A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook today. She has traveled pretty extensively in Eastern Europe, spending a year in Romania and this past semester in Austria so she’s gone through the new language process a few times. I read the article and although it can be at times a little more philosophical than I was thinking it is a really interesting take on the transformation that we’re all going through. Check it out!

Having been here in Montevideo for two weeks now I definitely understand where the author is coming from. When you first arrive in a new place with a new language, even if you’ve been taking classes for years, you feel like an infant. You have no idea how to express yourself, you don’t know what to call things, and communicating with locals is humiliating. However, piece by piece you start to reinvent your language skills from the very very bottom. (He talks about reinventing  yourself completely which might have been true in the past but now I have too many attachments to my English speaking world with other English speaking students, Facebook, email, etc. that I’m developing a new part of myself, not a new self) It’s also promising to hear the author talk about all these authors that started a new language and became esteemed authors because it can be difficult to see any light at the end of the tunnel amidst all this incompetence. He was definitely right when he said “Changing languages is not for the fainthearted, nor for the impatient”.