New languages, new personalities

With Dutch, I felt terribly uncomfortable with the harsh sounds and no-nonsense aspects of the language--I don't think I really had time to develop a personality, and it would have taken extra time. In Japanese at first my voice went several decibels higher, and I sounded daintier with my careful enunciation like some sort of very feminine anime character (not my comparison). I still have problems expressing myself in Japanese--I can't make as many off-hand quirky comments that would normally round out my personality in English.

I think my personality with Chinese has been developing for a long time now--I've marked this personality of mine in the past as being awkward, terse, less specific, less expressive. Perhaps these characteristics seem obvious for someone with limited control over a language, although I'm sure that they are also tied in with the difficulties of my childhood growing up with parents fluent only in Mandarin.

After this summer, I feel that my personality in Chinese has [thankfully] become more confident and thoughtful. I have less of a problem with occasionally making mistakes, and I am also more aware of my usage of grammar and various problem areas. I used to take it really personally whenever I made any sort of mistake in Chinese, but being surrounded by other students who were all being constantly corrected was actually quite healthy for me. I ended up being in classes with other Chinese Americans, some of whom were more advanced in certain areas but had also taken more Chinese language classes before attending IUP. My rough edges have become more smoothed out in Chinese as I've grown to be capable of a wider range of emotions and thoughts. While I wonder how much actual grammar & vocabulary I've picked up (that's stuck), I feel more confident in general about Chinese, although we'll see how long that lasts once I start taking a graduate seminar in Sinophone literature this fall.

In the end, I never feel fully comfortable in any one language. Even when I speak English, there are always bits of Chinese and Japanese floating around the edges. When I'm with other students in the East Asian Languages & Literatures Department at Yale, I'm indulged because frequently I can move freely between languages according to my own sense of what the sentence or situation requires. It's really not to be obnoxious or some sort of East Asianist pretentious--sometimes another word just feels right. I could never be fully expressed in English, because I've been with these other languages too long. It would be interesting to try learning a new language now, while I'm already in my mid-twenties, to see whether or not I could grow into it in the same way.