Who Wants To Be Bilingual

       As we study a foreign language, we sometimes envy those bilingual speakers that flaunt beautiful accents. These people usually spend their childhood overseas, or they are exposed to foreign languages at an early age. Do bilingual speakers naturally learn these languages due to their environment, or do they have to continually work at practicing and improving their language skills? Do the languages learned during one’s childhood stick with the person into adulthood, or does the adult have to continually expose himself to the languages? After interviewing two trilingual speakers, I conclude that it is not the childhood environment but the continued effort on self-education that enables people to speak more than one language.

      The environment alone is not conducive to learning a number of different languages. For example, Ikue Hayashi’s environment was not the reason she became trilingual. As a 25 years old Taiwanese, Ikue speaks Japanese and Chinese, as well as fluent English. Although she was born in Taiwan, she grew up in Japan and is now a graduate student at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). At eight years of age, Ikue’s Taiwanese parents took her to Japan. She stayed in Japan until high school graduation, and then moved to the United States, where she has lived for the past seven years. Some people may easily assume that because Ikue is Taiwanese she can naturally speak Chinese. However, this is not the case.

      Although Ikue’s first language was Taiwanese, she gradually lost it when she moved to Japan where she not only absorbed the Japanese language but acquired its accent. Right after she moved to Japan, she attended Japanese school and mingled with Japanese. Only a few months later, Ikue automatically learned Japanese. She doesn’t even remember how or when she actually learned to speak it fluently. Although it is fair to say that her circumstances somewhat helped her to learn Japanese, she did not become bilingual due to her environment. Ikue lost her knowledge of Taiwanese because she did not have to use it in Japan. She just learned Japanese like anybody would learn his/her native language.

      Even her environment was sometimes against Ikue to be bilingual. Ikue was speaking Taiwanese with her family when she just arrived in Japan. Gradually, her father starts using Japanese because he only met Japanese at work, whereas her mother, a housewife, still used a lot of Taiwanese even when Ikue was in high school. Ikue could understand some of the mother’s words, but she was not willing to use them. In particular, she never used Taiwanese in front of her Japanese friends because she did not want to provide the impression that she was a foreigner to them. When her mother spoke to her in Taiwanese, she had to fake herself not understanding her mother even though Taiwanese is one of her native languages.

     It was her endless motivation, strong desire, and determined efforts to learn other languages that enabled Ikue to not only become bilingual but to be trilingual. When Ikue moved to the United States at the age of 19, she learned not only English, but also Mandarin Chinese. One would expect foreigners in the United States to learn only English and would wonder why they would want to learn anything else. However, in the U.S., Ikue learned English and Mandarin Chinese. Today, Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. Ikue came to the U.S, known for its melting pot of races, and had many chances to develop Chinese friends. After socializing with these friends, she realized the importance of her Taiwanese race and was compelled to learn Mandarin Chinese as perfectly as own her native language. She had to practice her Chinese with her friends over and over again, and had them constantly correct her pronunciation. This shows that it was not her childhood experiences alone, but her passion to learn that really enabled her to digest other languages.

     (By the way, the language she speaks is Mandarin Chinese, not Taiwanese which is the one she spoke at her childhood. In fact, Mandarin and Taiwanese are very different. The Chinese language has several dialects with completely different pronunciations. Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in Chinese and is used in public media, such as television and news broadcasts.)

     Another example of a trilingual speaker learning several languages from her own efforts is Rie Yamada. As a 21 years old CSUF student, she can speak Japanese, Spanish, and English. Rie was born in Japan, grew up in Paraguay, and now lives in the U.S. At the age of one, Rie’s Japanese family moved from Japan to Paraguay. She stayed in Paraguay until the age of 16 and then went to high school in Japan. After graduating high school, Rie came to the U.S to study business at CSUF.

      Rie remembers being bilingual throughout most of her life. Because her parents wanted to raise her as Japanese, she had to constantly speak Japanese in the house even though she lived in Paraguay. However, when she attended the local school, she only spoke Spanish. Many people would expect that she would naturally pick up both languages because she learned them as a child. However, it was not so easy for her to acquire Spanish and Japanese. In fact, she had to work extremely hard at learning and improving them.

      Japanese is indeed hard to learn. First of all, Japanese is completely different from Standard Average European (SAE), such as English and Spanish. Additionally, Japanese does not use an alphabet in orthography, and incorporates three different types of writing: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (Chinese character). As a child, she hated having to study Japanese. Living in Paraguay, she did not understand why she had to use a complicated language, like Japanese, because she did not need it in her daily life. Unlike her parents, all of Rie’s friends spoke Spanish. The only reason she used Japanese was that her parents forced her to do it. Clearly, Rie’s environment did not inspire or help her to become bilingual. She knew the basic rules of Japanese (enough to communicate) but was not motivated to really use it. In fact, she was discouraged by her peers to speak Japanese.

      When Rie moved to Japan, she had more difficult time. Because she had only had the chance to practice Japanese with her family, her Japanese vocabulary was very limited. She could only conduct simple conversation, and could not understand abstract words or complicated expressions. Rie said that when she returned to Japan, she could barely keep up with the school curriculum because of her limited vocabulary. Although Rie could speak Japanese with a perfect Japanese accent, she could not communicate very well when somebody spoke too fast or used difficult words. Sometimes, strangers falsely accused her of being retarded or thought that she had no clue what she was talking about. Consequently, interacting with strangers became a stressful task for her, and she often had to mispronounce her Japanese on purpose so that they would think that she was not a native speaker of Japanese.

      Both Ikue and Rie pointed out that a common problem that plagues bilinguals is that they can suffer from a limited vocabulary. For instance, Ikue has no trouble speaking Chinese on a daily basis. However, she believes that because she had no formal education in Chinese, she lacks crucial Chinese academic and technical vocabulary. The Chinese language employs many old proverbs and idioms, and she sometimes feels lost when these idioms are mixed up in a sentence. Likewise, Rie explained that her Spanish vocabulary is basically on a junior high school-level. After leaving Paraguay when she was 16, her opportunities for using Spanish dropped sharply. Today, Rie does not forget how to speak Spanish, but if the topics are deep or complex, she feels more comfortable speaking English or Japanese. It is hard for bilinguals to maintain the same vocabulary level in both languages. Therefore, they must continually educate themselves and learn new vocabulary. In other words, they cannot just use the words and expressions learned as a child to converse with people as an adult.

     In conclusion, living overseas and being exposed to foreign languages at an early age was somewhat helpful for both Ikue and Rie in acquiring three languages. However, their environment itself was not the only reason they became trilingual. It was their continued effort to perfect their language skills that really enabled them to learn multiple languages. These learning processes are not so much different from anybody that studies foreign languages. However, the main difference between somebody that fails to acquire more than one language and somebody that has successfully mastered many languages is the person’s strong motivation and determined perseverance to learn and use languages. Supporting Edison’s theory that genius is “1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” these trilingual speakers spent a lot of time and effort to constantly learn, practice, and improve their languages.