I wanted to share an interesting experience I had about 10 months ago that ended up being a sign that the CI method works!
I had a major surgery on my upper and lower jaws around that time. Not only is that a scary prospect for surgery in general, but it was my first time having a major surgery under general anesthesia. Heavy stuff!!
Anyway, a funny thing happened when I finally woke up from surgery: I could only think in Japanese. I couldn’t speak, of course, because my jaw was wired shut. But as they were asking me questions while I woke up, I was responding in my head in Japanese. It’s hard to describe, but I quite literally could not think in English at all (even though I knew what they were saying to me.) I didn’t even really notice I was thinking in Japanese at the time. It just felt very natural.
It turns out this is a fairly common phenomenon! I’ve since read a lot of similar experiences and some scientific articles on the topic. Unlike simply being asleep, wherein your brain is still pretty active, being under general anesthetic means some parts of your brain are almost totally dormant. This can include the area of the brain associated with one’s native language. However, areas of the brain associated with secondary languages can still be active, and the brain just defaults to that instead.
What surprised me is that I technically have far more experience in French because I took it in high school and college. But I never had proper comprehensible input exposure with the language. I guess all the comprehensible input learning I’d done with Japanese meant that it came much more naturally to my brain in its time of need!
Anyway, I hope you all find that as interesting as I do. It was a weird sensation I’ll never forget. But it ended up being a very positive silver lining to an otherwise stressful and scary experience!