Being a Polyglot

Ms. Nancy had been an English teacher at my school for two years. Despite Ms. Nancy’s professionalism in literature and linguistics, all my friends who were taught by her told me she gives a “teenager vibe.” Ms. Nancy indeed feels more like a friend living next door who always greets you with a gentle smile when you knock on her door to borrow a book or discuss the implications of a metaphor.

Since Ms. Nancy had already returned to Vancouver, Canada in July, the interview was conducted on Zoom with a time difference of 15 hours. Even though we were speaking to each other in different time zones, the conversation was carried out smoothly as usual without any "jet lag".

The experience of immigrating to another country at a young age and her personal interests in linguistics made Ms. Nancy a polyglot—she can read and speak fluently in Mandarin, Shanghainese, English, French, and Latin. We then delved into a conversation about how she encountered each language.

“I was born and raised in Shanghai,” Ms. Nancy recalled. “I spoke Shanghainese with my grandparents at home and Mandarin with teachers at school.”

“And it was really interesting that I never realized that Shanghainese and Mandarin are two different spoken languages until I was about 11 or 12. Then one day I heard a friend suddenly speaking Shanghainese in class when everyone was supposed to be speaking Mandarin.” Ms. Nancy chuckled and continued the story with exaggerated astonishment, “I had never heard Shanghainese being spoken in an academic context. That’s why it came as a shock to me because I didn't realize I was speaking something completely different from the language used in my grandparents' house.”

Ms. Nancy in Cambodia

After finishing the childhood story, Ms. Nancy told me that it’s amazing how people somehow subconsciously decide which language they would use depending on the audience or the context. I couldn’t agree more as a bilingual student who constantly switches between Chinese and English, always striving to find suitable vocabulary to assist self-expression.

At the age of 13, Ms. Nancy moved to Vancouver, Canada with her parents, and that’s when she first encountered English and French in school. I further asked her which language she preferred for self-expression among all the ones she learned as a child.

“I think the experience of immersing in an English environment when I was 13 years old—the age when you're starting to kind of develop your own opinions about things—shaped my tendency to use English as a way to express my ideas. Yeah, but I'm trying to write in Chinese more because I want to remember how to write these characters!”

Ms. Nancy in Singapore

The opportunity of being exposed to different languages fueled Ms. Nancy’s interest in linguistics as a child. She told me that it was much easier to pick up a third language after mastering one or two. But it was still quite difficult to learn Latin—a “dead” language that wasn’t intended for conversations but instead a written language that allowed communication between civilizations back in Medieval Europe.

“We were studying the roots of the Roman Empire, how it grew from this little village, you know, in the Peninsula of Italy and how it became such a huge and all-encompassing empire across the Mediterranean.” Ms. Nancy began weaving a vivid description of the Roman Empire’s glamour, which drew her into studying Latin. “We had an inspirational professor, and he often brought these inscriptions on stones about Roman laws and its political system. I just thought it would be really interesting to learn the language and be able to crack the code and read these stone inscriptions in their original language. And that's why I started to take Latin after that history course.”

Constantly flipping back and forth through the references made the reading process extremely tiring, and it took at least two years for her to read in Latin without the help of the “baby cribs”—the Latin commentaries and dictionaries that she frequently relied on when reading Latin.

After listening to Ms. Nancy’s story with each language, I found languages as reflections of her different stages in life, and how experiences of living in different culture shape her as a person: Chinese and Shanghainese bridging her to her grandparents, English serving as media for self-expression to bloom, French symbolizing moving into Canada, and Latin letting her to travel back and immersing in the musty wind of ancient Rome.

I then realized how learning a language is a huge commitment, particularly in the case of literature. It takes years of living and breathing through a language until one can truly appreciate the beauty of the literary work in its original language—to feel the rhythm of the language, being able to appreciate the word choice, the rhymes, and all the nuances.

Ms. Nancy with her class