How I Discovered Who I Was Thanks to Languages

We’re all more than just our native culture

I grew up feeling “off”. I had a good life and enjoyed it, but something wasn’t right.

At 4 years old, my father recorded himself asking me questions about the future. When he asked me what I wanted to do in the future, I replied with enthusiasm,

I’ll leave home and learn every language on the planet.

At that time, I didn’t even know a single word in any foreign language, even English. All I knew was a 4-year-old level of French.

It took more than a decade for this interest to take form. I learned how to count in Italian during a trip when I was 7. I learned basic English and Spanish in middle school. I took classes in Latin because my parents asked me to. I started learning Japanese on my own during high school. A year later, I took up Korean. Another year later, it was Mandarin. That was it. This was what I had been longing for, without even realizing it.

I learned about the existence of the video mentioned above a few years ago and it made me reevaluate how my life had unfolded. I had always thought Japanese had been the trigger for my language endeavors. It wasn’t. It stemmed further back.

France is a beautiful country to grow up in. Many people around the world fantasize about it. Living there, I hated it.

In elementary and middle school, I was always different from others. I blamed my myasthenia but, still, it felt like there was something else. I didn’t know what it was. Most other French children couldn’t understand me so I lived behind a mask. The mask of my true self.

I did and said what I knew was considered right. I smiled when the situation required it. I laughed when I should. I took part in activities because I should. I followed my brother’s step because he did what I felt France asked of each individual.

My life starting changing at the end of middle school. I started reading mangas and watching anime. A light lit inside me. I wanted to hear Japanese. I wanted to read Japanese. I wanted to talk to Japanese people.

It was the first time I did something drastically different from my brother who had no interest in Asia as a whole. Two friends showed me there could be a different way to live life and I followed once again. Only this time, while they were only watching animes, I was taking in the language and researching the language’s script.

Something new was happening. I was becoming myself.

By the end of high school, I had brought my English to a high-advanced level, all thanks to TV series. I had also learned very basic Japanese and had embraced my love for other countries than France.

I had done a 180 and instead of following the French rules, I started going against them. I looked for the calm I found in my learning sessions in my room. At university, I talked to foreign students more than to French students. I exchanged every day with strangers on the How To Learn Any Language forum.

If you had a problem with me being different, that was your problem. My problem was that I had come to look down upon France as a whole.

I despised the country that led the foundations for who I would one day become. France was disgusting. People were loud, disrespectful, unorganized, lazy, arrogant. I wasn’t.

Or so I thought.

It took me 6 months in Spain and Shanghai, and 4 months in Japan to notice I was just another bloke. I wasn’t “better” than the other French people. At the very least I was just as loud and arrogant. If not more arrogant than others. I just kept that part to myself instead of letting the world know.

I had jumped too far. I had tried to cut my roots. What would have said my 4-year-old self had he seen me then? He’d have probably screamed at me saying he didn’t mean to forget France. That poor kid was still in love with every girl he saw in his kindergarten back then. Looking down on them would have been blasphemy.

I thought I had discovered my true self when I dove into language-learning. My focus was wrong.

It took more years and more languages for me to realize two important things:

• France wasn’t that bad. Most times, when I complained about something in another country, it was to say that France did it “better”. No country is worse than another. I could love another culture without hating my own.
• It wasn’t the act of learning a language that I craved, it was the discovery in the language.

I had focused on the study itself. My “thing” was to study languages. By the time I did my exchange program in Japan, everybody knew me that way. I was always introduced as “the guy who learns languages”. Not speaks, learns.

I had already lived incredible experiences in foreign countries thanks to my study of languages so why was it that I wasn’t a “polyglot”? On paper, I was one. In reality, I was a learner and nothing more.

And finally, it all merged into the one magnificent person that I am today. (Remember? French people are arrogant.)

What I was looking for was traits I had deep down within me and that I thought were unacceptable. My environment in France had nothing related to Asia. I had no Asian friends until I was at least in high school and even then they were French. The first foreign Asian people I spoke to were right after I finished high school.

I was looking for a way to find acceptance in who I was. This wasn’t the only solution — nor the fastest I guess — but it worked. My personality fitted better in Japan and South Korea. My weird sense of humor and strange habits made sense there. It wasn’t that France was wrong. It wasn’t that I was wrong, it was that I needed something different as well.

I didn’t need only Japan or Korea. I wouldn’t even have liked growing up in those countries. My personality was never just French nor just Japanese.

We All Have a Place

Many polyglots say they change personalities when they speak a foreign language. I used to think so too. I’m much more straightforward when speaking English than Japanese. I’m more smiling when I speak Spanish. I listen more when I speak Korean.

In reality, we don’t change personalities. It isn’t a matter of which personality is better. It’s about which trait we put forth more. Or less.

Learning a new language helps you discover new ways of thinking. It also allows you to notice what your original personality has in common with the language’s culture.

Learning is adapting.

It’s like a chameleon changing colors. It doesn’t shed its skin to replace it with a new color. It changes the structural arrangement of certain cells to modify the color of its skin. All the cells still exist and keep working. It’s the rearrangement that modifies what we see outside.

Learning a new language is adapting to situations with more variety. You build a stack of cells you can use later on. If you had 100 per language, add one foreign and you now have up to 200 — minus duplicates. Add a few more and the combinations you can make expand exponentially. Learn nine more languages and you have up to googol possibilities.

Everything is already within you. You already have unlimited combinations within you and overlook them daily. Learning a foreign language allows you to notice them, to be amazed at how you missed something so obvious for so long.

Even if your life is great now, discovering another language and culture will change your life. Who knows? You might even become as addicted as I am!

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