gatheringbones:

“To learn a second language, you have to be willing to give your self up, the self encoded in your first one. You are no longer a person who speaks with facility and authority. You are less than what you were as a child: You cannot transact a phone call without help, discuss matters more complex than the color of fruits and vegetables. You cannot signal who you are. Most of us, by the time we’re adults, speak in so many words. We convey information through tone: I am sad, or I am displeased, or Is it not clear? I am important. Our speech acquires layers so that directness, when employed, has power through force and rarity: “I don’t like what you did.” But at the beginning in learning a language, you can only be direct. You can say “Tea is required here,” not “Can I get a cup?”—a vast difference in terms of your popularity. In half language, you’re half what you were, half an overgrown child. You speak like a child, are received as a child. In this other state, you lose abilities. “I was amazed at how quickly my English …” “Fell apart?” a cognitive neuroscientist named Arturo Hernandez, who’d also done time abroad, said, and laughed. This was a year or two after my return, and we were comparing notes. “There’s this very weird thing that happens where your language starts to bust apart. It’s because there’s language in your head and there’s language in the environment.” The one absorbs the other, he explained, the external one filters into your thoughts, becomes, to some extent, your inner one. “We think of language as ours,” he said, “but it’s not. It’s on the news, and we speak it with people. We use other people’s language all the time. It all makes you question, What is knowledge? What about that—is knowledge in our heads or in our environment? And if it’s in our heads, how fast can it break down?” He mentioned that overseas, when you’re aiming for fluency, you try to suppress your first language. “You don’t want to use it,” he said, then paused. “It’s interesting. Language is a lot more fragile than we think it is.””

— katherine russell rich, dreaming in hindi