Warning: If you are thinking about learning another language beware. You’ll probably never be done and once you start it’ll be very hard to stop.
English
Favourite Expression: Love it. Or any other informal phrase that allows for the suppression of the subject, comfortably removing the ‘I’ from expressions of emotion. Love you, love me, love everybody. Maybe it is this flippancy, lacking in my native German, that made me fall so hard for this language.
English Self: It feels easier to share intimate thoughts in English. Maybe because it often uses fewer words than German. I feel less exposed. My English self writes a blog revealing things I would never dream of talking about in other languages.
Learning: September 2005. School exchange to the UK. A heady mix of side bangs, GHD straighteners, Galaxy chocolates and the school disco. And my first experience of going all the way. Using my mouth in new ways. I remember standing in front of the PE teacher, the one everybody fancied, locking eyes with him. My tongue moved towards my teeth, a sound building at the back of my throat ‘nerv…’, only for my brain to kick in at the last moment, my tongue retracting. This felt wrong. There was something I had heard the other day: ‘Anxious. I feel anxious about hitting the ball for rounders’. As I heard Mr. Jones’ understanding response, giddiness spread. I had used a new word casually. Score, no matter how I hit the ball. My tongue + a cutie + an expression of true feeling. My recipe for bliss since 2005.
Spanish
Favourite expression: Que te sea leve. May it be an easy one. Said casually to family or friends before they head out to work, for example.
Spanish Self: Vaginal. What the hell, piss off, damn, for heaven’s sake. What would be a myriad of expressions in English, can be summarised in one Spanish word coño – a derogatory term for vagina. During my year abroad in Madrid, I learned the rule of thumb that informal positive expressions usually involve male genitals, informal negative expressions involve the female ones. And their use abounds in daily life. After 15 years with the language, 9 and counting dating a Spaniard, those idioms definitely colour my own use of the language making it just that tiny bit crass. My Spanish self wears black and feminist tattoos.
Learning: Following my love affair with English, Spanish was all about method and discipline. With more language learning experience under my belt, I was keen to learn a new language from scratch and ‘do it right’. This and the German educational system obligating me to attend 5 hours of free Spanish classes per week from the age of 16 meant that I smashed it. I was young, my brain was hungry. There wasn’t a single word said by my teacher in passing that I didn’t copy and commit to memory. Arbitrario. I was un hacha – an axe – hacking away at the Spanish unknown.
French
Favourite expression: There are too many to count. Épanouissement for one. Flowering or flourishing, the opening of a rose but it can also be used to describe someone’s personal development.
French Self: Croquer la vie à pleines dents, avoir l’embarras du choix, combler ses lacunes – I read words on a page but I see teeth biting into a juicy green apple, the crushing weight of having to choose between all the amazing things life holds in the knowledge that we can’t do them all, and a lagoon symbolising everything I have yet to learn. This language fills my head with fairy tales. My French self is the one that grabs you by the shoulders and stares into your eyes just that bit too intensely while whispering ‘There is so much life to suck from the beauty of one single expression, we shall never go hungry’.
Learning: Unlike Spanish, my interest in French was feeling first, method later. I LOVE the sound of French. And yet, it was the first language I was embarrassed to speak. The abyss between how a word is spelled and my idealisation of its sound causing deep anxiety. I don’t think my erratic way of learning it has helped with that. Due to my knowledge of Spanish and linguistics, I was able to skip ahead a few levels and join an advanced class when I started learning French as an outside subject at university. In practice, this means that after ten years of on and off dedication, I can say without dismantling patriarchal structures we will never achieve full gender equality but I’m still not sure how to say spoon / cuillère without running the risk of accidentally saying balls / couilles instead. Learning a language while doing a full-time job you have to choose your battles. After all, who has the patience to memorise a lexicon of household items when you could be listening to the ‘Vénus s’épilait-elle la chatte?’ (Did Venus shave her pussy?) podcast on misogyny in visual arts.
German
Favourite expression: Kompetenzgerangel quarrel about areas of responsibility, turf war, often in the work context.
German Self: After 12 years without permanent residence in Germany, I am starting to feel less at home in my mother tongue. This is a shock. I loved how in German I could speak at a hundred miles an hour, confidently navigating an endless succession of main and sub clauses, Genitiv, Dativ, yet never losing sight of the final perfect participle that would round off the sentence. Mastery I didn’t have to think about. It is the structure I have been leaning on for all of my foreign language skills.
Learning: The first sign of my linguistic alienation was a certain form of English enthusiasm that sounded off to matter-of-fact German ears. Overt friendliness to the postman. The overuse of positive adjectives. Krass. My real downfall these days doesn’t come with pronunciation, word choice or friendliness though but with syntax. The immediacy of English simply doesn’t translate into German and I often only notice halfway through miss-constructing a sentence. The pain of knowing that something is off but no longer having the intuition for what is right. So, at 31 I am discovering my native tongue for the first time. German is beauty in precision. Take the term Wortschatz meaning vocabulary. The German version is a composite of ‘word’ and ‘treasure’. One term captures the realisation that every word I know needs to be appreciated, including those I have been taking for granted.
Italian
Favourite expression: Sbagliato, wrong, incorrect. Italian and German are often presented as opposites on the spectrum of sound. German sits on the ugly end with its guttural consonants and Italian floats in a sphere of operatic beauty. A deeper knowledge of Italian complicates this simplistic division. Scacciato, sradicato, bruciato – I love discovering Italian words that, not unlike German, are a string of satisfying edges.
Learning: My name suggests a level of fluency in Italian I can never retrofit. It is the perfect antidote to my perfectionism. More than being able to order my coffee in yet another language, Italian has taught me that a foreign language needs constant practise. Following a year of classes at university and a summer spent in Italy, I used to be fairly fluent in Italian but without use it quickly atrophied. Now that I’m making a serious attempt at Italian for a second time, I am taking it slow. It’s the only way if I don’t want to repeat past mistakes.
Italian Self. Italian Chiara is the one that throws her head back cackling with laughter and the slightest bit of madness upon hearing someone say ‘I can’t start learning German because I’m not ‘done’ with French’.
In case it has not become clear, I think that complete mastery of a language is an illusion. And it’s really not the point. You can use AI for that. Learning a language is about the thrill of the never-ending discovery, of the unknown, of us, of others through words. It is a full-body experience. I literally have a physical come-down after each of my oral classes. I think that’s what I think of whenever I’m asked whether I’d consider moving back to a German-speaking country. Losing the euphoria that comes with speaking a language other than my own. It’d be like going back to primary colours after living on a rainbow.