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> Presumably, since we don't observe people saying "near but actually totally incorrect" words in practice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphasia#Verbal_paraphasia

> do you ever feel like there is a "maybe word" for the idea in your non-native language "on the tip of your tongue", but that you can't quite bring to conscious awareness?

Sure, that happens all the time. Well, if you include the conscious awareness that you don't know every word in the language.

For Japanese you can cheat by either speaking like a child or by just saying English words with Japanese phonetics and this often works - at least, if you look foreign. I understand this is the plot of the average Dogen video on YouTube.

It's much more common to not know how to structure a sentence grammatically and if that happens I can't even figure out how to say it.



Huh, neat; I knew about aphasia (and specifically anomic aphasia) but had never heard of paraphasia.



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