Right, I'm currently back in Dublin till early next week, for meetings with my supervisors and fixing some loose ends. Had a meeting with one of my supervisors the other day and it went quite well, in my opinion - always a good thing since it makes me very motivated with work and all. :)
Anyway, on the day I arrived in Dublin, I noticed something strange. I couldn't speak English properly! [horror] What I mean is that there was no flow in my speech! Stringing two sentences together took some effort! What happened??? Things like that don't even occur when I'm exhausted! Then, it dawned on me. Since I've been back in Berlin, I'm surrounded by a fair number of Bruneian-speaking Malays (hehe, I say this because some of them are from Sarawak!), hence by default, I'm speaking Brunei Malay a lot of the time! Plus, I'm exposed to the German language! So I'm guessing that having to switch back to full-time English, it took my brain some time to adjust, hehe.
I know, you're thinking - what about when I'm back in Brunei for holidays and having to return to Ireland? Well, I figured that out, too. The flight from Berlin to Dublin is only 2 1/2 hours, whereas the flight from Brunei to Dublin is at least 18 hours. Hence, I had a longer period to readjust my speech, and I don't notice any speech difficulties as I wouldn't be speaking to anyone much during the flights.
Anyhow, my English is back to normal, took several hours, though. My friends were having a great laugh about it, hehe. I thought it was an interesting phenomenon. I'm sure it happened to a lot of people who are multilingual, but it was a first for me, so I thought it was rather strange. I know now to be prepared for it.
