I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.
I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.
Iāve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just ānot happyā, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said āthere is an economic downturn inside my brainā.
When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren't sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn't speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, "Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?" Literally translated that's, "Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?"
She very gratefully confirmed that "Money goes over there," and we paid and left.
This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades' worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn't understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn't know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just...do that when we didn't know something.
Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn't know a word or couldn't remember or didn't have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she'd never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn't communicate with them in the "proper" way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn't always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don't care if you get it "right." They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can't speak for the French, though. š)
I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they're blanking or can't think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don't because they think it's weird and so either they don't get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I'm subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.
it's so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say 'the doors for light to come in the wall' and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?' and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they're orange.'
genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.
official linguistics post
I have mild aphasia. I forget nouns a lot. It's happened for a while, and it's usually not very obvious online, because here I have more time to think about the words I want. But I talk around words a lot, and now that my wife and I have enough Yiddish to send each other messages and communicate that way, I do it there, too, which sometimes leads to things like: "Tomorrow is the new year. Tonight the sky will be terrible because of stars with chutzpah, and the dogs will hate it. We should give them medicine for sleep."
Listen. You tell your dad that you are creating new neural pathways by doing this. You are reinforcing your native language. It's like darning a sock - you are adding new threads to reinforce that location.
Another thing you can do to help yourself think of words is to sing for/about them. This is a thing I learned about back in one of my language acquisition classes back in the day - they do this sometimes with people who have TBIs. Music is stored in a different part of the brain, so if you're singing about a word, you're storing a backup in another location.
(This is why I can still sing a little song to The Mexican Hat Dance about Hans-Peter and Kitty sending a postcard home about swimming and laying on the beach in Mexico City that I learned in 8th grade German 33 years ago, and I'll be able to sing it until I die, I'm pretty sure.)
I once (due to jet lag) managed to forget the French word for sheep, despite having taken 3 years of French (plus learning it concurrently with English as a child, thanks to my great aunt who was a native speaker). So I'm on the train in Quebec and making polite small talk with the woman next to me and it's going pretty well and she asks me what I do and I say "je travaille avec les vaches et les..." (I work with cows and...) and I forgot the word for sheep so I just do a very realistic baa and she laughs and goes "moutons!" and I nod and go "oui, merci, moutons".
(on that same trip I also managed to also mix up "poutine" and "putain" and accidentally excitedly announce a restaurant had gluten-free hookers, for which I have no excuse except that it had been a long week and alcohol was involved and honestly both of those incidents were pretty funny)
