bilinguism

What we can say with absolute certainty is that speaking more than one language makes life a whole lot richer and more interesting, with more dimension and insight. We might not gain a whole new persona, but we do gain glimpses into something else.

In the U.S., they’re “not American enough” because they speak Spanish. Back in their home countries, their Spanish doesn’t match the monolingual norm. They live between two versions of themselves, just as I do.

A few nights ago, I was watching a Portuguese stand-up comedian, Andrés de Freitas. In one of his comedy sketches, he said that English gave him a sense of freedom because all his trauma happened in Portuguese. He even pointed out that in English he can casually say “I love you” to a stranger, or engage in humorously exaggerated dirty talk, things... See more

The situations in which we are required to speak one or the other language can have a huge impact on why we feel a certain way when we’re speaking it. I might feel more confident as the English “me”, because most of my adult life has happened in an English-speaking environment, i.e. I’ve managed work, house buying, having children, sorting out bank... See more

These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more

More recently came the struggles of pretending to understand bullet-paced conversations at the start of my year abroad, which slowly but surely became less bullet-paced. And finally — the moment I had longed for — I was able to connect on a deep level with others in this third language. I was pleasantly surprised to see that these connections grew... See more

Let’s further consider the plausibility that the relationship between language <> thought <> culture is not linear or uni-directional, but instead a virtuous cycle.