“So what languages do you know?”

“Well, that’s a bit complicated…”

If I were to describe my language background, it would be something along the lines of “wannabe polyglot” and “terminally online cosmopolitan”. A polyglot refers to someone proficient in multiple languages — though polyglots would say that you would be considered a polyglot when you reach “proficiency” in four or five. By some definitions, I would be considered a polyglot: I can write and read English, Portuguese, Spanish, German and Swedish. But by some other definitions, I wouldn’t be considered a polyglot — I can only listen to English, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese fluently, but I can’t listen to or speak the other languages I’ve listed very well. The idea of language proficiency is messy, and defining it is something that I’ve always stepped away from because, frankly, it’s just much clearer to say what you can or cannot do. I would prefer to look at it from the perspective of being able to use a language in the way that you want to use it.

My family background wasn’t anything ordinary for a Singaporean — I was born to a Malaysian Chinese mother and a Singaporean Chinese father, and my mother has always communicated in a mix of English and Mandarin Chinese to me. While she was fluent in Malay, she has never mentioned a single word of Malay to me until when I was about 20, when I got interested in learning languages. A pretty late age for new languages, but not the end of the world. 

I started learning languages as an adult through a combination of textbooks, programs like Duolingo and Anki, and some exposure to pop culture in that language if possible. It’s been a good five or six years of daily practice, and it’s clear that I haven’t been as successful in picking up languages as I wanted to be, but it’s an ongoing process of improvement. 

But the main reason I picked up languages in the first place is less for the love of the languages themselves, and more to communicate with friends that I’ve met online. While most of my friends online are comfortable with English, some of them have said that they felt most at home with their native language, or at least a combination of their native language and English. I got closer to my German friends when I started talking to them in the tongues that they felt most comfortable with, and we found ourselves laughing and talking to each other way more than we used to in doing so. The same went for my Brazilian friends who were speaking Portuguese, we would drop a random reference to a Brazilian meme and we’d laugh in both English and Portuguese lingo. And it was cool to see how our circle of friends were rotating between English and Portuguese without even thinking about it. Actual translanguaging!

I could go on about how much languages have helped me connect with people I’ve met all around the world, but the main point is that learning languages to deepen my online friendships with people from other countries has been both entertaining and fulfilling for me. I do hope to learn more languages one day for both social purposes and for my future studies (one of the routes I wanted to pursue as a PhD is in Japanese cultural studies and I don’t have much experience in Japanese), but language learning, especially as an adult, is a long arduous process. But I find it rewarding, both to experience all of the unique linguistic phenomena of using multiple languages like thinking about a concept differently, and to communicate with peers that I’ve never seen their “full” selves.

Perhaps it’d be fun for you too to pick up a new language too, whether it’d be to connect back to your roots or to connect with friends who speak a specific language that you don’t! It’s never too late to learn a language if you keep your expectations low and keep at it for a long time. Learning, like many things in life, is never a sprint; it’s a marathon.

This post was written by our intern, Eze. Eze is a 4th year Psychology & Linguistics and Multilingual Studies student.

Multilingual Memories is a collection of stories about our experiences learning language growing up as a bi- or multilingual! Childhood is when most of us start learning languages, and we think that it would be fun to reminisce about those memories together. Want to read more Multilingual Memories? Click here!

At BLIP Lab, we’re keen on investigating these language mixes at home! If you have a child between the ages of 0-4 years old, we’d love to invite you on our journey to understand more about this. Click here to know more about the Baby Talk-a-thon: https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/blip/baby/talkathon/

We’re also on Instagram @bliplabntu – follow us there!