My language background
At the Empowerment seminar I had on Saturday (see details here), I asked everyone who participated to share their language backgrounds. I asked them questions such as: What languages do you use? What languages have you learned? What languages do you identify with?
It was really interesting to listen to each story as they were all so different, ranging from languages they’ve learned in order to make “friends” or use at work to languages they encountered playing an instrument, and so many more. I’ve written about my language background a few years ago, and as I reread my writing, I realized that it hasn’t really changed (maybe except for the fact that I’ve started learning Korean for fun!), so I think I’ll share it here as a blog post. Here goes…
When I reflect on my language background, I have been trying to keep a balance between English and Japanese since the age of seven. This was when my father got transferred to the US and my family moved there with him. I had been exposed to a little bit of English before then in Japan, but I had not been so conscious of foreign languages, let alone my own mother tongue. So the first day at the local school was a tremendous shock for me. I had no idea what was going on in class, what my classmates or teachers were saying to me, and how I was supposed to act. I consider this experience my very first contact with a foreign language.
After a year of living in the US, I was finally able to express myself in English, but at the expense of my skills in Japanese. My parents had laid a rule for speaking only Japanese at home because that was the only place I could speak Japanese every day. I remember having a hard time communicating in Japanese then, and I remember my parents often got impatient with me because I would use a lot of fillers like "eeto…" or "anone…" but that was my strategy for buying time to think of how I would say something in Japanese. I remember feeling really vulnerable in Japanese, and that made me push away my own native language in those days. I didn't like speaking or writing in Japanese, and studying in Japanese felt extremely uncomfortable.
My attitude towards Japanese changed when I came back to Japan just before I started junior high school, at the age of 12. I went through a series of reverse culture shock, but I remember feeling determined to fit into the Japanese culture and society. I obviously did not have much control of my mother tongue, so I studied hard to gain knowledge of kanji and various colloquial phrases and to gain proficiency and fluency in Japanese. At the same time, I was terrified that I might lose my English language skills so I tried using English as much as I could. Luckily, I had many “returnee” friends who were in the same boat as me so we almost always used English amongst ourselves.
Leaving the US and coming back to Japan also changed my attitude towards English. The English teachers I had in junior high and high school had diverse backgrounds, and my “returnee” friends had lived in various parts of the world such as Australia, Canada, Belgium, the UK and so on. I remember we would have disagreements on whether a particular phrase or pronunciation was "right" or not, only to discover that they were just different Englishes. This experience was definitely my first contact with World Englishes, and it opened up my view on English.
Another eye-opening language contact was when I was in high school. My father had been transferred to Brazil after coming back to Japan, but my family decided not to move there with him. Instead, we visited him and this was the first non-English speaking country that I visited. Until then, I hadn't even thought about foreign languages other than English, but using Portuguese with local people or trying to order food at restaurants was exciting and was a whole new experience for me. Later on, I came in contact with many more different languages through traveling and meeting people, but I think it was my experience in Brazil that widened my perception on different languages, societies, and cultures.
I took French in college, and this was my first time to learn a language solely through classroom instruction. Having been interested in foreign languages, I was highly motivated to learn the language, but in vain. I would say that my receptive skills in French are not so bad, but not as much as I had expected it to be. Although I do not see my learning as successful, being able to see the difficulties of learning a language through classroom instruction was a great experience for me, because now I can relate to learners trying to acquire English in Japan.
At present, I feel that I am fairly balanced in terms of English and Japanese. I feel equally confident in both languages, though there are still many instances where I feel incompetent in both languages because they get mixed up and I am literally at a loss for words. However, now that I know more about language learning and its processes, I am fully aware that this is just how the bilingual/multilingual mind works, and I am now beginning to embrace (and even enjoy) this mix of totally different languages and worlds within myself.
