The Agony of Being Not Quite Bilingual
Living a linguistically challenged life abroad
Whenever I talk to people about living abroad, the conversation eventually gravitates toward the elephant in the arrivals hall: language. Americans in particular tend to find this topic distressing, since for many of them, learning to speak a second language seems as daunting as learning to build a wooden boat and sail it across the ocean. Because I’m a linguist, they ask me lots of questions about how to learn languages and what it’s like to be multilingual. I find it hard to talk about these things; after living in so many places for so many years, I struggle to put myself in the position of someone making their first move abroad.
However, I do want to convey what it’s like to live a multilingual life, and I always do my best to encourage people to learn languages. In my essay “The Magic of Multilingualism”, I went through many of the benefits of knowing more than one language, and in “Loving Learning Languages”, I gave some tips for learning them. I have also written about why it is so important to learn the local language in “How to Be a Good Migrant”. But here, I want to do something very different.
In fact, in this essay I want to describe an aspect of language learning that I think is not discussed often enough: the agony of being not quite bilingual. For many of us who have left our home country to live elsewhere, this becomes the permanent state in which we live out our lives. Like a bad back, it’s something that we simply get used to. This may sound grim, but it is really a testament to the human ability to adapt.
And there is an even better piece of news, which I will return to at the end: I think it doesn’t actually have to be this way.
Linguistic lockdown
Moving to a new country and not speaking the language puts you in a sort of linguistic lockdown. You can communicate with whoever is in the house with you, but you are largely cut off from the surrounding community. And like physical lockdowns, this one has psychological consequences. We generally thrive when we are part of a community, when we have abundant contact with others. As I argued in “Talking to Strangers Can Change Everything”, even little interactions can be highly beneficial.
But what is it like to speak the local language—imperfectly? This is a scenario I know well, as I have been in this situation for most of my adult life. Speaking the local language reasonably well is less like lockdown and more like wearing a face mask in public; you can get things done, but it’s not that comfortable, and it fogs your eyeglasses.
What I want to do here is go through some of the challenges that arise from using a language of which we have an imperfect command. I think it is only fair to be candid about this aspect of life abroad, as it is very difficult to escape. Then, at the end, I will tell you how to escape it.
I see three general areas in which linguistic limitations lead to other limitations: the practical, the social, and the intellectual. Let me take you through these.
Practical limitations
When you have to deal with bureaucracy in your native country, it’s a pain. Nobody enjoys going to get their driver’s license renewed or applying for a building permit. But when you live in a foreign country (and for present purposes, by “a foreign country” I mean a country with a different language), it is triply difficult. This is because you not only have to go through the procedures, you also have to learn how they work in the new country, and then you have to learn how to talk about them in a new language. The hellishness of this is expressed pretty well in what I personally see as my funniest piece thus far, “Let’s register our car in Portugal! How hard can it be?”
But let’s leave bureaucracy behind. Simple, everyday activities like shopping and eating out become more challenging when you have to use another language. Even if your Portuguese, say, is good enough to get you the food you want and allow you to pay for it, there will always be cringe moments when you don’t understand the specials of the day (“Did he just say beef cookies?”) or have to dispute a charge because you didn’t actually eat the bread. These moments raise the stress level in what can otherwise be a very pleasant experience. (Perhaps this is why wine is served by the carafe here.)
I frequently return home at the end of the day tired from the exertion of having to speak another language. This is an experience that persists even once we can speak the language well. Not long ago, I helped run an event in which I had to explain things to about twenty strangers in Portuguese. The next day, I felt completely knackered. Stupidly, I have now agreed to run a two-day workshop in Portuguese in September, in which I will be teaching methodology to a big group of new people. In Portuguese! I will probably need a week off to recover.
Social limitations
Speaking the local language opens innumerable doors for socializing—this is true. But the flip side is that these interactions are not easy. There is a cost—in energy, in time, in stress, in sweat—to talking to people in a language that you speak imperfectly. There are endless opportunities for saying something that will embarrass you or offend them. Would you like an example? Here is a story from when I lived in Lisbon as a young man many years ago.
