Once someone asked me how my Danish was coming along, and I remember saying that I wouldn’t want to have a discussion on Plato’s philosophy, but I could get by very well in daily life. Based on that answer, I realised that I still had some idea about linear progress in language learning that leads from simple to complex and nuanced. And it is fair enough when you look at the textbooks and internationally agreed levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.), they all suggest there is a progressive path of that kind. However, after 17 years of living in countries I wasn’t born in, something strange happened. I really wouldn’t want to discuss Plato in the language I’m supposed to know best – in Czech.
What I didn’t know back then was that languages are always situated, always domain-specific, and you can’t assume that if someone can write an excellent article on highly specific research in chemistry, that they would also be comfortable having a small talk in that language. And that, of course, goes the other way as well. I first noticed this discrepancy in my jewellery making. All the words, all the names of the tools or procedures I knew were in Danish; if I wanted to communicate with someone in the Czech Republic using the same tools and techniques, I had to search for images and find the words. In metalsmithing, Danish was my first language. And as I went along, it had only become more evident in various aspects of my life. I have no issues sustaining a discussion about Jung’s and Simondon’s philosophy in English, but I would be terrified if I had to do the same thing in Czech. On the other hand, when reading poetry, it is a whole different, much richer experience in Czech than in English. I have recently learned that I can read an academic article in German fairly easily, but I can’t have a conversation with a stranger on the street. I thought that after 10 years in an English-speaking country, I would have a reasonable grip on the everyday talk, but I’m still learning, searching up phrases and words, and even though they are usually in the colloquial and regional departments of the language, there doesn’t seem to be an end to it.
In the meantime, my Czech is stuck in 2008, and while I’m able to write a Facebook comment or text with friends my age, just listening to some podcasts or TV makes me wonder how much the language has changed. I haven’t read a book in Czech for ages, and when I have to draft an email to someone I don’t know, I struggle to find the right words and phrases that would express the correct level of politeness and neutrality. A person I know was recently giving a presentation of her research in her native language after she spent most of her adult life in a different cultural and linguistic context. She noticed that not only was it difficult to learn the proper vocabulary and feel confident when speaking, but that the content of her research also didn’t translate 1-1 into the other cultural environment. More work needed! This is something I see quite often in the other direction. The nuance of context when translated into English from its original milieu just loses something very subtle, but also very real.
Sometimes, most of the time, it feels like I can’t use any language properly as I’m always hanging somewhere in between them. So, what I thought of is that we don’t really acquire multiple languages, we move between codes that are context-specific, maybe we have some sort of “individual” language that operates in different areas differently, we just learn more words, more structures and rearrange as we go. Does it sound too strange?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this!