I’ve always hated icebreakers. Having to come up with an interesting fact about yourself for a room full of people you’ll never see again and who, frankly, couldn’t care less about your fun fact should be classified as a humiliation ritual.
I could never come up with anything that didn’t seem lame. “I have a dog.” Congrats, so do 50% of people in the class. “I used to do sports.” OK, once again, so does probably half of the class. “I am an only child.” Well, in this state of the world, so is 49% of Europe, so that’s not that impressive either.
So I really thought about it, about what really sets me apart from other students here and what could be considered a fun fact: that I’m a polyglot.
Put that dictionary away, it literally just means I can speak five or more languages.
Trust me, it is not as impressive as it sounds.
My mother tongue is Slovak and due to the little thing that used to be called Czechoslovakia — no, it doesn’t exist anymore and it hasn’t for the past 30 years, which really most college students should know considering they weren’t even alive at that point — I can understand Czech as if it were my mother tongue too.
So you know, because of that, back home, nobody really counts Czech as their second language, the same way Czech wouldn’t count Slovak as one either.
My third language is English, but like, so is everyone else’s. Whether you like it or not, it is considered the unofficial “universal” language of the world, so yeah, my parents threw me into a British school since kindergarten and now we’re here. So that doesn’t really count either.
My fourth language is German. I’ve been learning it since I was about eight and I completed my graduation exam with a B1 certificate in high school. But then again, I live about 15 minutes by car from the Austrian border, so that doesn’t really count either.
I guess the one that I can really count is Romanian, since it doesn’t fit into any of these categories, and the only reason I can speak it is because I lived there with my mom for a year.
So congrats, I actually only speak one language, and even that barely. This is how I think about it, and so do the majority of the people back home.
Here people look at me like I’m insane.
And maybe I am. But not because of the aforementioned facts, but because I didn’t realize what a gift I was given.
I didn’t realize just how many more doors opened for me because I can understand so many different languages. How many more cultures I have been exposed to and how much richer my life has become because of that.
I can easily move between countries and count that there is at least one language that I can use to find my way around. All of the Slavic countries? No issue, they are all so similar anyway. Germany, Austria or Switzerland? No brainer. Even my minimal Romanian is helpful, since it’s a Romance language and helps me pick up Spanish and Italian. And English? Well, it allowed me to move across the ocean and pursue the education I wanted.
Once I realized that, I was the one who started looking at my peers here like they were the insane ones. What do you mean you only speak one language?
I understand now how easy it is to never leave the U.S. Size-wise, it is pretty similar to my entire continent. You can drive for nine hours and still stay in New England. When I drive nine hours from my house, I can go anywhere from Dubrovnik, Croatia; Frankfurt, Germany; Milan, Italy or the center of Romania. So for the majority of people it is simply easy to stay in their English language.
But English is not the official language of this country. In fact, there just isn’t one.
The U.S. is a country built on a mixture of cultures from people immigrating from all over the world. Very often I tend to hear people boast about their “ethnicities,” that they are Italian, British, Polish and so on, just because their grand-grand-grand-grand mother decided she had enough of the communist grey and ran across half of the world.
Congrats, but I’m sorry, if you like to go around boasting about this, why don’t you make the effort to learn that language then?
And I understand not everyone can learn them as easily as I can. I got the gift of languages, but don’t ask me to do any complicated multiplication from my head; I think it would actually explode. That’s what calculators are for.
But at least try. Trust me, it will open up a whole new world for you, and I don’t even mean to quote Aladdin. It can be as simple as watching your favorite TV show with subtitles in different languages. That’s how most of us learn English anyway.
And if you find even that hard, think about that before you start making fun of someone who can’t speak English well.
Being able to meet new people, try new foods, listen to different music, all of this has only opened up the horizons, and now my dreams and goals are vaster than anything I could’ve thought of as a kid.
Being multilingual has never hurt me. It only ever helped me. And it might help you too, one day.
