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I just had a strange experience. In my earlier post I wrote (in Russian) that I couldn't remember what happened to me on Brighton Beach a few years ago. Then I started reading "Investigations" and ran into this passage:
I thought, what if I tried to remember Brighton Beach in English? And I did, and it worked! All of a sudden I remembered vividly how we walked along that strange hot street, asking for an authentic Russian restaurant; how two middle-aged men in "кепка" debated between themselves which restaurant deserved to be called authentic (настоящий), etc. We had a great lunch, with traditional Russian-Jewish appetizers, the borscht (my mom makes a better one), a lamb plate (шашлык), and some herbal tea with клубничное варенье. Overall, we probably spent there two hours and got out completely full - barely able to breathe. The weather was great too. We found an empty bench on the promenade and mindlessly watched old Russian people go by. They were speaking Russian, and once in a while my friend would ask me what they were talking about. I would listen in, it was typical nothing.
Anyway, it's weird how the brain works with different languages.
336. This case is similar to the one in which someone imagines that one could not think a sentence with the curious word order of German or Latin just as it stands. One first has to think it, and then one arranges the words in that strange order. (A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.)
I thought, what if I tried to remember Brighton Beach in English? And I did, and it worked! All of a sudden I remembered vividly how we walked along that strange hot street, asking for an authentic Russian restaurant; how two middle-aged men in "кепка" debated between themselves which restaurant deserved to be called authentic (настоящий), etc. We had a great lunch, with traditional Russian-Jewish appetizers, the borscht (my mom makes a better one), a lamb plate (шашлык), and some herbal tea with клубничное варенье. Overall, we probably spent there two hours and got out completely full - barely able to breathe. The weather was great too. We found an empty bench on the promenade and mindlessly watched old Russian people go by. They were speaking Russian, and once in a while my friend would ask me what they were talking about. I would listen in, it was typical nothing.
Anyway, it's weird how the brain works with different languages.