Learning a new language is not an easy task. It requires a certain level of commitment. After all, you aren’t just learning a word or two but enough to at least by able to have a conversation. You have to learn the vocabulary, understand the grammar structure, and be able to hear the different pronunciations so you can match them. It’s not an easy task to accomplish and sometimes knowing more than two languages becomes more of a hindrance than an advantage.

I know firsthand how difficult it can actually be to try and learn another language. I know English and Spanish rather well, I grew up with these two languages, and my friends eventually convinced me to try and learn Korean. They wanted me to be able to at least have a simple conversation with their parents. So I began to learn Korean but right before beginning college I realized that my school didn’t offer Korean as one of their foreign languages. I ended up choosing Chinese as a sort of replacement for Korean.

To some extent I’m still learning Korean on the side, not with the same amount of focus as before, but I’m still getting a better grasp at the grammar and learning new words. So if anything for me it’s not learning one language but two at the same time that has me confused at times. I’ll remember the word in one language and not the other.

In preparing for my upcoming midterm I enlisted my roommate to help me with Chinese, and listening to her ask me questions feels worlds away from hearing my professor ask me the same question. She puts an obvious emphasis on the words, and I hear the different tones that are meant to be heard in Chinese. This is all a good thing of course, I’m finally hearing the difference, but at the same time it’s not a good thing. I’ve spent two and a half months hearing words sound rather the same in class and now when preparing for my midterm they don’t sound the same.

The tones in Chinese are rather tricky to tell apart especially if you’re like me and just a novice. Two different words sound rather similar and that brings about uncertainty. Did I hear it right? Did I say it right? Did they understand me? All of that comes to mind when I’m trying to put together a sentence in Chinese regardless of whether it’s an answer to a question or not.

So when my roommate asked me what girlfriend was in Chinese I experienced one of those moments of uncertainty. I knew the answer in English, in Spanish, and even in Korean but I couldn’t remember it in Chinese. And when I did end up saying what I thought it was it turned out that I was wrong because I’d used the wrong tone. It was a disheartening moment especially because I’d been doing rather well and remembering most of the words.

Now as I prepare for my midterm I truly understand the difficulty of learning a new language especially when you have knowledge from other languages inside your head. The more you know the more possible it becomes to get it all mixed up. It just turns into a load of confusion that is also rather frustrating because you have an answer just not the right one.