.  every once in a while, i see an item and the spanish word for it pops into my brain.  i can even more-or-less read spanish, but i can not come up with it when I need to in any reliable sense. 

so as I re-learn spanish, will it simply push the german right back out of my head?  or create an overly-confused mishmash of words that don't go together?  is it still in there somewhere?  once i get back into it, will i still at least be able to read german if not speak it?

it's bad enough that there are still times i know the german word for something but have trouble recalling its english equivalent.  but here's the part that really makes me worry:  oftentimes i can come up with the word for something, knowing it's the right word, but unsure whether it's the german or spanish word for that object.  i have to really think hard about it, and even then i sometimes can't be sure which language it is.

then there's grammar.  german grammar is so complicated and nothing like english or spanish.  what if I remember the spanish words before my "language switch" finds the right setting?  what is the spanish translation for "if we tomorrow to the store to go would like, take we the subway"?