How a Language Experiment Ruined My Childhood

I'm the product of a language experiment  and it lowkey ruined my childhood Here's how I grew up in America but my parents refused to speak English to me even though my dad's American  we only communicated in Japanese 24/7   even in front of other Americans for reference here's a little taste of his Japanese My dad's never lived in Japan but was able to pick up fluent Japanese from college classes and self-study To this day he and my Japanese immigrant mom are the only interracial couple I know of who've never communicated in English This was obviously awesome for my Japanese growing up but it means I lost out on thousands of hours of English exposure compared to my peers and this English deficiency snowballed into one of my biggest insecurities Throughout my childhood I was always one of the "slow kids" In elementary school I got thrown into time-out multiple times because my teacher thought I was ignoring her instructions when really I just didn't understand them Another teacher recommended enrolling me in an "alternative learning school" because I wasn't "academically inclined" It escalated to a point where my parents had to take me to a speech pathology lab to make sure I didn't have a communication disorder Despite being so young at the time I started questioning my own intelligence and wondering if something might be wrong with me It got even worse in middle school when my peers started making fun of me for gaps in my English like even the smallest things For example they found it weird that I would call Louis Vuitton Louis VUI-tton the way you would stress it in Japanese One time even a teacher picked on me because I said "lumberman" instead of "lumberjack" and joked that I must not have grown up in America I mean how would you not internalize that as a kid? The last straw was when my dad noticed I didn't know what the word "intersection" meant when we stopped at a traffic light I still remember that moment super vividly because it was the first time in my life that my dad ever spoke a word of English with me he was like "You're 12 years old you don't know what the word "intersection" means? We gotta fix this Let's start speaking English with each other from now on So from that point forward we started using English with each other whenever my mom wasn't with us Within a year This increased my English exposure outside of school from zero hours to several hundred hours This was still not nearly as many hours as my peers who speak English with both of their parents but definitely enough to begin making a difference in my academic performance For example my score on the reading section of standardized tests shot up from the 41st percentile in 6th grade to the 99th percentile in 11th grade Now as an adult my English is up to speed I think and I'm beginning to take a little more pride in my language background But would I want to put my future children through my childhood struggles even if it "works out" in the end? Or should society just be more accommodating towards people with multilingual upbringings? If you have any insights feel free to share them in the comments and don't forget to hit subscribe :)

Channel: Kisara Takahashi

Views: 273,833

Keywords: polyglot, bilingual, Japanese, Asian, Asian American, languages, language learning, multilingual, Japanese language, language skills

Id: vxrkgGZ99tQ

Length: 3min 0sec (180 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024