speakroots

[speakroots]

“It SHOULD be so easy!” 

Is sometimes what I tell myself when it comes to studying my HL because... 

1. some things ARE (probably) easier for me compared to a new learner, like irregularities, ease of retrieval of certain words or phrases, and ease of comprehension...and

2. because I’ve learned other languages (though languages that are very different from my HL) to the point where I can express my thoughts and feelings without second-guessing myself 

I think I forgot that learning a language will just be plain hard sometimes, especially ones that are typologically so different. When you’re used to ease of picking up vocabulary and being able to just say what’s on your mind in a language you’ve taken the time to learn before, makes me wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can do that in my HL. 

It’s tough. I blog about HLs, I try to stay positive, I’m going to research it during my PhD, but my struggles are the same as yours. 

Sometimes I have to remind myself that at the end of the day, I know that I’m progressing if I can incorporate just one or two new vocabulary words in my sentences. It may not be as fast as I want to progress, but it’s still progress. 

[speakroots]

Hi. Do I count as a heritage speaker if all my heritage is being born in the country and living there for 5 years and then only "learning" it again much later in school? Even if none of my family lives where i was born, and only my immediate family ever did, but the country and culture still is important to me. Because some of what you are blogging about really resonates with me. Kind of doubly since my family moved to another country than they "come from". So do I have 2 HL? - 🦔

I may be interpreting this incorrectly but let me see if I understand first: you were born in the country and lived there for 5 years, then you moved somewhere else and are learning the language of your home country later as a teenager or adult? If so, assuming you spoke the language of the country where you were born (because then you moved and then are speaking the language of the new country), then yes, that is your HL. Heritage languages are usually often associated with family, but there’s also a term (to my understanding) of “heritage children” in the book I’m reading and what makes them heritage speakers is “the status of the languages and the conditions under which the languages are learned” (as opposed to having family ties?) (Montrul, p. 39-40). I vaguely remember reading something else about this but I can’t find it in the book, if I find it, I’ll update the post.

Edit: Found it. So a lot of heritage speakers may not be part of the broader ethnic community but it’s the language experience that makes them heritage speakers.

Anyone feel free to weigh in; I hope this answers your question!

[speakroots]

Some academics + advice based on personal experience

That “shaming” of your language skills from those who are native/fluent speakers is a super real thing. I’ve experienced subtle comments from my family members, and many of my friends have also been shamed by older speakers in their community for not speaking it “as well as they should.” 

Not only does it hurt, but it prevents people from wanting to practice since they’re scared to make mistakes (and be further shamed for it). 

Know that your experiences are different from the experiences of older fluent speakers who immigrated to your country, and even the experiences of native/fluent speakers who grew up in a place where your HL is their dominant language. 

If you really want to improve your HL skills, try to find someone who will understand your story and be accepting of all the mistakes you make. This could be a friend, a family member, a tutor, a teacher. But also know that some native-speaking teachers may not fully understand your perspective, especially if they’re used to teaching the language as a second language (as opposed to a heritage language). 

A couple weeks ago, I found a tutor who would converse with me in Japanese for an hour. This is the first time in years that I’ve had to do this--talk to someone as much as possible in the Japanese that I know. 

But I saw a huge improvement from the first time we talked just to the second time we talked. I doubted myself a lot less, I felt more relaxed, and I felt like there was some kind of a shift. 

The last image was something I found a couple months ago. It doesn’t just apply to language learning. But as someone who feels a ton of embarrassment for just opening their mouth, I think that saying is worth a lot. I might print it out and put it on my wall. 

[speakroots]

I’ve been reading this book that kind of breaks down Japanese essays from real Japanese authors (it has the Japanese version and then kind of translates it into English on the other side bit by bit) and as I’m reading it, I’m thinking

Damn I’ll never learn Japanese 

But then sometimes I have to step back and think

What are my actual goals 

My goal is NOT to read literature in Japanese. My goal is to be able to use Japanese conversationally so I can talk to my family members. 

