Cat*
I absolutely know what you mean! My problem is the same, only the other way round. My first language is German and I have lived in Germany for all of my life. But there still are a few topics where my "native" language is English because I learned about them in English first. I often have a hard time talking about these things in German (it's much easier the other way round).Le Fanu said:My mother tongue is English, but Ive spent most of my adult life in Portuguese-speaking countries and am fluent in Portuguese. I have been interested in tarot now for over 25 years. However, all my tarot studying has been in English. [...] Funny, but I never think of the cards or their images in Portuguese. Just the way my brain is. It has become set into this way of processing information.
Only recently have I begun reading for friends, and 99% of the time I have to do readings in Portuguese. There is nothing in Portuguese which I cannot express, but somehow, I find it incredibly difficult doing readings in another language, when I have processed everything in English. I really feel like Im translating (something I never feel Im doing in my day to day life) and the stuff doesn´t come out well.
The long and short of it is that the images have gone into my "English" subconscious and struggle to some out in another language. Plus it is connected to what you call the "image side of the brain". There is a lot in that...
When I got back into tarot about two years ago, I had a little basic knowledge of card titles and a few book meanings in German, but I had never done any readings in German. I started lurking here on AT and did all of my first readings for myself or in the Reading Exchanges here in English. My chaotic notes are mostly in English and only sometimes in German. At some point I realized that I felt extremely wrong and awkward when I tried to read in German. I practiced a little, and now I'm fairly bi-lingual with tarot.
Only sometimes I feel that neither language is the right one to express what the cards say. It's like there's an area in my brain for "tarot language" with information in either English or German. The problem is that many things are there in only one language (mostly English). That's when it gets awkward to read in German, and I really have to translate things into my native language (that suddenly feels very foreign to me)...
I'm an odd case of a bi-lingual person, it seems!