The Trials and Tribulations of Being Trilingual

When a Japanese person calls you "bimbo"

What does it mean to be fluent?

I don’t know how to categorise myself—trilingual, bilingual, one-and-a-half lingual?—because somehow it’s transpired that I’m more fluent in my second language than in my first.

I’ve come a long way from the kid whose mind was blown by a family friend back in Saint Petersburg telling us how these days he thinks in English, sometimes even dreams in it. (Inconceivable!)

My family immigrated to Australia just before I turned six, meaning literacy was never required of me back in Russia where kids typically start school at seven years of age. Technically, I can read in Russian—a phonetic language with far fewer spelling irregularities than English—but my pace is positively glacial. This is particularly the case when trying to decipher cursive Cyrillic, which looks uncannily like fifteen “e”s and “u”s all strung together.

That said, recently, I’ve greatly improved simply by reading YouTube video titles in Russian—an upside to chasing social media dopamine hits. There’s just something about phonetic languages that doesn’t quite gel with me; had phonics been the pedagogical standard in Australia back in the day, I think I’d have really struggled.

To top all this off, I’m pretty shabby at rolling my “r”s; I’m the Russian-language equivalent of Elmer Fudd and his “wascally wabbits”. Best I can do is a Spanish style “rrr”. In this way, even my spoken language skills aren’t up to snuff.

As for Japanese, the would-be third language crowning me trilingual, I was only ever intermediate at best—and this was almost 15 years ago as an exchange student in Kyoto. Nowadays, my Japanese is only good for asking directions or ordering off a menu—which is, and I’m only being slightly facetious, most of the impetus for learning a foreign language anyhow.

Still, I’m improving—once again with the help of YouTube videos such as this one.

Whatever I am, I know only too well that learning a foreign language has its trials and tribulations, its quirks, unexpected boons, and joys, both great and small.

Trials and tribulations

Say chowder, chowdah!

My Russian accent is detectable, if not place-able. I’ve even been mistaken for Canadian—how “aboot” that? Frankly, all those Hollywood action movies, chockablock with mobsters with phony-baloney Eastern European accents, are to blame. No one seems to know what a Russian accent is meant to sound like. (I'm afraid to say, nothing like Steve Carell in any of his animated kid movie franchises.)

If English is your second language, you know there’s nothing more irksome than being interrupted with, What accent is that? It telegraphs that the contents of your speech are far less important than getting to the bottom of—basically—why you talk funny. (At this point, you feign a brain injury for maximum affront and harrumph yourself out of the très insensitive conversation.)

Your country of origin is the sort of information that comes up in due course, in an entirely natural way—if it’s any of their business. (I'm so cagey with strangers I probably wouldn't confirm or deny my status as even an amphibian* if asked.) Regardless, if you’re simply bursting at the seams to ask, it can at least wait until they’ve finished their sentence. Can’t it?

Miss Articulate

The problem with being multilingual is that you might know a word—you’ve read it in books—but have no clue how to pronounce it. That intuitive sense most native speakers seem to possess is missing, or a least, a little miscalibrated.

Rather than risk butchering the word that’s the linchpin of my sentence, I attempt to alter course to avert the looming prospect of embarrassment. To use an aviation analogy, it either results in circling around and around and being unable to land (circumlocution), or dropping out of the sky entirely (the crash and burn scenario). Either way, I don’t exactly come off as a paragon of eloquence.

Another strange phenomenon: whenever someone compliments my English, it does something funny to my brain. If you’ve ever forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other in the cross-hairs of an attractive stranger’s gaze, or how to act ‘natural’ when passing a police vehicle, you’ll understand the sort of neural short circuiting I’m talking about. (Oh, my English, she is well, but she is not my, uh, mother—mother tongue.)

The London ballet

Another way in which my stupidity is actually a testament to my genius: I’m not mispronouncing a word in English, I’m saying it the Russian way out of habit. For example, we pronounce the “t” in ballet and both “on”s in London. Slip ups like that make me cringe, but it’s probably one of those things where trying to explain digs your grave even deeper.

Pidgin

Growing up in a bilingual family means you end up creating hybrid words of convenience; English words conjugated into Russian rearing their heads every few words. Before long you’re talking to each other in a pidgin of sorts, forgetting these words were of your own invention, and that an actual Russian word for “lawyer” does in fact exist. (That word is zhulik**.)