And on top of that, any language’s literary language is different from it’s spoken language. Though this learning material is not aligned with my goals, I still find it fun, so that’s why I like to try and decipher it.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I feel like my goals with my HL are kind of different than they were with my L2s. For my L2, I just kind of...kept going and had no goals but to just keep getting better. My HL...maybe I’m aware of how difficult certain aspects of it are, so I cap myself off at a certain place. 

But I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing...

But then maybe it’s the nature of a language like Japanese that makes me think that. Perhaps I’d think differently if I spoke a different HL. I’m not entirely sure. Late night thoughts. 

[speakroots]

Posted on my main a couple months ago, for anyone who hasn't read this yet, maybe you'll find it helpful🙏🏻

Tips I’ve Learned from Relearning my Second First Language

This is really important, to me, and maybe to you, too. 

But first, here’s some background info on me and bilingualism in general:

I grew up speaking Japanese and English and started speaking them as a baby at the same time (simultaneous bilingual). Some of you may have learned one after the other (sequential bilingual). 

I grew up speaking Japanese because my grandma mostly raised me, and she’s Japanese. So through her, I learned Japanese. This is my heritage language. Another example, a common heritage language in California (USA) is Spanish, and I have friends who grew up speaking Vietnamese and Tagalog. 

By definition (for ease, through Wikipedia), a heritage language is is a minority language (either immigrant or indigenous) learnt by its speakers at home as children, but never fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. 

People who speak a heritage language range in their skillset: some speakers are more fluent than others, and some can only understand. Some may know how to read and write, but many don’t. Everyone is different. 

The past couple months, at 25 years old, I decided I wanted to start trying to learn Japanese again. Before starting to study it more actively, I could understand Japanese pretty easily, minimal ability to speak, read, and write (hiragana was the easiest, followed by katakana and some kanji). When I was younger, I attended Japanese school on Saturdays, which is where I learned to read and write. 

I had tried many many many times before to learn Japanese again, but I failed every time. 

Here are some things I wish I would have realized earlier:

 1. You can’t rely on passive skills to study if you want to improve your active skills 

Passive skills: Listening comprehension, reading Active skills: Speaking, writing 

Active skills focus on the production of language. For the longest time I wasn’t improving these skills because I thought that I could improve them by listening to more things in Japanese: TV shows, songs, YouTube videos, listening to my family speak. 

But why would that work if I’ve been listening to my grandma speak to me in Japanese for 25 years of my life and I didn’t gain any active skills from that? 

In order to gain improve your active skills, you have to practice by using your active skills. 

I know, if you don’t speak a heritage language and are reading this, you might think DUH! I learned Portuguese and the only way to get good at speaking it is to speak it. I don’t think I realized this was the case with my Japanese because I already had an “in.” But this still applies. I had to speak and write more in order to be able to, well, speak and write more. 

2. You have to try 

You grew up speaking another language. It’s a special gift. But if you’re lacking in certain skills, you still have to work to try and strengthen those skills. 

A couple years ago, I went back to study at my Japanese school as an adult because I thought it would help. It kind of did, but not really… 

I TRICKED MYSELF into thinking I understood all the material because I could understand everything the teacher was saying, when in reality I wasn’t able to retain the kanji or the syntactic structures I was learning. 

By tricking myself into THINKING I knew things, I sabotaged my own learning experience. 

You have to try, and you have to really want to learn it because already knowing parts of the language have the potential to hold you back. 

3. Use what gave you the language to your advantage

Don’t “use” them, but you know what I mean. 

For the longest time (childhood into recent adulthood), I was too embarrassed to use Japanese with my mom and grandma. I would only routinely use a select amount of phrases that I felt comfortable using, even if my grandma was speaking to me in Japanese. 

My mom would always say “You have the best resources around you, practice your Japanese while you can.” 

