If one day, I suddenly immerse myself in another language

The stories I read today are the discussion of bilingualism and bilingual education in the USA. The first article is a autograph from the perspective of a bilingual and how he perceives his experience as a person immersed in more than one language.

In countries where English is spoken as a second language, parents argue that what is the perfect age for a child to acquire another language. The child may be sent to a school to learn the target language, yet he will hardly face the need to speak or use it outside of the class, though he is encouraged to. This is a contrast compared with children who have to use English or become immersed in English as they are relocated in a country where English is an official language. In other words, those children are forced to use English, in every way, in every aspect of life, or in every language skill they need to apply to function efficiently in real world situations. However, it does not mean that at the time English starts to become a part of one's life, the first language gonna fade away. Here are some thoughts of mine when I read the first article:

1. The first language connects with the deepest part of the soul, stimulating all the sensations and all the subconscious experiences. The character is aware that English is the principal"tool" to communicate and make him able to "live" in his environment, yet in his definition, the most familiar scenarios will provoke his use of French, his mother tongue. Do you agree with that viewpoint? How can a baby receive the deep impression of the first language and let it get him on the root of his thoughts and perceptions about the world?

2. Note that there is a phase described in the article that he could not use either language to communicate, which scared his parents that either he may lose his grammatical knowledge in his first language or will never achieve the abilities to form a correct syntactic sentence in his second language. It turns out to be alright. It turns out to be that his brain just needs some time to work it out. Then, when we observe his growth throughout the passage, English turns out to be a language he uses when he becomes a writer, though he admits that if someone mentions a word in French, his imagination runs wild with all the sensational notes. Do you also observe the delay in oral skills when someone is processing two languages or learning a new language? How long would that period last? What happened inside our magical box, our brain, when we acquire another language? Will they replace or transfer our impression of L1 into L2, or vice versa?

3. Then, it comes to the maturation stage of second language use, or actually, English has become an official language since he used it frequently when he stayed in the States. The interesting is that his parents still struggle (more than him) to speak English and prefer surrounding themselves either with their native-speaking community or international language speakers. Why is that? Do they feel safer when they keep the life of their mother tongue? How can the social factors and even socioeconomic factors interfere with their language choice? (see how they try to create the atmosphere of their hometown when they live in the US, and their mother tongue is a mark of originality and uniquely cultural identity)

4. Talking about the root of the language, to what extent should we define an original language or the first language acquisition? For the second half of the article, the author reveals the beauty of even within first language, there can be different dialects we are talking (and even choosing to maintain) about. Even more, such dialect directly relates to a situational description.

5. Lastly, talking about the identity as a language speaker from a bilingual's perspective, the author does switch among languages effectively (though he needs some time to remind himself with the idiomatic vocab and the rhythm of French) and smoothly based on his communicative purposes. However, he does not identify himself with any "native language"acquisition. He just thinks he's different. He puts himself into the category of "bilinguals" all the time 'cause his linguistic journey is so unique in many ways compared to any side we can refer to: French native speakers and, or, English (American) native speakers. His language choice is based on the mixture of many factors, both consciously and subconsciously. If you can speak more than one language fluently, do you consider yourself a bilingual? If not, do you mean that a bilingual must start the second language acquisition really soon? How soon to make the experience different enough compared with just a foreign language learner? And then, will you still be able to identify yourself as a L1 native speaker anymore?

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After all, do you like to be a bilingual? Do you find yourselves unique in the way you use the two languages?

#bilingual #bilingualism #SLA