The Struggles of Being Bilingual
I was born in Las Piñas, Philippines, which meant that I was brought up speaking Tagalog as my native tongue. When I was four years old, I moved to Bacolod, which is a highly urbanized city on the northwest coast of Negros Island in the Philippines. There I learned to speak the local dialect, Hiligaynon, for the next seven years. I was also living with my cousins, who were raised in Cebu and also spoke Cebuano.
In the Philippines, it is mandatory to learn both English and Tagalog, and so I started learning English in Kindergarten when I was five years old. My English comprehension developed quickly due to the abundant exposure I got from English music, movies, and TV shows. When I was eleven years old, my older brother and I moved to Canada to be with our mom, who had been working abroad since I was four and my brother was nine
As a child, I had always been exposed to different dialects and languages. I was able to quickly pick up the local tongue because I never had an option but to do so. I have been so fortunate to have the ability to speak multiple languages. However, being bilingual/multilingual definitely comes with its own struggles.
Feeling Like a Foreigner
Thinking back to my childhood and early teens, I remembered always being teased for speaking a bit differently than everyone else. I had a hard time finding my place some of the time. When I first moved to Canada, kids teased me for having a thick Filipino accent, but that was inevitable. After all, I am a Filipino born. The same thing would happen every time I visited the Philippines and spoke the local dialect. I get teased or even ridiculed for not maintaining my native accent well enough. There’s always that negative connotation of being whitewashed or not being white enough.
Switching Between Languages
Bilinguals have different processing modes for their two languages — they have a mode for processing speech in one language and then a mode for processing speech in the other language. Another view is that bilinguals just adjust to speech variation by recalibrating to the unique acoustic properties of each language. — Association for Psychological Science
I applaud anyone who can switch languages easily. I find it very difficult to speak Tagalog if I am speaking English to someone. The accents and the tones are just so different that I find it challenging to switch within seconds.
“Learning a Language Must Be Easier for You.”
I learned my second language when I was just a child and have developed my fluency over the years. Learning a new language as an adult has proven to be very challenging. I took Spanish for four years in high school, but aside from knowing how to introduce myself, I have not retained much.
The first undeniable advantage involves strategy. If you learned your L2 as a teenager or an adult, you have managed to figure out what strategies work best for you. — Aneta Pavlenko
Currently, I am living in Cambodia and have been trying to learn Khmer for the last five months. However, it takes consistent practice for me to really grasp the language, and I have not been good at that. The truth with becoming fluent in a language is that you need to emerge yourself in it every single day.
The Upside of Knowing More than One Language
Although being bilingual comes with its own challenges, I still wouldn’t have it any other way. Being teased by my peers for sounding different just revealed to me how little exposure they had to the world. I have been so fortunate to have moved around and experienced different stages of my life in different parts of the world.
How about you? How many languages do you speak, and are you currently actively learning a new language?
