My pseudo-languages
A few days ago, I realized that there is a part of my life I have been taking for granted, which most people do not experience at all.
During my childhood, for one reason or another, I ended up spending significant amounts of time in multiple different countries. This meant that I ended up acquiring basic proficiency in the languages of these countries as well—in fact, for Vietnamese and Portuguese in particular, I'm pretty sure I managed to attain the same level as native kids my age. At the very least I was able to go to school, do homework, and make friends without any apparent difficulty.
After I no longer had a practical need for them, while I occasionally dipped my toes into native social media, news and such, I never put in a concerted effort to improve my knowledge of these languages beyond the state they were in when I left Vietnam and Brazil. I didn't even try to keep up the knowledge I already had.
However, as speakers of the relevant languages may know, Vietnamese has strong parrallels with Chinese, and Portuguese with English, to the point where knowledge in one can actually carry over to a meaningful extent to the other. For example:
- “銀行”, “專業”, and “公園” in Chinese directly translate to "ngân hàng", "chuyên nghiệp", and "công viên" in Vietnamese, and vice versa.
- Same goes for "present", "irony", and "theory" in English to "presento", "irônia", and "teoria" in Portuguese.
As I've been actively keeping up my English and Chinese, this means that my more advanced knowledge of them has somewhat bled off into Vietnamese and Portuguese, both because it makes it possible for me to guess new words and because it makes it easier for me to remember terms I already know.
Because this sort of overlap occurs more often for formal terms, this has given me vocabularies in the latter two languages which are heavily geared towards certain topics, and a specific level of formality. In practical terms, it means I don't have a reliable skill baseline in these languages at all. The words will practically roll off my tongue when I'm talking about one topic and come to a screeching halt once the conversation switches to another. I'll have no trouble conversing with my cousin, but get lockjaw talking to a government official or a family acquaintance's kid in anything but a mortifyingly unsuitable tone.
Unless I'm talking to someone from one of these countries, this pseudo-polyglotism has very little practical use. At most I've been able to add basic Vietnamese and Portuguese to my resume, which almost always catches the attention of my interviewers (which is pretty useful, actually!). I also entertain myself every now and then by reading a Wikipedia article out loud really fast or singing something in them—it's more fun than you'd think, I've spent solid hours karaokeing to Sertanejo songs on Spotify.
Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if I'd spent all that time making my English and Chinese (the latter in particular) better—maybe I'd be a spiffing writer and have a personal blog with tons of readers whose archives page is hundreds of posts long. Maybe I'd have an account on some Chinese-only site where I publish little sci-fi stories to the general acclaim of anonymous internet people. Heh heh.
But this is just daydreaming. In the end, life doesn't always go in a definitive direction, especially since I didn't have the sense to aim for anything specific when I was younger. I've come to accept this as part of who I am.
And I do like it. It makes me feel like I have access to more information and resources, even though the only content with no English version I've ever been able to consume thanks to them are manga scanlations. It's also made me more open-minded regarding foreign-language media that I would've been otherwise. Music is a big part of my life, and thanks to having a foothold in Brazillian and Vietnamese culture to start with, I listen to a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise—even though I would still be able enjoy the music per se without knowing the relevant languages.
In the end, I think I wouldn't quite be who I am if this wasn't a part of my life. And it's pretty funky to think that there're people out there who only speak one language. I wonder if they have any special parts of their lives that they take for granted?