Deutsch, oder Alemán?

So...

I've been learning German. I love it. It's so much fun, and I just love learning languages. It's awesome, and is such a blessing to me.

However...

I am a Spanish major. Meaning, I speak Spanish decently well. So, en mi mente, in my mind, there are two categories. Native language, and foreign language. And all foreign language is Spanish, because that's the only foreign language that I know. Correction, was the only foreign language I knew.

So most of the time, if you speak to me in a language that isn't English, my brain automatically goes to Spanish. But that doesn't exactly apply when you're sitting in German class. So, I end up doing a lot of translating from Spanish to English to German. It gets a little confusing. But I've managed to keep all the various languages in their proper places so far.

The other day my teacher, Regine, asked me a very simple question that I totally knew the answer to. Wie Uhr is est? What time is it? As she pointed to the time she had written on the board: 14:30. So, 2:30. I thought, "Awesome! I know this."

"Dos y media," I said, totally confident.

Right answer. Wrong language. And I could not, for the life of me, remember the answer in German. It's "Halb drei," in case you were wondering. But what makes it even funnier is, I couldn't even remember in English how to further explain why I was speaking Spanish. My brain just kept thinking in Spanish, and there was no changing it.

Lesson learned today? Only one language happens at a time. And apparently, I do not have control over which language that is. It's like for every situation a little war is waged in my brain, and one language always slaughters the other two. There's no switching once a victor has won... That language  fought valiantly and wields all control. Like a dictator. The other two languages are left lying in a bloody heap on the floor, never to rise again... Until the next war is waged, anyway.

I just have to hope that the victorious language corresponds to the language of the situation I find myself in. If not? Well... Maybe everyone else should learn English, German and Spanish too. Just to be on the safe side.