A.K.A How Japanese and Spanish Met in My Head and Became Nihoñol.
I was volunteering for my church’s VBS (we call ours “Summer Spectacular”) in ‘07. It had a Mexican/Southwest theme, so we had the hallway leading to the Children’s Ministry classrooms painted with adobe buildings (really colorful ones, blue, green, purple…). And the songs they had were partly in Spanish. Yup. So I was standing in the back of the auditorium during the Sing & Play Olé event (before they went home). Sometime around this moment, one of the two actors on stage (they were volunteers) asked the kids “and how do we say ‘thank you’ in Spanish?”
My first thought was ‘>:O Arigatou!!’ (I didn’t say this out loud, thankfully. :3)
I didn’t take a whole lot of Japanese in high school (only about a semester), but it seems to have stuck with me pretty well.
On the flipside, learning some Japanese really helped me in Spanish. Example? In English, if we wanted to say something about a car belonging to Marie, we could say “Marie’s car” or “car of Marie” (but normally, it would be the former). In Spanish, if you wanted to say it, it would be “carro de Marie” (car of Marie). I thought ‘wait, what if we wanted to specifically say “Marie’s car”? Then I remembered that in Japanese, if you wanted to say it, it would be “Marie no (I forget how you say “car” in Japanese X_x)” (Marie’s car). There’s no way to say “car of Marie” in Japanese (as far as I’m concerned). They just have one way of expressing possession, so I figured that it must be like that in Spanish as well.
(A bit offtopic, but I like how the two languages share the same word for bread–pan. ^^)
But I’m rambling. And it’s a bit late at night and I’ll probably have peculiar dreams about Marie and her car. And what brought this on? I was listening to a song on my playlist, while working on part of my Capstone project at the same time, so I wasn’t really paying attention to what was playing. Then I heard a word “tiempo” and thought ‘hey wait! That’s a Spanish word!’ A couple seconds later: ‘Oh, this entire song is in Spanish.’ Yup, that’s right. I originally thought it was in Japanese. 
So, anyone who’s taking/took two languages, do the two ever become jumbled up in your brain to where you think of a word in one language, but end up getting the word in the other language? Or any similar situation?
Modified: March 12th, 2008
Yeah. For example, I forget how to say he or she is in French. So I end up thinking er or sie ist, not il or elle est.
But do you ever get French mixed up with German?
(For those who don’t know, this is my younger sister. She’s in her third year of French and first year of German. :D)
Heh, I don’t think I confused French and Japanese together. But then again, it’s not like they have many similarities like French/Spanish/Italian (Romance languages) or Spanish/Japanese (the vowel sounds).
Hmm, veeery interesting.
Actually, it’s not the vowel sounds that gets me confused (even if the vowels sound the same, you could still tell they sound different, since in Japanese, the consonants in Japanese are usually followed by a vowel, while it’s not the case in Spanish, so it’s one of the ways that would kind of make the two sound different). It’s just the vocabulary, even though the words in both languages are completely different.