Five years ago my family emigrated from Colombia to the USA, my parents wanted for my brother and I to be bilingual and have different experiences in life. At first everything was a challenge, my first language is Spanish and even though I had previously been homeschooled in an American academy and took tons of particular English courses... I could not understand a single thing people said to me when I first arrived to this country!
My first year and a half in a American high school was crazy. I had no idea what many words meant, and could not pronounce many others because of my accent. I did crazy things in high school to be able keep good grades. For the English class, I memorized a whole chapter of the book we had been assigned to read just so I could pass a 5 question quiz. For bio class I memorized words I couldn't pronounce and most certainly did not understand. Even though I didn't know what the words in my brain meant, or why I was supposed to know them, I would memorize anything in front of my eyes.
Finally the dreaded day arrived when the words I had memorized gained a meaning and I was able to think in this new language. I finally started to dream in English! I know it sounds awesome that I was finally becoming more fluent in English, but this was a dreaded day because everything I had done at school to keep good grades stopped working. Suddenly I wasn't able to memorize whole paragraphs of information, instead I had to understand what the paragraph meant if I wanted to do well in a test. But the worse was yet to come.
I had been so focused on learning a new language that I had stopped practicing my mother tongue. I wasn't able to translate words like "accurate" or "support" to Spanish. I couldn't have a conversation with my relatives back home without using "so"!
Even though I am happy that my English has improved a lot, lately I have been reading more books and watching shows in Spanish (more like soap operas if I am quite honest), I don't want to turn into a yo-no-sabo kid.
Anna <3
As someone who is also bilingual I related to this post quite a lot. I also love the title.
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