Language Rant!
It can be tough being bilingual. The other day I tried looking up gold "metalls." Mmm hmm. There's a word in Hebrew that's similar and I was blanking and I remembered it sounded something like that and for some reason I thought I was remembering a word in English. So. Yeah. I also have (at least) two languages on my computer and phone, and I have to buy actual books if I want them in Hebrew because there are only English (and other major languages) e-books.
I'm technically not even actually bilingual, but I've been having English lessons since I was literally four and half years old and I spent two years in the US (well, technically four, but I don't remember the first two). So if I sometimes spew a word in English in the middle of a sentence in Hebrew (or the other way around), imagine what it's like for people who speak two languages since childhood and don't have one they're more comfortable in!
I actually don't know what language I'm more comfortable in. I read mostly in English but that's because I want to read stuff in the original language if I can, and I'm way more comfortable writing in English. Still, in daily life I speak Hebrew and I never have a problem with that, and during those two years when I spoke mostly English I had moments where I just went 'what. am. I. doing. I can't do this in English.' But during those two years I also felt really awkward in Hebrew and kept forgetting words, and so I didn't fit in with any language. On top of all that I learned Spanish during that time and I was actually good at it so everything was confusing me...
And I learn English, Arabic and French at school, I have a weekly English private lesson, I speak and do school work in Hebrew, and I write and communicate online in English. Thankfully next year I'm dropping Arabic and I am so. relieved. I know basically nothing in that language and I'm just struggling to not fail because there's less than two months left of school (and less than thirty actual school days!) and I've never failed a class so why start now... I also don't want to disappoint the teacher.
Wow. I wrote the first paragraph a long time ago, and now I came back and wrote all of this and it went in a completely different direction, but it was nice ranting about this, even if it's not fandom-related (sorry about that).
~Tal