My ears are bleeding

A downside of knowing a foreign language is that people mispronouncing words from said language will now set your teeth on edge, whereas before you lived in blissful ignorance. It’s ka-ra-teh! It’s sa-keh not sa-key! (No, I kid, I’m not that insufferable, I understand that phonemes differ language to language.)

So, while I have your attention, if you ever go to see the opera Eugene Onegin, it’s pronounced Ah-ni-gin not ‘o-nE-gin’. (“Ah” sounds are often written with an “o” in Russian.) This is definitely a pet peeve—and how Satan would see fit to torture me in hell. Oh-neigh-gin, he’d say, and then jab me in the ribs with a pitchfork.

“Talk English!”

When my little brother was much younger and a mite more gullible, I’d start conversations regarding his adoption (from the zoo, naturally) within earshot. After a while he cottoned onto the fact that I was, of course, speaking in English entirely for his benefit.

Which reminds me of a conversation I once overheard. An elderly man jabbed his thumb at a group of Chinese people waiting for the train, and turning to his assumed ally remarked, They ought to speak in English.

The other man, also an Aussie bloke in his golden years, shook out his newspaper and said, Are you telling me that if you were in China with a group of Australians you wouldn’t be talking to each other in English?

This is all to say, speaking to my mum in English is so very unnatural and painfully artificial that I’d rather translate for a third party after the fact, than speak in a language we’d all understand. Sorry, not sorry.

But don’t worry, people speaking a foreign language in front of you aren't talking about you.

Secret code

…except when they are. It’s tempting to treat your first language as a sort of secret code. As a teenager, I lived in fear of the day a stranger would make meaningful eye contact with me just after my mum had referred to their “hideous hat” in Russian.

On the flip side is the supreme awkwardness of hearing about your hideous hat, or worse, a fellow commuter’s itchy haemorrhoids, because they’re so confident no one can understand a language spoken by a million, billion odd people. (I’m not saying the people are odd—curse you English, curse you and your whimsical ways.)

Thrills

Colourful language

One of the joys of learning a second language is the potential for hilarious mistakes, like the time a fellow student added poi (“-ful” in Japanese) to colour (iro) and the lecturer had to gently explain to her, over the howls of our laughter, that it meant “erotic”.

Hilarious homophones

Then there was that time a hush befell the class when a Japanese teacher called a blonde student bimbo, meaning cheap—no, not like that—rather, “impoverished” in Japanese.

It’s ineffable

Did you know you can simply say “Saa”—a sigh onomatopoeitised—in response to any difficult question and sound like a profound philosopher in Japanese?

Teacher: Do you believe there is a god?

Student: Saa.

Class: *claps*

Teacher: Angela, do you prefer the city or the countryside?

Me: Saa.

Teacher: No, Angela. You need to answer the question.

Self-discovery

When I say “self-discovery”, I don’t mean it in the Eat, Pray, Love sort of way, but learning a language does mean your priorities quickly become apparent to you. (Heck, maybe it is in an Eat, Pray, Love way and everyone needs to get off their high horse about that movie.)

I learnt most of my English back in Russia through nursery rhymes but discovered on the first day of school in Australia that ‘Teddy bear, teddy bear touch the ground’ is far less useful a phrase than ‘Where’s the toilet?’’.

When you’re taught a foreign language you typically learn your colours, your days of the week, and all that jazz. However, I’ll tell you the holy trinity, the three sweetest words for any student living in Japan: jiu (free), tabehoudai (all you can eat), and nomihoudai (all you can drink).

Nuance

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause”

— Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov was right. However, by that same token, there’s no word in Russian that captures the essence of “listlessness” or “ennui”. If you wish to put a name to every shade of existential dread, learn as many languages as you can.

The greatest gift

Fostering friendships, understanding the peoples, traditions, and history of another land, engendering flexibility of thought, making overseas travel less taxing—all incredible benefits yours for the reaping.

Through untranslatable zeugmas—“a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses”—a monolithic concept is cleaved in half, like a glittering geode revealing a multifaceted beauty. Thus, your world is enriched. Ultimately, the greatest gift of bilingualism is that you have effectively conceptualised the entire world—the entire world!—in your head twice over.

Making you twice as smart as everyone else, of course.

Footnotes

*Yes.

**And yet, no other profession does quite as much pro bono work. Lawyers—as maligned as Eat, Pray, Love!

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