Mentally compartmentalising languages

Same thing happened to me. I'd switch into the stronger language on the 了.

I don't think it helps that I stopped learning French six years ago, but I have quite a few French speaking friends. Apparently, I'm supposed to say "je parle un peu de francais", so there we go: confusing le and 了, and de with 的. Nightmare.

Um, why know French when Chinese better? ha ha. I even start to forget my English... it comes with the "Black Hole" theory maybe (see a recent conversation I started on an article about the Blackhole of Chinese). I wonder how people here that I know in Edinburgh who can speak both Cantonese and Mandarin can get the two dialects separated? amazing....

So far (very early days) I'm finding Cantonese and Mandarin separate out well. The only thing that troubles me is the numbers one and two. I can't get my head around them in either language now, always forgetting how to say them and failing to recognise them correctly, if I listen mainly for the sounds. For example the Mandarin for (counting) two, "er", is not like anything in Cantonese, yet I'll freak out and think it means one because they're so muddled together. On the other hand, if I deliberately only listen for the tones, I get them right, in both languages, all the time. If I need to respond "one" or "two" in a hurry, in either language, there's no way, but I can hum the correct tone for the number, without fail. Nothing this brain does will ever amaze me again!

Yes, exactly the same problem with French and Mandarin. If in a French environment I can get going in French again after a while, but I quickly get rusty if I don't use it.

There seems to no way that I can get out of saying Dui all the time instead of Oui for affirmation. On me regarde bizarrement