Sat, 20 March 2010
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"Gradually, foreign sounds find nesting places in your vocabulary and once entrenched, it becomes hard to remember what it was like before they were there."It's funny how a new language soon becomes your own.
Gradually, foreign sounds find nesting places in your vocabulary and once entrenched, it becomes hard to remember what it was like before they were there.
My second language is Dutch - yes, I'm a good example of the 'Great Belgian Divide'; I speak one of the country's languages and not the other (I am learning a little French however).
And joining the first birthday party of the son of close friends on Sunday, I was surprised again at the level of Dutch fluency I have at my disposal.
It was not a sudden realisation because I remember the day some five years ago when Dutch suddenly 'clicked', giving me the key to a language I had committed to.
On Sunday, however, it was a realisation of how 'expatriated' I had become.
In conversational English, I have a tendency to use Dutch grammar and when speaking to my three-year-old son, though I speak English, he often replies in Dutch!
To put things simply: I cannot ignore the subtitles on television, though the film I am watching might be in English. I concentrate for five minutes (at best), only to return again to multitask listening and reading.
Jokes about my lack of attention span aside, I recall what I felt when I first arrived in Europe: confusion, isolation (and yes excitement) of suddenly being stone deaf.
Though those days are long gone, year after year, another plane load of expats arrives to confront the same issues that I (and others) have already overcome.
It is not easy, but the message here perhaps, is that it does get easier.
However, I also remember what a colleague once told me, a Canadian who initially spoke both English and French:
Struggling to learn Dutch, he joked about the possibility he might only have a finite capacity for language, i.e. that as he learned a new Dutch word, it would squeeze a French word out of his head.
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