I remember perfectly what reaction I had when when I found out in the second grade that one of the subjects of that year was English and that I would have to learn it a few years from then on. It was a specific stubborn reaction that I often have when I have to learn something I don't want. I admit I am very stubborn and have developed this "quality" since childhood.

Of course I had good reasons to not want to learn English at the time. I loved my native country, I thought I would never leave it, and Cartoon Network's cartoons were translated into my native language, Romanian. However, I did not give up and even at some point I started to like it. Lucky me.

Even more, in high school we had an American citizen coming through the Peace Corps to "teach us English". In fact, those English classes we had with Justin (this was his name) had nothing to do with the classic ones we had with the Romanian teacher and who would weary us each week with the English grammar I could not bear at all.

With Justin it was totally different because we were involved in English interactions during the classes and him being very close to us in age got us much closer than our native teacher. He came to parties with us and even learned some Romanian during this time in which he taught us English, but the actual talks with him made a lot of difference. After graduating from high school I did not have much of a chance to speak English anymore and it began to fade away from my memory. Not totally, but pretty much did.

However, I noticed that when I needed to speak English for long periods of time, I changed my personality a little bit and my thinking became also "English". It was not like I became an American or English person for a few days, but the way of thinking seemed to go hand in hand with the language I was supposed to use. That change I noticed not only with English, but with German to.

Living in Germany for over a year, I also learned German at some conversational level. Being a postman there I had to speak it everyday which had its "side effects". It sounds very strange, if you don't have to speak a foreign language too often, but it really affects your personality to some extent and it's not only you noticing that.

You begin to think in that language and even to replace the words of your native language with those of your new learned one. It's like even some of my life concepts became "German" and not only my daily used language. What I also noticed during this time is that the other foreign languages ​​that you know when you learn a new one and practice it daily "give up some memory space" to the new one. I remember that one day I met a Chinese who was looking for a factory in the city where I worked and asked me in English if I could give him some directions.

Being a postman and an English speaker, of course I did, but there were more words in German than in English that came out of my mouth and I could not believe that I came to speak English so badly. However, since I started to "live" on Steemit for a few hours every day, the English language started to get into its rights and to sculpt a bit my personality and not just my vocabulary. That's what I noticed in particular when I comment on some articles here or when I try to explain something about Steemit in my native language and I just can't find the proper words.

Now it's just about four months since I'm practicing my English around here. I'm curious how much of my brain and language will take some other flags colors in a year from now.

Have you noticed such changes when talking in a foreign language for long periods of time?

Thanks for reading!