I was young, good-looking, and single, and my watch had stopped. I concluded that the battery had died, as batteries do. I knew the Spanish word for battery, pila, and assumed that the Portuguese word would be similar. It is similar—but not identical. In Portuguese, the word is pilha, pronounced “pilya”. Unbeknownst to young me, the word pila means dick. As in, yes.
So one afternoon I marched into a shop that sold watches and went up to the counter, where there stood a surprisingly beautiful young woman, who smiled at me. I smiled back and said to her in the best Portuguese I could muster, “Good afternoon. I have a problem, and I hope you can help me. I think my dick is dead.” She suppressed a smile that I took to be from attraction, and nodded. I continued, “I hope you can give me a new one. Would you like to see it?”
I won’t tell the rest of the story, but I can say that I ended up getting what I needed (a new battery), and I eventually learned to avoid that street out of embarrassment.
So yes, sometimes we know a language well enough to be dangerous. What is therefore absolutely essential—and what comes with time, whether we like it or not—is humility, and an ability to laugh at ourselves.
For some people, of course, this can be a real challenge. If you are someone who generally suffers from social anxiety, then having to talk to strangers in a language that you find difficult can be excruciating. That said, the possibility exists, logically, that some shy people learn to be less shy in a second language, thanks to the cognitive and behavioral shift prompted by learning that language. However, I can’t name any examples of such people. If you are one, please let us know!
Intellectual limitations
That brings us to the intellectual limitations of being not quite bilingual. These will depend on the particular makeup of the individual, of course. Let me say how it affects me.
Unfortunately, I tend to be rather hard on myself. It is in my nature to be rather critical, and the vast majority of the criticism I dish out is toward myself. Imagine, therefore, how I feel when I say the wrong thing in an interaction with someone. Not only might the other person be confused or offended, but also, I get angry with myself for saying something stupid, or for having gaps in my knowledge. Thus, self-esteem can be a casualty of imperfect language use. Many people report that they dislike learning languages precisely because it makes them “feel stupid”.
Related to this is the fear of offending others. Especially for those who are very careful about what they say (I think of all my Lutheran friends, whether they be from Sweden or Minnesota), it can be agonizing not to know whether you are going to cause offense. This is primarily a social problem, as I have mentioned above, but it can also boomerang back and hit one’s self-concept right in the noggin. Imagine being someone who has general social anxiety and is very keen on pleasing others... and having to make small talk in French! Quelle horreur!
Another aspect of my own personality that takes a direct hit when I use languages imperfectly is my pride in my intellect—and specifically in being witty. I know that I can be funny in English; that’s how I got rich on Substack (ha ha ha ha ha, groan). But being funny in Spanish? Or German? Nicht so leicht.
I really do try to be humorous in other languages—this being an important component of my worldview—and I do achieve it sometimes. But then, I often fall into a horrid trap, which I call the surely-he-doesn’t-know-what-he’s-saying syndrome. It goes like this: I will make a clever play on words in, say, Swedish, and people will just stare at me (this happens especially with Lutherans). Interestingly, it is as though they have an LED display on their heads, like on a bus, with the text ticking across: “HE IS NOT A NATIVE SPEAKER. SURELY THAT WAS A SPEECH ERROR. LET US NOT LAUGH, OR HE WILL FEEL STUPID.” Sometimes, frustrated, I say, “Did you get my joke?” But by then it’s too late, and all is lost, and I just turn back to my Kierkegaard.
The good news
But then, every once in a while, I am sitting with a group of, say, Portuguese, and everyone is talking and laughing, and I come in with a perfectly timed and hilarious comment, and everyone laughs. This is worth a hundred times more points in whatever system one might imagine for self-congratulation: not “I kicked ass!”, but “I kicked ass in Portuguese!” It makes up for all those times when the bus-head people just stared. So there actually are benefits that derive from the frustrations of being imperfectly bilingual.
