The trilingual trouble

Something that always made me stand out in school was my trilingual abilities. However, in this article, I wanted to write about how being trilingual made my life harder. To fully explain my point of view I wanted to get back to last week´s article where I discussed my fears. One fear that I left out was my fear of being misunderstood. I constantly have a nagging feeling that people do not fully understand what I am trying to explain. To fight that fear, I am trying to make my ideas more understandable by writing them down and taking my time to structure them properly, since the spoken word just come as unstructured as they are. However, even writing these articles, I still have a feeling that I will be misunderstood somehow. What I am trying to say will somehow be lost in understanding and my actual message will be lost amidst the thousands of words on that page according to my silly fear.

In every conversation, I am sure that the receiver of the message knows what I am talking about. Then there will eventually always be the “oh I thought you meant that…” or “I understood that…” moment. It is these moments of realization where I realize I have been talking to a person who did not understand me correctly this whole time. And it is moments like these when I just wonder what I should do now. Should I start the conversation from the starting point again or should I just carry on? Starting the conversations again just feels like a huge waste of time. By just carrying on, I am not sure if the receiver of the messages understands me clearly this time.

Day to day conversations where most of the misunderstanding can happen are minor trivial misunderstandings but then my fears kick in and I ask myself what if others in conversations that are more important did not understand me. An important conversation lost in understanding can be devastating. That is something I would love to avoid. I want my messages to be understood and not just be another message on the shelf that nobody will hear/read. This may have sounded a little presumptuous but I just hate the idea that I could be misunderstood.

I am fully aware that I already tried to tackle my issues with miscommunication in another article I wrote a few months back but in that article, I failed to mention the form of miscommunication that dominates my life. To sum up the previous article, I just wrote that there are multiple ways someone can be misunderstood but in this article, I wanted to write about the way I believe I am constantly being misunderstood and my regrets concerning that form of misunderstanding. From the title, it should be obvious what form of misunderstanding I want to write about.

When I was younger, my parents wanted me to learn multiple languages for reasons I do not want to get into now. I ended being able to speak and understand three languages but the major flaw of my language knowledge is the lack of grammatical knowledge and the lack of specialized vocabulary. I could communicate decently in all three languages but my phrasing was always incorrect in one way or another. Many people urged me to learn the grammar correctly but I refused.

The reason for the refusal being that knowing three languages at a young age just got to my head. It felt empowering to be capable of something that most adults are not capable of doing. As a child you don´t know a lot, therefore, when you know something others do not feels powerful. It also felt great to be able to speak languages that no one understood. The trilingual ability gave me insight into some of the most different cultures. To be able to speak with people from three rather different cultures can be fascinating and allowed me to look into how people from different countries lived. Many adults are constantly praising me for my skill and are brushing of my grammatical errors as something normal for a trilingual child.

Back then I also did not care that much if people understood me or not. Baby me was a bit bratty and egotistical. It felt like the people around me had the obligation to understand me and I did not need to change my forms of expression to make understanding me easier. After growing up a bit made me realize that the world does not revolve around me. I learnt that people would not care about my messages if I can´t deliver them properly.

There used to be a select group of people who knew all three languages. They understood everything I said. For a child, the feeling of being understood was already enough. It was fun to be able to have secrets with others that nobody know about and being to talk about those secrets openly without the fear of someone eavesdropping. When people did not understand us, we would just laugh at them. Full disclosure, I do not believe that the people in that small group of people who spoke all three languages were my friends but they understood me and that´s what matters. Not only did being trilingual mean that we could share secrets openly but we would understand each other even if words were missing. This meant when I do not know a word in one language I could just use the word in another language as a replacement. Nobody would be bothered with sentences with multiple words and phrases from different languages. I did not want to improve my grammar and vocabulary since I believed that being understood in that small select group was enough.

When I started to grow up, reality hit me square in the face. The select group of people who can understand me dispersed. The next devastation was going to a not bilingual school. Going to a monolingual school made me realize that nobody could understand me if I spoke in different languages. I did not realize how hard a “normal” life with one language could be. There are constantly words stuck on the tip of my tongue and phrases that are literally lost in translation. That did not seem like a problem back then, since everyone in that group understood all three languages and the bilingual school encouraged different languages. I could not use a word from another language in the monolingual school since my classmates would not have understood me if I did that.

