It's official. News media and papers have recently reported the beneficial effects of being multilingual.
Being able of speaking two languages - or more - is said to help you in keeping your brain young and healthy. Besides, it seems that scientists have found out that they who speak two languages have fewer possibilities of suffering from serious mental problems, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson disease. Obviously, we can add practical advantages: being able of stepping out of your little and peaceful comfort zone and communicating with people that have totally different culture and background. But, besides the endless beneficial effects I've just listed, there's an obscure aspect of the learning and speaking processes. A dark side which happened to me that hasn't been so far taken into consideration: confusion. More precisely, ‘language confusion’. I've been living in England since 2011, when, full of good hopes and positive expectations, I came to London to take my postgraduate qualification in journalism. Although I could speak English, or at least communicate, the beginning wasn't easy; different accents were a kind of terrifying challenge which sometimes caused funny - sometimes embarrassing - misunderstanding. However, the time provided numerous opportunities for refining my abilities. Moving to the English capital surprisingly gave another opportunity to me. At that time, I was living in a hostel in which the main part of the tenants was composed of guys and girls from Spain. That was a good chance to rehearse that little bit of Spanish that I had studied during my university years. Honestly, I was enthusiastic. I could partially get two birds with one stone. I'm Italian mother tongue, I thought, I'll learn English for the time I'll be settled in London – out of curiosity, I celebrated six years the last September - and I'll improve Spanish. So, on went my plan: English for every day, Spanish for my time in the hostel and Italian for letting my parents and friends know that I was still alive. My first travel home was after ten months. Enriched and satisfied with my experience and my post-graduate diploma proudly pocketed, I decided to spend one week in my country to, then, get back to London and carry on my path. Since I landed, the confusion had possessed me. As I said, it had already been months that I expressed my thoughts and any possible request in other languages. The embarrass of saying hello to the border officer with my own idiom was easy to get over. Very well, I positively thought, the first hurdle had gone. How wrong was I in that moment. The initial victims – or torturers - were my parents. I comfortably sat in the passenger seat of my father’s Toyota Yaris, and we were talking about the life out of my country, the people I met, and food. The conversation went on and on fluently as long as I stopped. “What were you saying, Sam?” My mouth gawped; I frantically started thinking of what I wanted to say, or more precisely, I started thinking about the word I needed for. Exactly! I started thinking of the word in my language I needed because I clearly could recall the English analogous, but not the Italian. “Ehm…I-I don’t know how to say,” I embarrassingly explained. “Do you mind if I use the English word?” There was a moment of awkward silence. Then, trying not to be so naïve, I started explaining what I wanted to say. “I can’t recall the word for that, but I can explain what I want to say,” I hopefully said. “You know that small red fruit that has a sour-sweet taste. It’s used in fruit cakes and ice-cream.” “Strawberries,” My mum guessed – she was laughing at my lack of memory. “No,” I replied and continued. “It’s smaller and it seems composed of little red balls glued one another. It’s soft and…” “Lamponi – which means raspberry in Italian,” she happily exclaimed. “Yes! Precisely that!” I smiled, but my face had grown redder and redder. It was a smile, an automatic smile to hide the huge embarrass which was invading me. For the first time, I had no idea what the name of a thing – in this case, a fruit – could have been. This was only the beginning. The week went by pleasantly; I had met my friends whom I haven’t hung out for a long while. A lot of new things had happened to them and numerous things had, for sure, happened to me. My memory had carried on playing around with me, and, unfortunately, the number of words I couldn’t recall had dramatically increased. My amnesia was met with a laugh by people who knew me well; with a pretended smile and a silent accusation of ‘you’re the one who lives abroad and so cocky to show off’ by people who didn’t. “So, we’re going to that beach,” a friend of mine told me one afternoon. “It’s nice and quiet, besides the sea is amazing!” “All right!” I replied. In less than an hour, we were off to the seaside. Liguria, the region where I come from, has a singular particularity: even though it’s a by-the-sea area, the hills soar closely to the beach, which means that the landscape intermingles sandy beaches with rocky hillside. It’s breath-taking. Although I was born and grown up among those sceneries, their view astounded me as if it had been the first time I saw them. “Slow down! Slow down!” I asked him. “I’m gonna take a picture.” He looked at me. “Yeah, slow down, so I can take a picture.” My friend guffawed. Why is he laughing at me? I thought completely taken aback by his reaction. I stared at him. “Sam, I do understand that you’re very excited to be here after some months,” he said. “But here we say ‘to make a picture ‘not to take’.” That was it. Indeed, we don’t say ‘to take a picture’ – it would merely mean to grab or to hold a photo – but we use ‘to make a picture’. That was the tip of the iceberg. Not only was I forgetting words in my idiom, but I had unconsciously started to speak it with English structure. Anytime I read articles and essays about the fortune of being multi-languages speaking, I think of that week. Multi-languages people can feel an intense connection with the culture of the foreign language they’re using. These are my huge and appreciated fortunes which I’m completely happy and satisfied with. But, don’t misunderstand me, even though I would do again the experience that I did, I sometimes wish that the people whom I’m having a conversation with didn’t look at me eyes wide-open as if I were an alien. You know, after all, mixing up languages has become a thing that I can’t help of anymore.
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