Hearing the wrong language

July 26, 2005 3:51 AM

I live in Japan, and I speak the language only at a pretty minimal level. Occasionally when out in public I'll overhear someone's conversation, and I could swear they're speaking English, but then I'll realize they're actually speaking Japanese. The two languages sound nothing alike, so this is obviously something going on in my head. So linguaphiles, my question is: is there a name for this mishearing of a language?
posted by zardoz to writing & language (11 comments total)

I've experienced the same thing (although not with Japanese). Whenever you hear any language, your mind filters it through the sound system of English. Every so often someone speaking Japanese will come out with a sequence of sounds that fit into that system: your mind then parses this as English (although of course you can't quite make out what they're saying).

As far as I know there is no name for the phenomenon you describe. Still, maybe somebody more specialised than I will drop by and enlighten us both.
posted by nomis at 4:24 AM on July 26, 2005

I don't know if there's a name for it, but it certainly happened to me, both ways, with German. In Germany, I'd hear English and understand, before I'd realize there were Americans on my bus. Later, I'd hear German and understand it, before noticing it was German (after leaving Germany). My German understanding is poor.
posted by Goofyy at 4:26 AM on July 26, 2005

I spent maybe fifteen minutes once, thinking two young Burmese women were speaking in English (I was quite surprised, and listened intently). Obviously, they weren't speaking English.

For a short while I thought I might be going insane, since I spoke essentially no Burmese and thus couldn't have interpreted any significant part of their conversation -- I'd made it all up, without consciously trying to do so.

...so add me to the list of people curious about this phenomenon.
posted by aramaic at 7:08 AM on July 26, 2005

It sounds like what you're describing is Categorical Perception. What happens is basically that, although the formant frequencies in the Japanese /i/ are different from those of English /i/ (that, I am assuming, you learned as your first language), they are close enough that you perceive Japanese /i/'s to be English /i/'s. This is an oversimplification, and I'm a little out of practice explaining it, but it's Categorical Perception you're thinking of. (Although it's interesting that you are also hearing English prosody as opposed to Japanese.)
posted by cog_nate at 7:18 AM on July 26, 2005

I don't know of a name for it, but it's obviously pretty common. I once had an argument with my grad school roommate about what language a waiter was speaking; I was sure it was Spanish, he was sure it was Italian. We finally called the waiter over, and found out it was Greek. We left, equally humiliated but having learned a valuable lesson.
posted by languagehat at 9:07 AM on July 26, 2005

Are you sure they're not, briefly, actually speaking English? That's code switching.
posted by Brian James at 10:36 AM on July 26, 2005

Also, Japanese imports a *lot* of English words (spelling them out in katakana), with just an ever-so-slight alteration in pronunciation (e.g., hanbaagu for hamburger). You may actually be hearing these imported words and recognizing them as English.
posted by jasper411 at 11:06 AM on July 26, 2005

Yes. It sounds like you are suffering from categorical perception.

Don't feel too bad, though. Japanese people suffer from categorical perception, too.
posted by cup at 11:23 AM on July 26, 2005

Might also be considered pareidolia, though perhaps not unless you were mostly unable to hear them clearly; pareidolia generally refers to a fairly random stimulus.
posted by attercoppe at 12:16 PM on July 26, 2005

I've had the opposite problem: interpreting any non-English speech as French. This used to happen a lot about a year after I really started actually speaking French a lot, but it seems to have abated. The brain adjusts itself to its linguistic environment with experience.

Another version of this is the patently wrong conviction that I can understand what's being said in a subtitled foreign language film after a couple of hours. Weird, but interesting.
posted by sneebler at 6:17 PM on July 26, 2005

With foreign films and myself, some time afterward, I become convinced I did not read the words, but heard them spoken. But then, after time passes, I often remember books as if they were movies.
posted by Goofyy at 5:45 AM on July 27, 2005