Languages and Legacies

I've studied two languages besides English. My hunger to speak a foreign language began sometime in my childhood; unfortunately, I didn't begin serious study (high school language classes really don't count as "serious study") until I was finished with undergraduate work.

At that point, though, I studied seriously for years. About twenty years, total. Some of those years involved living in the foreign country as well as studying from books and tapes. Much of my graduate school work revolved around language study.

Yet I feel that my grasp of those two foreign languages leaves much to be desired.

It's not that I can't carry on a conversation in both languages. In one language I would say that I reached fluency during the last part of my stay in that country (by which I mean that I could converse in that language with a complete stranger without pausing to search for a word more than once or twice); in the other, I never achieved fluency, though I reached a high level.

But the fact is that I lost fluency in the first language, and my level in the second language has dropped precipitously. It's a special kind of pain to have achieved a certain proficiency in a language, only to lose it.

And I'm sure that it's more painful for me than for some, because my mother came from a foreign country, one of the languages I was studying was her native language, and I always felt that I should be one hundred percent fluent in that particular language (Japanese) but now I doubt that will ever happen.

I feel "responsible" for knowing that language in a way that I'm not sure I can explain. Perhaps this is how to say it: as soon as I started studying Japanese, making a mistake in the language made me ashamed in a way that went beyond mere disappointment in myself. it was the feeling that I should have known already how to say the thing that I couldn't say. As if, to be myself completely, I had to know the language completely. Therefore, making a mistake in the language was more than a personal failure, it was a falling-away from myself. I know that sounds odd, but that's how I've often felt.

My attachment to French is different: I also considered it necessary to know French as completely as possible, but with that language my feelings are slightly--just slightly--more casual.

I'm almost sure that with my responsibilities as a mother, I'll never be able to learn Japanese as completely as I'd like; and my French won't reach the level I achieved the last time I was living in France.

I know that my guilt-tripping in relation to the study of languages is partly the result of being the daughter of someone born in a foreign country; but that alone doesn't explain it fully enough. Due to my parents' failed marriage and other problems in my mother's life, I would say that she had a particularly conflicted relationship with the English language. That has impacted my life in many ways--more ways than I can explore in this post.

On the other side of things--I also feel that I owe it to my son to introduce the Japanese language to him. And to speak French as fluently as possible.

Life is always a looking-back and a looking-forward (as much as we might attempt to live in the "now," we almost never get there). In my approach to languages, I might be feeling that forward and backward pull a bit too strongly.