Recently, by accident, I set the subtitles of some anime to Spanish, and to my surprise, for the first time in who knows how long, I could focus fully on an episode. Tested over the days, and indeed it was helping.
After that, it got me wondering why.
Being able to understand some Japanese, the impression I get is that it’s in a weird position where it’s too straight to the point and too verbose at the same time. Meanwhile, in languages like Portuguese and English, it seems to me as if the speaker needs to walk around ideas a lot to explain them. And almost like they’d be in the other side of the spectrum, languages like Spanish (oddly enough despite being Portuguese’s sister language) and the Scandinavian ones feel very straight to the point.
Perhaps then, less information added in helps at not straining one’s focus, specially when the person’s focus is already on the weaker side?
And going by that, it makes me think, if the person is struggling at focusing at something, despite the medium, maybe changing to a less verbose language (when possible and the person knows the language) could help?
If Spanish is not your mother tongue and you’re not “fully fluent” (by which I mean: have the ability to think in that language without any sort of mental translation layers): perhaps because your brain has to engage and work somewhat harder subconsciously to parse and understand it, compared to a more reflexive understanding of?
Sounds possible, if not the issue, at least as an aggravation of it.
(Also a note, Portuguese is my mother language "<.< )