I may have mentioned this before, but occasionally it bugs me when my boyfriend speaks in his native language, like with his parents or on the phone, and I have no idea what he's saying.

what bugs me is when .. hmmm idk anything else besides the fact that he gets really goofy on me when hes really drunk

Meh...if she's with me, that's already something.

as in more than that .. like sexual favor

I can get that from a prostitute, when I get a girlfriend I want some intimacy or some sh*t...

well yeahh or it would be an boring pointless relationship without intimacy.. ;)

Yeah, I get that! My boyfriend is Serbian, and that's what he speaks to his family and some of his friends. He's taught me some words in Serbian, and I've learned some on my own. But not enough to understand an actual conversation :laughing:

I gotta say, I understand their position. If a language isn't your native language, it's really a lot easier to switch into the other language if you need to have a quick conversation, or if it would be too difficult to try and explain it in a language everyone present would understand...

I had a gf that was fluent in german, and often when she was talking to her German friends, they'd lapse into german if they were having trouble with the conversation in english. I just stopped paying attention when they did :P

Yeah, exactly. Sometimes though, my boyfriend will have a conversation with his parents (for example) in English, but it will eventually start transforming into Serbian (he likes to call this "Serblish" lol). Everyone in his family speaks excellent English, but they usually don't use it at home. If I'm with him at his parents house, he will often offer a translation in English so I can have some idea of what they're talking about.

I like to think that although my boyfriend speaks English nearly flawlessly, his MIND is still in Serbian. Like his thought processes and such. I've never actually asked him this, so I may get an interesting answer if I do.

Do you speak any other languages? When you speak more than one language fluently, it starts getting a bit weird upstairs. They way I think of it, there are a couple of phases of "fluency":

Beginner: You're past the basics of the language, but you still have to look up words every now and then. It's not true fluency by any stretch of the imagination, but you can follow conversations, given time to translate.

Effectively Fluent: You know the language like the back of your hand, you can follow the conversations, but your head still does the automatic translation back into your native language. However, it no longer slows you down because the transition is so automatic. You start having dreams in the other language around this point :P This is interestingly enough, the point at which I think one makes the best translator - you understand everything perfectly, but because you're still doing the automatic translation you can easily translate for someone else too.

True Fluency: This is where it gets hard to explain. In my experience (with Irish), there's no longer any transition, you simply... understand, in the same way that you understand English perfectly without someone having to explain it. It's like the difference between understanding a sentence because you know all the words that form it, and understanding the sentence...because you understand the sentence. It starts getting harder to translate for others at this point, because the inherent and subtle differences between languages start to mean more and more to you, It's no longer such a simple thing to switch between them.

Curiously enough, you hit a bit of a bullseye by saying that his mind might still be working in Serbian. I went to school through Irish, but all my memories of my time in the school are in English. I would imagine that if Irish were the language I was speaking more, it would be the other way round.