In fact, one of my favorite things about living abroad is the way little chores can become victories when done in another language. It’s not, “I had to go buy bread”, but rather “I managed to buy bread in a French boulangerie!” Every visit to a supermarket, every meal in a restaurant, can become one of the “tiny victories” of my mantra, precisely because it presented a challenge and you met it.
I have said this before, but it bears repeating: This process of clambering your way up to the summit of the mountain of foreign life one fistful of dirt at a time does wonders for your self-concept—for your sense of empowerment. People who have successfully lived abroad for some time (not those who return after nine months saying it “turned out not to be fun”) are some of the most capable and grounded people I know. And the view from the top of the mountain is spectacular.
I believe that I am more resilient for all of the knocks that I have taken as a result of not quite knowing how to say things, and more humble for all of the times I looked like a fool. Let me offer a tip specifically to those who say they don’t like learning a language because they hate to “feel stupid”: I have noticed that people respond to your intention, not just your words.
If you come across as someone pleasant and kind who genuinely wants to communicate, folks will forgive all manner of grammatical vagaries and lexical gaps. I have seen many Americans who are much better at this than I am (I tend to be nervous and perfectionistic). Unfortunately, I have also seen Americans who approach interactions with a sense of entitlement (“Your job is to serve me!”), and the effect of this is also predictable.
Is there any escape?
I have promised to come back to the topic of whether we can escape from the agony of being imperfectly bilingual. I believe that it is indeed possible. There are two lines of approach to the problem: working on the “imperfect” part, and working on the “agony” part.
I find that many people, after moving to a new country, learn a certain amount of the local language, and then plateau. Once they can get things done without extreme hardship, they settle. This is the linguistic equivalent of moving into a house and unpacking all but the last three boxes, which just sit in the corner of the guest bedroom. Just as it is possible to unpack those final boxes, it is possible to continue developing proficiency in a language.
How to do this? I have already made some suggestions in the pieces referenced above, but here’s a really easy one: read the local news. It is amazing what a marvelous source of vocabulary and grammar lessons a newspaper is. I hardly ever pick up a newspaper (or—let’s be honest—read one online) without learning something. Plus, doing this connects you more firmly to the local cultural and political landscape, which also works to improve communication.
If news just stresses you out (and I totally get that), then maybe reading books is the way to go. As I said in Loving Learning Languages, my favorite genre for this is mystery, specifically the police procedural, as these are very predictable, have limited vocabulary, feature lots of dialogue, and are suspenseful. Reading any kind of book in your new language will help you to continue learning and avoid the plateau effect.
Then there is the agony question. (No, I am not going to tell you to read the agony column in the newspaper.) What I will suggest is to gradually learn to pay more attention to communicative successes and less attention to communicative failures.
I lived in Sweden for over ten years, and during that time, I learned to speak the language fluently enough that I found I could acquit myself well in any situation. Did I still say things wrong sometimes? Sure, I did. But when you realize that you can walk into a professional meeting and say 99.8% of what you want to say in fluent and idiomatic language, then you can forgive yourself that 0.2% of bloopers. As I said above, the sense of empowerment that comes with knowing that you have achieved this is tremendous. And you learn to be more forgiving and less hard on yourself for making mistakes.
OK, I have to wrap this up now—I see that my battery is nearly dead. I wonder how you say “low battery charge” in Portuguese…
What a great essay! While it IS exhausting, I love learning a new language. Interestingly, in the states my husband was the social one and I was the super shy introvert. But here, our roles have reversed. I’m the one who does more attempts at speaking the language and he stands back. Recently, a friend referred to my husband as the shy one and my husband and I laughed and laughed at this.
“low battery charge” in Portuguese is: "(a bateria) tem pouca carga" (I'm sure you know). In addition to a grammar full of exceptions, of an ocean of separation between what is written and what is heard, we have (not like in English, doublets / pairing) often two different words for things that have the same word in English. Battery, you said? Well it can be "pilha" or "bateria"... (depending on the format and the use). [Of course it also goes the other way around.]