And while sometimes what parents say can be annoying, my mom was right. 

But it took a HUGE change in my life to realize this and take action. 

When I was 23, my grandma went back to live in Japan. It was an emotional and difficult time for me because I was so used to having her around. While she was living with my family, we learned to communicate in a mix of Japanese-English, and I expressed my gratitude for her by doing housework for her, or buying her things at the grocery store or brought her desserts after going out to eat with friends. 

But her moving across the world meant that I couldn’t do these things anymore. A couple days before her departure, I decided that I would try and write her a letter in Japanese and slip it in her backpack for when she arrived in Japan. 

Let me tell you, I had THE MOST difficult time writing that letter. I couldn’t express how much appreciated her because my Japanese sucked. And I hated that I couldn’t tell her that in her own language. 

So after she moved to Japan, I started to write her letters–*practicing those active skills though!!! 

By being able to write letters with my grandma, not only was I practicing my Japanese, but I was creating a relationship with my grandma that I had never had before. I knew that I would regret it if I didn’t talk to her more before she’s gone. Which is sad, but it’s reality. 

And let me tell you. I’ve improved a lot. 

I can think in Japanese now. It may not be perfect, but I know how to structure my sentences. Words are coming more easily to my brain now. I can communicate with my grandma. 

4. It’s never too late

I considered late high school/early college the prime of my language learning career. I got myself to a decent level of Spanish, I learned Portuguese, I took classes in Mandarin and French. 

But for some reason, I thought my Japanese was always DOOMED because it was just way. too. hard. for. me. to. learn. 

Japanese is hard. But it’s not impossible. 

I realized that at 25. It’s never too late to learn a language, but it’s also never too late to try and relearn a language you were familiar with before. 

Just take it one step at a time. 

I always thought Japanese was overwhelming because I KNEW how difficult it was. I thought about everything–kanji, onyomi and kunyomi, all the sentence structures and everything all at once. This freaked me out and made me think I could never learn it. 

But if you learn it little by little, it’s not as overwhelming. 

# 

That’s pretty much all the major points of things I wish I realized earlier when it came to studying Japanese. 

Language is something I’ve been interested in for a long time in terms of academics, so Japanese is naturally, important to me as a language. For other heritage language speakers, it might be more of the food that’s important, or cultural aspects, or other parts of their heritage that is important. 

Everyone is different. 

But this was for you, heritage language speaker, if you needed a little push. 

[speakroots]

Honestly, shout out to people who are learning their heritage language. I feel like I never see acknowledged just how hard it is, but learning Malayalam has absolutely been my most emotionally fraught language-learning experience. It simultaneously feels like an unavoidable commitment (because if I don’t know my own family’s language I’m a fraud at this language thing, right?) and also a demonstration of just how much I’ve missed out on not learning it as a child (because even my cousins who wouldn’t consider themselves fluent still have way more of a base than me, and I missed out on having basic household interaction in the language, so I’ll never be as fluent as them, right?). Learning a heritage language is a beautiful thing, I don’t want to make it seem like a burden, but every time I learn Malayalam all I see are my shortcomings, and it often feels like an undefeatable barrier to authenticity (I’ll never be a ~real~ Malayali until I’m fluent in it). So I just want to say that if you’re learning your heritage language and you’re feeling mired with these emotions, that’s okay. You’re not alone, and they don’t mean that you should give up. Don’t let your brain convince you that you’re not doing enough, because you are. And if you aren’t learning your heritage language because the emotions around it are too much, that’s okay too. You’re still enough, just by existing. Whether or not you know your heritage language, and whether or not you’re fluent in it, does not define your identity, so take the weight off your shoulders and do what you want to do to make yourself happy. And be proud of yourself, because you’re doing amazing.

