Reading the thread about bad missionary farewells/home comings reminded me of one of the most annoying things about super self righteous RMs that went foreign (self righteous is how I interpreted it, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). Ok you grow speaking english for jesus' sake and you learn a foreign language but come home and can't speak english??? I spoke spanish on my mission and didn't have contact with an english speaker for over a year except for once a week district meetings and I never lost my ability to speak english. Once or twice while speaking english a spanish word would come out but I never struggled like I've seen many others do at the pulpit, like they were foreign learning english. Drove me crazy as a TBM when I saw it!

Yes! That drove me crazy as well. I served a foreign language mish and had nooooooo trouble at all speaking english when I returned. It's just grandstanding, basically saying, "Look at me, I'm so special and spiritual that I completely forgot my native tongue!"

Lol. Total bs.

It can, though perhaps not always, be legit.

I served a foreign spanish speaking mission and when I came home I legitimately struggled to speak english. I thought in spanish and as I'd hardly spoken english for two years, I wasn't used to switching between the languages. I could speak english, but I had to translate it and I was slow and clumsy with it for a little while.

Just because you may not have struggled with this, doesn't mean it isn't sincere. We're all wired differently. What others struggle with may be a breeze for you, and vice-versa.

That being said, I do agree, there are probably some that fake it and try to use it as a sign that they were really dedicated missionaries.

I would occasionally forget a word when I returned...usually when the Portuguese word was similar to an entirely different word in English. That passed very quickly though. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone struggle much more than that.

I had a lot of trouble speaking "pure" English when I came back. During my homecoming speech I had a couple of English words I just could not think of that caused me to stammer and I was embarrassed. I wasn't faking it out of some arrogant notion. If some do, fine. If you had no trouble, fine. But I would hesitate to judge others by your ability to easily re-assimilate.

By the time I left my mission I was having dreams that were not only in Spanish, but my parents were in them and they were speaking Spanish, badly. They were funny. But I was seriously immersed and spoke Spanglish with all my companions. I think that is the reason the English gets rusty.

Just because you didn't experience this phenomena, doesn't mean that others didn't. I had been to Germany for school, and then I went there on my mission. It got the point where I was thinking and dreaming in German. The phenomena that you are describing is not that they have forgotten English, but rather they are thinking in another language and trying to translate. I still have it happen to me on occasion, if I have been speaking or reading German for an hour or so.

In fact, when after months of severe seizures, my brain fried, it was German that was easier to think and speak in than English. Thank the gods that my father, sister and boyfriend at the time spoke it.

You not having a problem might be due to your talent at being able to translate in your head quickly, or perhaps you never thought in Spanish to begin with.

Interesting thought, I'm actually glad it's not just a prideful thing and an actual phenomenon, at least some of the time. The thing I hated was when the missionary would boast about how they were so immersed in the culture and the work and were so obedient the gift of tongues truly was at play. I can see forgetting words and translating in your head but I knew a guy who spoke at his home coming and sounded like Stands With Fists in Dances with wolves when she first spoke english after many years.

Yes, I can see where that would be annoying.

LOL Yeah, I remember a friend returning from France and struggling to find some English words. She said she was even thinking and dreaming in French.

Not a "forgetting English" problem, but a buddy of mine drove me nuts after returning from his mission in Australia by constantly saying "petrol"--"Oh, I think I need to get some PETROL for the car."

C'mon, man,, this is California: it's GAS! You're just showing off by acting Aussie!!

I thought and dreamt in korean on my mission. It took a little while to transition out of the "konglish" (english with frequent interjection of korean words) that I spoke to other missionaries when I got home.

I have a Chinese friend. Her family moved to Vietnam and then to Myanmar (formerly Burma) and finally to the U.S. when she was a little girl.

To this day she is unable to speak Chinese with her own mother. Weird, huh?

I thought she was joking, but it was confirmed by her older sister. I think she can speak in limited phrases and sentences, but mostly she relies on her older siblings to translate.

The woman is not dumb. She is a paralegal. Chinese dialects must be tough to master!

Ok, ok....I give up! lol

I must be wrong about this because it's obvious this is a real phenomenon. I served in Korea but never had a Korean companion so I was speaking a lot of English every day. That's probably why I never experienced this.

There's a huge difference between losing a language you stopped speaking as a child and losing a language you have spoken into adulthood. It happens with kids alll the time, it almost never happens past adolescence.

Some of it is legit. When I came home there were a handful of low-frequency words that would escape me. I've been living out of an English speaking environment for about six years now, and it drives me nuts when I can't think of the word or phrase I want, but again they're words and phrases that don't come up in everyday conversations.

The RM who stammers "please pass the, uh... uh... sorry I forgot what that's called" ... "That's the cheese, dear" is either full of shiт or needs to see a doctor

I agree with this one. I'd have problems when I'd call home and try to say words like "comradery" so I'd have to explain my way through it: "You know, you have that tie with people who have gone through the same situation??"

I also think it had to do with speaking Chinese vs English because you use different parts of your mouth to speak so switching back to the "big" English words might be hard.

I remember when my BIL came home, he would slip into the foreign tongue a few times, particularly if he was tired, and trip over words. He dreamed in the foreign language for awhile. He did, however, speak English and didn't suddenly forget it.

Learning a language is a funny thing. I did the peace corps, not a mission, but same deal with the language. I had a problem towards the end of my two years where I stopped having to translate things in my head I just understood what people said. This was a problem because I would reply back in whatever language I'd been thinking in. 50/50 chance it was the right one.

I also spoke a lot of english mixed with the other language with other volunteers - a bad habit that tripped me up when I went home. I'm a very good speller but not as much anymore. Weird.

