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Why I’m Embracing Learning New Languages in a World Obsessed with English
Conquering foreign language anxiety
I used to think of multilingual people as other people. The first time I travelled abroad alone, I was 22, on an Interrail trip across Europe. I left the train in Innsbruck, Austria and popped into a supermarket en route to the hostel, confident that the German I’d learned at school would be good enough.
Unexpectedly, I had a mild panic attack. I can’t even call it culture shock, as an Austrian supermarket is barely different from an English one. It felt as if I’d been parachuted into an unfamiliar world, where bread, milk and soup were presented in a discomfortingly unfamiliar way: the language, the marketing, and the prices in Austrian Schillings. I stammered at the till, fumbled with the money, and sneaked out with only half of what I wanted to buy.
If only I’d taken a school exchange trip to France or Germany, like my friends did. But my parents weren’t well off and our house was small — a foreign exchange student would have had to share a bed with me!
Besides that, multilingualism wasn’t encouraged at home, despite my father being Polish. He’d ended up in England during WW2, and was unable to return to his birthplace as eastern Poland became part of the USSR. On the few occasions…
