Language Breakthroughs

When you start learning a new language, there’s always a moment where it feels impossible and you wonder why you began. Hopefully, you stick with it because eventually, you get a breakthrough moment - like I recently did in the space of one month, in two languages. 

I have been involved in legal advocacy for Muslims affected by the “War on Terror” for 10+ years. A lot of my clients and their communities speak Arabic. I can work with an interpreter/translator to navigate those spaces, but I recognise that there is no substitute for being able to directly communicate with someone in the language they are most comfortable in. So in 2015, I made the decision to take a year out of work and pursue studying Arabic full-time — reading, writing and speaking. 

I quickly learned that any language study requires regular deposits of time and energy to keep learning over many years. There is no such thing as a “crash course” to learn a language in a few months or a year - you have to continue chiseling away at that skill. After that year of study was over, I had to continue studying. Seven years later, I know that any language study will never be completely over - and anyone who claims to have undertaken rapid language acquisition is not being honest. Any language requires maintenance, and there will always be another level of the language that you can learn - from all the dialects to the vast vocabulary to the literature. 

Over the last seven years, I have travelled to Middle Eastern countries and I have been able to use my Arabic one-on-one with people to open doors and build relationships. I have hopped into taxis by myself with Arabic speaking drivers, held back and forth conversations with people who do not speak any English in order to gain entry to archives, or access to people who hold important stories. After a few years, I realized I needed to focus on dialect study, so in 2018 I traveled to Jordan and enrolled in classes at a school in Amman. In 2019, I started studying full-time for the New York Bar and I gave into the temptation to take a break from my Arabic studies. As time passed, I felt like it was too overwhelming to pick up again. In those two years, I sometimes wrote messages in Arabic, but I mostly took a step back from it - which was a mistake, because consistency is key. In 2021, I bit the bullet, and resumed Arabic sessions via iTalki.

At the end of 2021, I travelled and I found myself in a situation where the people I was talking to did not know any English. For the first time, I had a fluent English/Arabic translator available to me. In those situations, it’s tempting to just rely on those people and avoid making any mistakes. I decided to push myself and use the relatively new dialect that I’d been studying. I watched the ice melt away and a conversation quickly started flowing. It wasn’t completely perfect - I think at one point I forgot the words for ‘purple’ and ‘red’ and my new friends had to point to things in the street to show me what it was. But it was a very significant breakthrough moment for me. Language studies can feel impossible at times but when you keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, you start to achieve things that felt like they were years away. 

At home, my parents speak Tamil. They’re from Jaffna, Sri Lanka, and they immigrated to the U.K. They speak to me in a blend of Tamil and English. I can understand Tamil fluently, but I grew up only responding to my parents in English. After moving to the U.S., I get less exposure to the language, so I spend a lot of time watching videos of young Tamil comedians on Instagram (@suntharv and @ashkumaaar in particular) both for the jokes and also so that I can catch the vocabulary and the syntax. I always felt scared and nervous to speak in Tamil. What if I conjugate sentences incorrectly? What if I use the wrong vocabulary? What if I call a man a woman or vice versa? What if I speak Tamil with an English accent and sound bizarre?

I travel to Sri Lanka frequently. Whenever I go there, I find myself in a situation where someone is asking me to speak Tamil. I’ve never been able to do it fluently. While I could string the most basic sentence together, my brain would not allow me to go further. In recent years, when I tried to speak Tamil, I actually - bizarrely - spoke in Arabic. I never studied Tamil, so my brain is trained to translate words from English to Arabic or from Tamil to English, but not from English to Tamil. 

I visited Sri Lanka a few weeks ago. I hired a driver (which, in Sri Lanka, is not as bougie as it sounds!), and I travelled around the island with a friend. Our Tamil driver did not speak a word of English and my friend did not speak any Tamil. I had no choice but to speak Tamil - to the driver, to the people we met in Jaffna, etc. On previous trips, I always had my parents or an Aunty with me on these travels, so I could hide behind them as a translator. I honestly did not think I could do it because my brain did not seem to be able to process words from English to Tamil for so many years. Necessity begged me to step up and tap into a dormant part of my brain that held all this Tamil vocabulary. I breathed into it, and decided to treat this like I treat Arabic - talk as much as I can, forget about perfection, and just get the words out of me. I decided to use this trip to practice more than just basic questions. By day 2, I was talking back and forth with people about the situation in Tamil land after the war, their work conditions as a tea leaf picker, and the art of hand-looming. By Day 5 I felt confident enough to pretend I didn’t speak any English when I walked into shops owned by Muslim Tamils in Galle - therefore forcing them to speak to me in Tamil, so I could continue to practice (Muslim Tamils speak a different type of Tamil to Jaffna Tamils but they can still communicate with one another). When I met up with my parents after that trip, they did not believe that I had actually spoken in Tamil to people. In fact, I tried to prove it to them and enforced a ‘Tamil-only’ language day at home. Within half an hour my parents were responding back to me in English! In the same way that my brain could only respond to them in English for so many years, they had also been conditioned to always have one person speaking English in our conversations. 

Linguistic breakthroughs feel incredible. It’s years of hard work - whether actively (Arabic) or passively (Tamil), coming to fruition. When you can communicate in another language, you are able to tap into so many spaces that you would not have access to as an English speaker. You can understand nuance and emotion in a way that is not accessible to you through translation. For those who are studying a language, I would say keep at it, even when it feels impossible. Language study is tough - perhaps nowhere near as hard as Western education systems have us believe - but it is fun and challenging. At some point, something clicks. When it does, the rewards are endless.