[speakroots]

A fun Friday post powered by nostalgia & restricted contexts 

*note: if you’re learning Japanese, don’t use these as a guide. You have been warned

Growing up in the U.S. while also speaking Japanese, I was exposed to Japanese in very few contexts. The only contexts in which I was exposed to Japanese were at home and every Saturday at Japanese school for a handful of years during elementary school. 

Because I grew up hearing Japanese in very restricted contexts, my perception of certain words and their meaning were limited to very specific things. One of them was the word まぶしい. 

This usually translates to glaring, dazzling, radiant, blinding. To me, all it felt like  was “it’s sunny, and the sun’s in my eyes” because I would only hear it in the context of when my mom or Obachan would use that word when the sun was facing them while driving somewhere, for example. 

This happen to any of you, too?

[speakroots]

Growing up with Japanese in the States, I could definitely relate to this. English and Japanese being incredibly different languages with very different vocabulary, I don't know a lot of abstract words or academic terms in Japanese. Learning languages in Spanish and Portuguese have been easier for me, since so many vocabulary words are similar. Motivation 》 Motivação Opportunity 》 Oportunidade And I have no idea what those words are in Japanese. 🤷🏻‍♀️ If you speak Spanish or Portuguese, for example, as a HL, let me know what your experiences are, especially if your other language is English or you have two languages that are more similar to each other than English and Japanese! I can only speak to my personal experience being a heritage speaker of Japanese, and I’m curious to learn about more perspectives.  Furthermore, attending school in a certain language is a place where students "are...exposed to different types of discourse that require the expansion of morr abstract vocabulary, and the use of more complex syntactic, semanticm and pragmatic structures" (Montrul, 105). Some of us simply don't have access to schooling in our heritage languages, and if we do, it's usually limited (e.g. Saturday schools) or we're taught by parents or family members.

[speakroots]

on: pressure to be perfect 

anyone learning a language might feel some kind of pressure to be perfect, but I feel like growing up as a heritage speaker of a language packs on more or extra pressure to use the language “perfectly” 

but that pressure to speak “perfectly” and the fear of being wrong probably made my abilities worse...

simply because I never opened my mouth for fear of being corrected for something I should know, or shamed for not speaking it better

growing up, my mom and grandma would watch the Japanese TV program that was available to us. Whenever there was someone who wasn’t Japanese speaking Japanese fluently on the TV, my mom would be so impressed and asked why I couldn’t speak like that 

shaming from others who were supposed to support me probably made it worse 

I realized rather late that you just have to open your mouth (or rather, just finally got myself to do so) 

I speak two other languages non-natively, so I learned that you had to do that for your second languages, but I never applied it to my heritage language 

I finally did speak to someone in Japanese about a week or so ago

and let me tell you, it was rough

my conversational competency is basically non-existent, I didn’t know a lot of complicated words, and I doubted myself SO much that I kinda probably sabotaged any fluency I had 

but it was still progress 

from none to some

[speakroots]

An interesting (but understandable) distinction made in the book I’m currently gathering information from. 

So someone (by the definition) could be a heritage speaker AND a heritage language learner, but a heritage language learner isn’t always a heritage speaker. 

Keep in mind that these are terms used in the academic sphere, and things are defined in order to keep a uniform sense of understanding within the community and the research being done. 

One of the takeaways I got from this was that certain people who DO grow up bilingual perhaps have cognitive differences (linguistically) from those who learn the language as a second language or someone who is “culturally” (but not linguistically) connected to the language. 

Thoughts, discussions? 

I know many of you here are on both sides of this. I created this blog because I am (or will be) basing my academic career around the heritage language population. And while I will have to adhere to those definitions in my research, I also like to consider just...real world perspectives and identities. 

I’d also like to note that for the rest of this book, the writer focuses on heritage speakers (in or outside of the classroom) as opposed to those who feel a cultural connection to the language but didn’t grow up speaking it. 

