How do I know when a language is my own?

Growing up monolingual, before I started the journey of learning another language, I could only say something one way; so it was always pretty straightforward to say one thing after the other; and not much thought behind the words that left my mouth because they weren’t fighting for dominance with another of their own kind. As I grew older and started to make friends outside of my normal circle, I found myself immersed in various different cultures. Very often I’d catch pieces and parts of languages and could even begin to pick up certain hints based on inflections of someone’s voice, or the repetitive words they used and taught me. 

Image credit: Pinterest

Language is an extension, an art, that is spoken with passion and intricacy, and attempting to capture all of those aspects in one conversation without knowing the other language, is like trying to paint a painting without paint brushes. 

The moment I realised that I, a cage, confined to one tongue, made me realise just how boxed in I was. I made my way out of this endless hole the moment I started to gravitate towards poetry. Because in a way it is its own language; there’s a certain vernacular, a certain flair one has to use to create almost an other worldly experience to convey a certain emotion. Thinking about it that way makes me think a language could easily be defined as a method of conveying something with your soul, it doesn’t just have to be a tool to communicate words with a concrete dictionary definition. 

Language flows in and out of us every single day, be it the words that we utter, or pieces of phrases we catch from a foreign tongue. But in either instance, it is always an exchange between two people, or between a writer and the page, a bridge between two worlds.

For me as a writer, I found a connection to an empty page, calling me to fill it with words, in times where no one else understood me. Paper was patient, it listened to me, it let me be messy, bloody, and it gave me the room to shed my tears. Paper wouldn’t wash them away, a stain would be left, as a reminder that it would always carry my burdens. That was my safe haven, that was my tongue, that was the language that I felt most confident in as a person. I could make myself feel more human by being able to put my thoughts onto the paper. 

However, that safe haven began to become its own cage of sorts, as I started to gravitate more on social media and started to post my writings. I found various other creators posting their own poetry and writings. I felt deep connections to their languages, their thoughts, their words. Part of this warmed my heart, but the other part of me felt isolated. Especially when some of these posts would be written in other languages, videos would pop of people’s poetic poetry and it would sound amazing, but I could never decipher the message due to the inability to understand because it was not my own native tongue. In these situations, there are usually three options, 1. attempt to ask for a translation, 2. learn the language yourself or 3. do both. As they say, if you’re going to learn a language you need a reason, or a motivation to keep you going. 

This was mine. 

Option one: Ask for a translation: Asking for a translation is extremely nerve wracking at first, especially knowing how my heart can compete with that of a hummingbird, since it beats so fast every time I ask someone for something in general. Most of the time everyone is happy to do so, and it is a heartwarming exchange. However, another part of me always felt disheartened when I had to ask them to do such a thing, knowing the hard work they had put into it, and also knowing that the translation may not do as much justice with the work in its original form.  Knowing this, this pushed me to start to dive head first into a few languages. 

Which lead me to…

Option two: learning the language: this one is intimidating, especially when those languages may not be the ones that I am familiar with, or spoken often around me, thus I am less acquainted with them, which makes it even much harder to try and learn it; and especially when not having that constant immersion, it can become a lonely and difficult process. Watching videos on YouTube or Instagram about people trying to teach you is not the same as having an actual person directly across from you and directly speaking at you, since those other videos tend to be robotic and often mistaken. 

Staying up late at night, making flashcards, or practicing pronunciation to yourself can feel like a jail cell in a prison from which I wanted to break free. And I’ll respond to your burning question now, studying grammar is fundamental but not enough. By doing that only, I have learned that it takes the passion out of learning a language, which turns it into a chore, a thing you HAVE to do. If your mindset starts to change in this direction, you’ll start to neglect even thinking about learning the language you wanted in the first place. 

How do you combat this? From being sucked into the never ending hole of grammar learning? 

Well, the answer is to find a community, or a friend that does speak that language, someone that you can bond with and have meaningful conversations too. As scary as it sounds, conversing is one of the main ways you’ll get somewhere once you learn the basic vocabulary. Community above all else.

In addition to community, especially if you live somewhere where the language is not frequently spoken, do practice immersion. Start by watching your favourite movies dubbed in that language with subtitles in your own language, then when you’re feeling more confident, you can take the subtitles out. Meanwhile, pause for words that you are unfamiliar with and search them up, even taking notes of them will help a lot. This helps create a pathway that makes you learn and remember that word especially if you learn from it on a situational basis.

Furthermore, for me at least, music fuels almost every part of my life. If that is the case for you when you don’t have time to watch movies, listen to some good music. Music is a really great and convenient way to include language in your life if you are running short on time. But I have to be honest with this one, it will not help you understand the language, but it will help you to learn new words you can search later, and how to pronounce them correctly. I do it with Arabic and Kpop music and I have a blast. So, the first recommendation is to watch movies or anime, or listen to music in that foreign language and go step by step; with subtitles, then taking them off, making notes, searching for words, and other things that may occur to you. 

As far as learning a language, you can do all of these things perfectly but the most important aspect in all of this is to have the best fluency, to be consistent. If these habits that you build aren’t consistent it is like trying to build a house without a foundation; eventually, it will crumble to pieces and it just won’t stick. Perhaps one of my most grave mistakes in language learning was taking very long breaks in between. With language learning I had taken a course in one period of school, and then I took a break for about two years and completely lost it. It was almost like without me taking it as a class, I did not have the motivation to carry on my own. I think that has to do with the reason for me, and a lot of other people. We need to have external pressure to guide us, to motivate us. Whether it is a deadline, or a teacher looming over our head it’s an uncomfortable feeling, but that uncomfortable feeling is what ultimately keeps us going and keeps us consistent. What Mila did to learn English was not only the movie and music methods, but she asked a teacher to give her extra homework and exercises she could do at home and bring the next day to her, even asking them to be graded. So, the second recommendation I want to say to you all is ask a teacher or someone who really knows how to teach you the language you want to learn, to give you exercises with deadlines not only of speaking, but also writing and listening. Mila also did another thing: read books in the language she was learning. First starting with very well known books to be already familiar with the story, which made it easier to read and understand, and then moving on to other popular books. 

However, the hardest thing that I have been grappling with, personally, is: when do I come to the point where a language is my own? It is a foreign tongue from a foreign land, do I still have a right to call it my own language? I’ve pondered this idea for months, the thoughts tangling in my mind like yarn that I can’t get to unknot. Every time I tried to come to a conclusion myself, it made me self-conscious. Perhaps it is an insecurity that I don’t have an additional language to call my own, because I simply haven't mastered it. Should self worth be determined by the level of mastery of a language? Or should ownership of that language be determined on the amount of passion and love for it? 

I spoke to many multilingual friends about this concept, and to my knowledge based on what they said it was almost a combination of both. Because yes, you need to have some level of grasp of the language to understand it. But if you genuinely love the language for what it is and how it is spoken, then it is already a little bit yours. And for us writers, I like to think that we tend to carry the most passion in our hearts; and if one of my motivations is writing, then that concludes that my amount of passion for the language can make me eligible to call the language my own, once it becomes a part of me; as I consider writing apart of my soul. 

Language is personal, for both me and everyone else. We all will have a different definition; we all will have a different way of learning languages and that’s okay. But in our differences we can let languages be bridge, and connect the division amongst us; to find a common love in a variety of ways with spoken words. 

Thank you for listening, I hope you found yourself a little less alone in this journey, 

And a personal thanks to Mila for editing my rambles~

Sincerely, 

Your delulu writer, 

-Eliza

PD from Mila: You’re welcome, but I didn’t do much since I loved the chaotic way it came out of your soul.