On mixed-up language centres

Like many people, I once tried to learn Spanish. Not such an odd thing to do, since nearly half a billion people speak it, with speakers on every continent, and most importantly perhaps, tens of millions of speakers in the US, which I visit regularly. And being honest, I once had a Spanish flame. Whether I was/am fluent is probably a thing of perspective. In the sense that Canadians from Alberta say they speak French because they studied it for four years in high-school (but couldn't order a coffee in Paris) I am utterly fluent. But in the typical European polyglot sense of "I speak a little English, would you like to debate the finer points of philology?" I am hopeless. Nevertheless, there are actually people in this world that I only speak Spanish with, or at least I did until they picked up English out of their own work-related necessity, so I guess I am functional, but not great at it.

My Spanish began to go wrong when I began to attempt the mega-impossible: namely speak the not-so-common-to-learn Serbian language. And it went wrong in a big way. The problem was that every time I tried to speak Spanish after beginning to learn Serbian, I ended up throwing Serbian words into Spanish sentences. Tengo malo hambre. Quiero cafe samo. That sort of thing.

Now, even the most ignorant person linguistically probably knows that these languages are not related. Yeah, yeah, sure, I know they are Indoeuropean tongues, but then so are English, Sanskrit and Albanian, and only an Academic, in a sweater with holes in it, would think that knowing one would help understand another.

People who have tried to pick-up more than one new language will understand, and probably won't see what the fuss is about - this is normal, and something you get over as you get better at the languages. But there are other languages in my brain that don't suffer from any interference problems: I do speak German pretty well, and I guess my French is about the same as Spanish, and I'm not just being a silly English-speaking Canadian: I have used it and it does work, sort of. It seems that whatever space Spanish occupies in my brain (and not the space for German or French), is now being over-written by Serbian, and it doesn't seem to get better as I improve my Serbian. Rather my Spanish, albeit already atrophying from lack of use, is degrading all the more rapidly.

My reasoning for this is simply that Serbian just sounds so much like Spanish. And there are also a vast number of words in one language that are words in the other, but that mean something else. Consider:

Serbian = Spanish (English)
Isto = Mismo (The Same)
Mi smo = Nosotros somos (We are)
Čiste = Limpio (Clean)
Wiz = Chiste (Joke)
Malo = Pequeño (Small)
Loš = Mal (Bad)

And on and on and on. Is it bad, small or sick? Is it clean or a joke? Is it the same or are we something? Argh.

What's more, many Serbian words simply sound like they easily could be Spanish: Samo, Isto, Dobro (Alone, The Same, Good), which is a far cry from the equivalents in (say) Germany: Allein, Gleich, Gute. No chance of interference there, or so it would seem.

And to augment my frustration, I must suffer the indignation that Serbian native speakers also don't see what the fuss is about, even when they speak Spanish. How could you ever mix up Mi smo and Mismo? You dunce.

A few years ago, some perhaps over-proud Serbs in Cambridge were saying that Serbian/Croatian speakers were the only people who can truly pick up Spanish and speak it like a native. I don't know where on Earth such a fact would come from (did somebody study this?), and frankly, if you can't say "th" I don't see how it would be possible to speak Castillian Spanish perfectly, but I could nevertheless see their point. It must just be a slight shift in the brain, the sounds (anyway) come flawlessly. Ovo es malo interesantno, no?

And while we are on the subject, does anybody else get confused by cyrillic/latin ambiguities? Mecapa or Mesara? Hypo or Nuro? Novi Sad or Hobi Cat? Argh....