Grief in Language Learning

After a measly three months of life in Mexico, I was languishing in my inability to speak the language. Agony poured over me as I felt I would never be able to communicate effectively. Only nine months later, I was conversing in Spanish with ease. I heard questions and responded in the correct language without the internal translation slowing me down. I was ready to connect with friends profoundly, take some adult learning courses, and even get to know my future husband in this new language.

It wasn´t until now that I understood my language journey to be so unique. For years I heard about the struggle of learning a foreign language, but the reality of it I did not know. I taught English to individuals who had been studying for decades and yet my Spanish surpassed their English within a year. The effort I put into learning the language- minimal. The money I spent to learn-also minimal. I simply lived my life and the language came driven by curiosity. 

But here in Laos, I have been treading water. I desperately want to become an advanced swimmer, skilled even in the most difficult of tasks like the butterfly. I desire for the language to just be a part of me like strokes are to swimming. I wish that I could compete with and be the companion of the other fellows in the water.  But I am stuck flailing my arms. Too far from the shore to just get out, but unable to really move on. An energy sucking movement that keeps me alive, but stagnant.

My language journey here in Laos has been nothing like my previous experience and nothing as I had hoped. I imagined that by this point I would be speaking fluently, still making mistakes, but able to dig into what really drives people here. I believed my service would come through honest conversations in Lao that inspired individuals and left them feeling a sense of my care for them.

Yet, my daily conversations in Lao resemble something like:

¨Is your child a girl or a boy?¨

¨A boy.¨

¨Really? He looks like a girl. His hair is curly.¨

¨Okay.¨

¨How old is he?¨

¨He is two.¨

¨Does he go to school yet?¨

¨No.¨

¨He should be in school, why is he not in school?¨

¨He is two.¨

It´s really attractive to Lao vendors when I walk up to make a request and can´t reply to their follow up questions. And it is actually aggravating that newcomers don´t even understand my basic question of ¨how are you?¨ But the reality is that most individuals prefer to speak to me in broken English than to give me a chance to try their heart language. Cashiers, sellers at the market, our local friends here day in and day out…few of them let me try. I have begun to understand that their opportunity for practice with a native English speaker is a service to them. Even though I have felt the need to communicate in the local language, my friends appreciate more that I help them improve.

So, I have had to grieve a lot in this language process. I have mourned over my lack of intimate friendships and my inability to get a first hand understanding of the culture. I have also lamented over my own inability to be a student and lack of opportunity to learn how I wish. I´ve allowed the current to push me back to shore where I can comfortably wade in the water, dabbling in the language. Surface level greetings. Superficial conversations that come to awkward endings. Watching treacherous movements in the water (in the country) that have only minor effects on my sand buried feet.

Changing my expectations as a student who is now a mother has also been slightly hard.  When I was single in Mexico picking up the language so easily, I lived among my friends. Here, I can´t learn by osmosis since I am not constantly surrounded by native speakers willing to slow their speech down. Camilo has a nap at 11am, so lunch dates are out. He can´t sit still through hour long speeches, so graduations and church services aren´t attended. Every moment of language learning came at a cost to someone. Either to an anxious Camilo while I stayed behind for fifteen extra minutes trying to understand directions, to the local people who tried to speak to me through the cries of a young child, or to my husband who needed to remain available to care for Camilo as I took formal classes. It seemed that each new phrase or each new level of language brought with it an important sacrifice to my family. But the necessity was great enough in the beginning to walk through some of those sacrifices.

At the end of my first month here I had already spent more money and time learning the Lao language than in all of my years in Mexico. I came to this country dead set on learning the language as soon as possible. I thought I needed it to survive here, but I also wanted to know people deeply. And so I enrolled in classes four days a week at a local language school.

In my first few months, I had learned some basics. One of my teachers painstakingly taught me how to read Lao script, making sure I could identify both in writing and by ear each of the 33 consonants and 28 vowels that make up the Lao language. My other teacher put me to work by having me memorize scripted out conversations that kept my learning from being dynamic. I learned vocabulary, grammatical structure, and some important phrases, but it wasn´t enough for me. After a few months of arriving on time to class to await my teacher finishing lunch or making last minute copies, I began to doubt my time was being used well.

I started to pour more time into studying outside of class. I would memorize new words and work ahead in the workbook to be prepared for answers to new questions in classes that never came. Instead, I was reprimanded for doing homework tasks that had never been assigned.

So I moved on. We hired a personal tutor to come to the house. He answered a lot of my percolating questions; both about the language and the culture. And he kept me practicing. Using his limited resources, he made up mini lessons for me and searched for my feedback to improve. What he had at his disposal was minimal. Internet searches for basic Lao concepts produce pitiful results, leaving a teacher in isolation. He had no access to texts like mine about teaching English or others with grammar activities. In Lao language, there are not even many literary texts from which to extract reading samples for students. This kept it challenging for him to teach and for me to learn alone.

When Misa went back to working in the mornings, my language sessions came to a complete end. I studied on my own for a while and ended up finding incorrect definitions to new words and facing the ridicule of using overly formal terms in conversation with friends. When I presented my writings to friends for critique, they understood so little and always rewrote my stories for me, leaving me without any hope for growth. 

I continue to try to understand Lao speakers in my community. But most conversations leave me simply nodding my head as a response to what I did not understand. Every day I see Mee Tao and few times is there speech between us. I venture to ask how she is and she responds, ¨Huh?!¨ I shut down once more as I stand on the shore of language with enough to ¨get by¨ but not enough to thrive.