Hair New Era

Usually when people spend a longer amount of time in a different country speaking a different language then at one point they start thinking in that language. I wonder how and when exactly that happens for most people. For me, it’s all abnormally (I think) quick. I don’t know if it’s my certain knack for languages or language in general, but my thoughts switch between Estonian and English all the time and I’ve yet to live in an English-speaking country. Last summer when I spent a month in France, by the third day my inner monologues had unconsciously shifted into French even though I struggled to express myself in it. Even in my head. And thus was forced to switch back to Estonian. While talking to the Americans on my course, I unintentionally bent my accent a bit towards the American one and tried to avoid British terms, and found myself using super simple, sometimes even grammatically incorrect sentences to match the ones of those Europeans whose English skills were below average.
And it’s not just foreign languages. I remember reading Tartuffe while waiting to go shopping with my mum (Molière at the mall. Classy, right). Then she arrived, and when I suggested we went into a store I liked I nearly used a sentence structure that was straight from this 17th century play.
Last year when my brother brought home the complete collection of Friends on DVD and had it playing in the living room all through the summer I found myself expressing my thoughts and even thinking them like Phoebe (cocky Phoebe from the later series, not kooky Phoebe from the beginning).
And now that I’ve watched two seasons of Sex and the City in three days I just want to wonder about stuff like Carrie. End every train of thought with a question or three and make generalisations about all the (single) people in town. And it’s the same with almost every television series, film, book etc. It’s like whatever I’m exposed to I become.
If the way I think is so easily influenced by everything around me then when am I really being myself? They say you can tell what a person is like by looking at their friends. But if we strip away all the people and influences and foreign languages, would there be anything left? Or would the real us simply be lost in translation?
(See, that is classic Carrie. May seem deep at first but when you really think about it… meh.)