I can't really relate. I grew up bi-lingual. Gringo speaking Spanish. However after working for many years in a spanish speaking environment I can understand the potential problem.

I lived in a Spanish speaking country as a missionary and had mostly Spanish speaking companions. After returning home it took me around six months to speak English at my normal and native fluent level. I know there were judgmental anuses out there who thought I was faking because that was sometimes expressed to me. Nonetheless, English was tough for me to speak for a long time after I got home.

Years later, as an exmo, I joined the Peace Corps and left the country again. This time I had more experience with language learning and I jumped right into the language immersion process. It was great. I wasn't just engaging in one language, I was learning multiple languages (this was in one of the world's language hotspots). When I left that community to teach in the capital it happened again. My English wasn't nearly as good as it was before. This time around it took less time for me to switch (because at this point, Code Switching was a skill I learned, as do most people who speak multiple languages) and I was able to speak English as a fluent native speaker more quickly.

Of course, at this point, most of the people I spent time with were expats (mostly non-American) who spoke multiple languages themselves and weren't judgmental. Many times we would switch between languages ourselves.

I'm sorry you didn't have this experience, but it is quite common.

I don't think it's always fake BS when RMs come back and struggle with English to a certain extent. Some people probably overdo it for the attention, but at least in some cases it might be legit.

I came back from a French-speaking mission and was struggling a little bit. In fact, during my homecoming talk, I kept using the words "numberous" and "soonly", which, of course, don't really exist in the English language.

I would argue that it's not a matter of forgetting a language, but trying to break what's become instinctive or a habit.

You still know your native language... but you just haven't used it in a while. You can still understand it - but your thought processes have been going at a different rhythm for a while, using the grammar and phrasing from another language - so things just get confused and you'll speak using the grammar/phrasing of the foreign language you'd grown accustomed to speaking. It's just a matter of working through a habit reboot. :)

Same thing happens with people who move from one region to another and adopt the local phrasings... it's just not so evident because it's still the same language (just with local influence). The pop vs. soda debate, for example.

I love that everyone's brain does not work exactly the same. There are propensities. This is one of the great things about humans. Because of this, I would never hold everyone's linguistic abilities to the same standard.

I lived in the US many years ago, but sometimes even nowadays, when I want to express a particular thought, I think of it first in English, because the words convey the idea better than in my native language (Portuguese). It happened a lot more often right after I came back, as did the dreaming in English, but sometimes both still happen.

I served with a German on my mission in Ireland who spoke English flawlessly. One day we were out and about, and we ran into some German tourists. He started to speak to them in his native language, and he was stammering and they were laughing at him and it turned out they didn't believe that he was German. They kept saying he was an American, and he kept saying that he had never even been to America. It was the funniest thing!

I believe that he was stammering a bit trying to speak German after almost two years away from it, but I'm sure once his parents picked him up at the airport, he was released by his stake president, hung around with his girlfriend, friends, family, etc. he would have had no trouble giving a homecoming speech. Just read off the paper!

Yeah, I think these guys are pretending. Another thing I've heard about six times is the story about conducting a Sacrament Meeting and saying "We'd like to thank you for meeting with us to day." but in the local language actually saying "We'd like to thank you for connecting your toilets with the congregation." Hardy har har. Yeah, I've already heard that one from about three different language missions.

a German word occasionally, but that didn't last long. But when a younger ward member came back from Germany a year or so later, he affected a full-on German accent (thicker than Uchtdorf's). He continued it for over a year. Drove me crazy.

Yeah-he-was-also-a-prick-otherwise-ly yrs,

S

It's most pronounced on religious topics. If you can get a hold of foreign missionary straight off the plane, you can frustrate the crap out of them with fill in the religious blank kind of questions. Coming up with the terms for atonement, charity and such are often very hard since their brain has used other words for those concepts often exclusively.

They'll be quite normal discussing other topics they're familiar with.

With my friend, she'd be talking to me and suddenly half the sentence was in French. She'd notice me giving her a puzzled look and ask, "What?"

I'd say, "Half of that was French."

She'd look really surprised and say, "Really?" She didn't even realize she was doing it. It just came out that way.

It took her quite some time to quit doing that, but it eventually stopped.

My DH served his mission in a Spanish-speaking country and I was an exchange student in one.

In our adult years, we both used Spanish daily in our careers.

So at home, we mainly speak English, but if a Spanish word comes to mind first, we just use that, and it works out fine!

I know a couple from Indiana that has lived and worked at an orphanage in a Spanish speaking country for over 10 years. When I visited them there and spoke Engljsh with them,I noticed that their English was somewhat strange and stilted, the rhythm and emphasis on syllables was odd.

I grew up in the UK and I recall one of the RMs came back from his mission with a full American accent. I could understand it if he hadn't gone to the England Manchester Mission :-)

This "phenomenon," such as it is, is quite impossible. It is just kids showing off. And as you know, one doesn't learn the best Spanish or Portuguese or German or whatever in the 22 months that one is on a mission. My Italian was as good as it gets for one of those kids--good pronunciation, and for a missionary, great grammar (that was an easy comparison because most missionaries could not even use subjunctives or conditionals). But I could not talk politics, I could not talk cars, I could not talk about matters relating to common current events--I couldn't talk about anything of value! I just didn't have the vocab list that was necessary. And being surrounded by English-speaking elders the entire time, I would have been quite impossible to forget to muvver tongue.

When I got home from Japan, occasionally I would stumble. Not on words, but on sentence structure.

In English: I went to church.

In Japanese: church to went ("I" is implied)

There is one word in Japanese that still wants to come out on occasion. Betsu ni. It means "indifferent", but it feels better than the English counterpart.