I'll never forget one of my coworkers asking me what my first language was because, "I speak English as a second language I know what it sounds like, so what's your first language?"

My first language is English, I just speak it really poorly

My wife and I were stationed in Germany for a couple years with the US military. Her only experience with a foreign language was some classes in French in high school, which came in useful since we were stationed near the French border. But while we were living in Germany, we decided to learn some German so we could get around easier.

We took a trip up to Berlin one week and my wife was trying her best to speak to a vendor in German, but she was really struggling. The vendor decided to switch to French instead. Apparently, her German had a heavy French accent, since that was the only other foreign language she had practiced. She was able to finish the conversation in French.

That's one advantage of being German. You do just hear it when a German speaks English.

A few weeks ago, we had a meeting at work and it was like 20 Germans, but one guy greeted in English, so I guess, this meeting is gonna be in English then. And like, us Germans were all doing extremely fine, but it was still just absolutely fucking comical when the native English speaker responded. In comparison, we all just sounded like shitty robots.

Went to a pub in Iceland. English brother-in-law had been living there a while, trying to learn some basic Icelandic.

He orders the drinks, slowly, trying to remember the words as he goes. Finishes the order. Looks at the barman.

"Sorry mate, I dunno what you're saying", he replies in an Australian accent.

Sometimes I can't think of a word, so I give a terrible definition of the word I am looking for and my saddest face in the hopes that the person I'm talking to will take pity on my feeble mind.

hey I got a story like that. I was in japan. my japanese was alright, I had attended two intensive courses before that, so I got around. But obviously i'm not japanese and everyone heard and saw that. I sat in a small eatery and ordered some Gyoza. This guy in a business suit next to me was all excited in japanese "oh you like Gyoza! how do you know about it?" and we started talking a bit, where he asked where I was from. I said that I'm from germany, where he immediately switched and we talked in German... weird experience.

I grew up in a fully bilingual home, in northwest Mexico. Then I was a foreign exchange student in Virginia, so my accent picked up a hint of southern twang.

So English is my second language, give me a minute of talking in it, and I'll start thinking in it, without the need of translating it in my mind. People tell me they can't place the accent... somewhere from Scandinavia, perhaps? French, maybe?
Someone once asked me if I grew up an army brat in Japan, and picked up some of the accent that develops in the communities around those bases, which is a fascinating concept.

Another friend, who's seen me go off in both Spanish and English, switching back and forth between people, told me that I have two personalities, and they're tied to the language, and they are like musical notes that go together.

EDIT: Now that I remember, what my friend said was "it's like you have two souls".

I think it was fortunate to have been enveloped by two languages so early on. Learning academically is important, but it'll only get you so far, the rest of the way requires that you be exposed to it, both passively and actively.

When I grew up, local cable had only stations from San Diego, if you wanted to watch cartoons, it would have to be in English.
You want motivation? I'll show you motivation: You learn English, and your reward is Bugs Bunny and Saturday morning cartoons. Every single one of my friends growing up spoke English and Spanish.

Less than a decade later, Mexican cable and satellite came into town. The English-speaking channels from San Diego got drowned out among a tsunami of new choices... and a huge motivation to learn English disappeared virtually overnight.

It looks to me like the type of environmental random experiment that pops up, like a Darwinian mechanism. Like growing a sharper beak to crack the nut. Then just as quickly as it popped up, it disappeared again, although an echo was left.

Wish I could speak another language besides high school Spanish

This happens to me pretty frequently.

I think is alright, language is a bridge and sometimes we feel more comfortable speaking our native language than others. But I don't really mind speaking in English or Spanish with people I meet in Brazil. But the moment of realization that you are talking with another native speaker is always full of joy.

#feels-nice to speak with other bilingual or polyglots :)

It's hard for Brazilians to speak Spanish? Whenever I heard someone speak Brazilianese I feel like I'm having a stroke because like 25% of it is just spanish, but the rest is like French Spanish.

I (English-speaker from the US) took Portuguese classes in graduate school. Everybody in the class but me was a native Spanish speaker and they struggled mightily to get the Portuguese pronunciation right since the two languages are so similar. I had no trouble with it at all since I didn't speak Spanish and the teacher used to call on me all the time to read stuff while castigating everybody else for their bad pronunciation.

Pizza restaurant in Portugal, my then gf trying, phrase book/dictionary in hand, to order herself a choose your own toppings pizza in Portuguese. Waitress: "This might be quicker in English, I'm from South Africa". Long conversation ensued about how a South African of Indian extraction ended up working in a pizza restaurant on the Algarve 🙂

In telephony we call that a transcoding path

In my experience, this is quite a common thing to happen to multillingual people when living, or just out on vacations, abroad.

I lived 2 decades abroad and this kind of thing happenned to me a couple of times.

Mind you, once you trully master a foreign language you start being able to tell accents apart, so are more likelly to spot that somebody is speaking that language with an accent from somewhere else, but it's pretty hard and takes time to reach that level of mastery of a foreign language (personally I only ever got there with the English language) so it's more likelly one is just good enough at it or even fluent but can't spot that, say, the person you've been speaking to in a foreign language is one of your countrymen.