Officially Prelingual: "My Idiom Not Is Perfect."

One of the wonderful things about moving abroad is discovering the fascinating plasticity of your brain. Language flows in; you struggle; you grit your teeth; suddenly, you have a conversation without thinking and you leap for joy. You also learn something more distressing: your brain is of a finite size. I, for example, am discarding one English word for each Spanish one I take in. In English I've begun placing adjectives after the nouns, as one does in Spanish: "The coat old is mine." The title of this post actually came out of my mouth. And so did, "In order to see the greatest spectacle, it is needed to bring binoculars"--a translation I made from a class workbook, admittedly, but one that I thought to be in perfectly reasonable English. Tha's me, El Ian: Proficient in Two Languages, Fluid in None.