English can the “universal” language if you want. Many countries, even if their official language is not English have requirements for people to speak English. And English can be simple at times. Not only English, but words can be meaningless without the right messenger. When someone speaks two languages or more, the messages you receive and transmit change its meaning for both parts.
During the time I have spent learning English I have learned many slangs, and many ways to understand the world in a different way. At times we have some constraints about the world that our home country has put into our beliefs. Direct translations of slang are the most stressful thing; you can barely get the essence of the message, either if it’s a love message or cursing! During the past months, I have noticed that there is a switch in my brain. Just as if I was in “Inside out.” It’s like new controllers were implemented in my head, but the little people guiding me don’t know when to switch between languages. When people are talking to me about something I don’t like, or something I don’t agree with and I’m not in the mood to argue; I automatically switch to Spanish, and everything seems like something far, far away from my understanding. That’s one of the bilingual perks. You shut yourself out into your own language.
With power comes responsibility. Being able to speak two languages gives you some sort of power. There are many ways to think about this. You can think about one think in two different ways. Your only Kryptonite are words. There are new words very often and you need to keep track of your own language as well. After a while, you have the choice of thinking in one of both languages. It happened with English for me. Since most of my friends speak English, and that I go to school in the US; I end up thinking n English about everything. I even started forgetting some words, which is not a big deal because I haven’t forgotten them totally yet. I’m saying I’m starting to forget them because when I find myself thinking in Spanish I can’t find words in Spanish that fit what I want to say in English.
The first few days at Carroll I remember how it happened the other way. I was trying to speak in English, I wanted to think in English, but I needed to translate every word I thought about, rather than just thinking about the word. I remember getting mad at myself because I couldn’t speak the language. There were words that I didn’t know, phrases that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t even realize when I started to get better. One day one of my roommates just told me, “Your English is getting so much better.” Right before winter break, more of my friends started telling me that my English was so much better, and that now they could actually understand what I wanted to say. Sometimes the switch doesn’t work so either my English or my Spanish are bad. But whenever I want to share some of my thinking, I like the way I can share it. I think I’m living the best of both worlds.
