Hi,
Here are some words about thinking in the TL.
I hope it will be useful to someone.
Something just happened to me related to what we’re in here all about. That was like click in for me, but even more I was impressed by the way I’ve come to it.
I start to think in English and all that have started with an assumption, that I’ve always tried to think something specific or particular of what I learned, but it felt stilted, the thoughts didn’t flow one by another. What if I’ll try to express my usual daily thoughts?
But, to give myself more time to come up with phrasing would be the fail because in trying to, you’re gonna get lost in this process, forgetting about what you’ve wanted to say. Should be another way to connect my thoughts to that speak producing apparatus the hell it may be in the brain.
Long story short, I’ve tried to slow down my thoughts to the speaking (available to me at that point) speed. There is a difference between the giving-yourself-time-to-come-up strategy and the slowing thoughts down one. I believe in that, at least.
My assumption is this.
At some point in our life we have such a strong request (from the world around us) to produce language, that we feel the desire to express our needs and feelings with every cell in our body. And at this point, the toddler’s (kid’s) thoughts of that kind of quite a low pace. Don’t confuse this with attention, because this one is very agile in the earliest ages.
Then we start to notice that these ones became options in our mind that we somehow can choose during the conversation before we actually get it said.
But because of repeatedness of this process, we’re getting habbitual, extemely used to this kind of Packed feelings, that these feelings with the related verbal expressions are getting compressed into rather hints, which we operate at the much higher speed than we’re able to speak. Some little hint which has come to you in a split of a second can be unpacked into your favorite quote, a flashback or whatnot. Memes work this way, they’re always a hint to some-thing. It would be too ordinary to call it just “notion”.
So we became too lazy to think in the actual language, because the hints work faster and you always can unpack this into the language which is in turn itself is the feelings that were packed by repeating them over and over again.
When we’re trying to think in the Second language, we’re trying this at the speed of hints, not at the speed of speaking. But there isn’t any hints in here yet, knock knock :)) And because it’s our kind of toddlerhood in the second language, we need to slow down our very thoughts in the manner as kids do, extending the vowels and not caring too much about what comes out of mouth.
So, this was my moment of truth, it felt strange. It still do actually. Don’t know, may be tomorrow I’ll come to forget how to do that again, but it feels that the habit of operating hints(mems/notions/hotkeys) it the one of the first hurdles en route to produce a language, and I should manage exactly this thing.
In that sense, acquired input finally has the connection to the “inner producing language apparatus”, because the toddler’s speed of speaking not to much faster, than typing. And while I writing, for the most part I have almost enough time to check with that general sense of English that I’ve gotten so far.
There needs to be some proportion in favor of input though, in order to refine that general sense you’re checking with.