I want to blame my parents for telling me to learn three languages in such a short period of time. I want to blame the group of people who accepted my trilingual talking spree. I want to blame the language barriers for existing in the first place. Due to all those factors, I believe that I get the languages confused excessively often, which leads to being misunderstood constantly. However, the truth is that I am technically the only one to blame. I did not give enough effort to learn the grammatical rules for each language. I did not expand my vocabulary enough so that I can flawlessly express my ideas in only one language. I did not understand the idea I want to share enough to not create a misunderstanding.

I realized that blaming others is not getting me further. As soon as I realized that, I started to read books again to find new ways of expressing myself. I started to go through the dictionary to find new words to give my ideas more depth. I started to learn about ways to properly structure my ideas to make my statements sound understandable. Blaming others does not make my fear of misunderstanding go away. It technically dug me further into the hole of self-pity. The hole of self-pity is the last place I wanted to be. However, even learning new words and phrases do not make sharing ideas without the fear of being misunderstood go away.

The learning of the new words and phrases actually made the fear of being misunderstood worse. Most of the time I am confident when using the new word but before I get a chance to say them in a sentence my head starts to believe that I am using the word in the wrong context and I am actively creating a misunderstanding. At the end of the day, I either say nothing at all or just use a simpler word that does not express my idea as much as the new word. The same goes for grammar. In my head, the sentence I want to say sounds grammatically correct but as soon as that sentence leaves my mind, I immediately regret it even though it may have been correct. I just do not believe that the sentence with the grammar was enough to express my idea. I know the more words I use to explain a complex topic, the attention of my audience will decrease with each word. Therefore, choosing the perfect word with the matching grammatical structure is important to me.

Now I realize that people not understanding is devastating me. I did not realize that grammar had such a huge impact on the meaning of a phrase. What I also do not realize was that the art of storytelling is important. Back then, it was also something I did not want to learn. Now my thought process is a huge mess and my writing is constantly jumping from one aspect to another. I even find it hard for me to follow my own writing and therefore I fear that others will not understand either. The problem being that I have no idea how to fix this.

The misunderstandings on a daily basis have frustrating consequences. People are trying to help you with something that you do not need help with. In addition, the danger of the misunderstanding is the transfer of that misinformation. I hate to be the blame for a misunderstanding that I did not mean to cause in the first place. Being misunderstood can feel annoying but it can feel embarrassing as well. I do not believe that adults are childish enough to make fun of me for causing a misunderstanding but the people is the least of my problems in this case. It is my mind. My thoughts just say: “how can you express yourself in a way where people can misunderstand you. How are you this reckless? What are the chances that your words do not coincide with your ideas? I thought you learned to avoid misunderstandings.”

There is just so much I hate about misunderstandings and what´s even worse is that it does not come in one form. It comes in different forms. Sometimes it is the information difference. I do not know how the receiver interprets the information I am giving them. Sometimes it is the language barrier, where I know a word in a different language will fit better than the word I have at my disposal with the current language I am speaking. Sometimes it is the misuse of words. Sometimes it is the lack of grammar. Sometimes it is the lack of structure. Sometimes it is the lack of knowledge about the idea. There are so many factors that contribute to my fear of being misunderstood. Constantly having to keep all those factors in my can be tiring. Just knowing that I could have done something about it is just killing me. I could have saved myself all the trouble if I learned the grammar rules, how to tell a story or understood my ideas better. I could have done better by learning the specialized vocabulary to help express my ideas, by forcing myself to think in one language and by wanting to be understood from a young age.

I love Ted-Ed Videos and coincidently found this one about miscommunication. It just ties in so nicely with what I am trying to explain. The video mentions how people miscommunicate and how to prevent it.

At the end of the day, misunderstanding is just part of what makes a person human. I realized that misunderstanding can go both ways and that may have calmed my fears a bit. However, I still do not understand why I am afraid of misunderstanding in the first place. Why can´t I be like baby me and just don’t care if others understand me or not? Baby me may have been a bit snobby but at least she did not have to deal with the worries of being misunderstood. Either way, being trilingual just added to the fear of misunderstanding. In this article, I just made being trilingual sound bad but in all honesty, it is not. That is a topic for another day though. With this article, I just wanted to write down the reasons I believe I am misunderstood and what led up to it. Honestly, it feels like this article is missing an important aspect but I just can´t quite put my finger on it. However, just trying to explain a problem I am dealing with, puts my mind at ease and just writing about it helps.