[speakroots]

Lovely to see people actually consider heritage languages. I grew up in an environment where I did not get the chance to learn the heritage language and now struggle to get into it. I often feel like a fraud and like I have no right to said language because I was not taught as a child. It comforts me to see there are many who have similar experiences

Even for many of us who grew up speaking it feel like frauds (at least I do lol). Many people learn second languages that they have no connection to, so you shouldn’t feel like a fraud for trying to learn a language that you are connected to in some way. Best wishes!! 

[speakroots]

Hi, thank you for your blog! I recently got inspired to learn my HL, Tatar, and just realized it's the native language for both of my grandmas. And as a linguistics student and a family member I can't believe I slept on it considering it's the language of the second most popular ethnic group in my country. Now grandma can understand it but doesn't speak, and my other grandma lost the language. So I've got determination to start learning soon

No thank you!! I’m so glad you were able to reconnect with your heritage through language. I wish you the best of luck!! 

[speakroots]

It looks like grandmas are so important in keeping HL everywhere. In my case a school teacher scared my parents into stop speaking in our HL to us, saying it'll confuse us and so we won't be doing well in school and in life ect. My siblings and I kept notions in our HL only thanks to grandma's weekly phone calls as she didn't know any other languages than hers.

Cont’d from poster: 

Oh PS : the irony with said school teacher is that about the same time she made the "confuse them with too many languages" speech to my parents she introduced English classes in our elementary school 😂 (at the time it was novelty). It's bitterness speaking, of course it was an improvement for the school, but this is easily interpreted as while school (by extension society) recognises the importance of knowing more than one language there are languages worth knowing and those that are not

Response:

Grandmas are the best :’) It’s so interesting hearing everyone’s stories and who they associate their HL with (and for our and many others’ cases, grandmas)! I’m sorry your parents were scared into not speaking your HL with you, that’s soooo unfortunate! But so lucky you still had family who could talk to you. 

In response to the second portion, I totally agree with you (and you have a right to be bitter, haha)! Dominant (or I guess more widely-spoken) languages in society, especially languages like English, are more “valued” by wider society because so many people speak it. People rarely think about languages that are important to communities or individual families, probably because they aren’t as “visible” or just due to its smaller size, it wouldn’t be lucrative to create courses or programs for those speakers (just speculation/discussion, no expertise here). 

[speakroots]

Hii ! I'm adding my two cents to the messages of support to your work. I'm really glad I came across your blog and read your story, and especially for the term heritage language. It's a word I never knew I needed but I've been looking for a long time. It really helps in putting together thoughts about mines, especially because words such as mother tongue have connotations of superior skills in that language- which may be true for my parents, but not for us. & Obv 2nd lng scales don't help either

Hi! Thank you so much for your message :) I’m glad you were able to stumble across this term/concept through my blog, especially after unknowingly searching for so long. 

[speakroots]

A weird instance of not being completely literate in my heritage language:

Thinking that, for my whole life, that the -san in Fuij-san (for Mt. Fuji in Japan) was just the name of the mountain (Fuji) and the suffix -san (honorific titles) 

NOT 

Fuji-mountain （ふじ (Fuji) 山 (mountain)）

ふじ - Fuji (I know there is a kanji for Fuji but writing in hiragana for simplicity) 

山 - San (mountain, also pronounced “yama” because of different ways to read the same character in Japanese)

[speakroots]

so glad to hear your story about your grandma, im in a very similar situation with my ukrainian babushka- i have decent russian comprehension and can write/read, but my reading comprehension and my recall, grammar, spelling, etc are about toddler level, and it’s really upsetting that i can’t connect with someone who i’ve lived with most of my life so it’s such a relief to find someone with a similar story, thank you so much for sharing!! good luck on your journey!! 😄

Thank you!! :’) It’s a lot more common than you think! I have a few friends who find it hard to even connect with their parents because of the language barrier, but I’m glad I could share my story so people could relate. Idk if you’re trying to learn Russian, but best of luck to you on whatever you may be pursuing :)

[speakroots]

I feel like being a linguistics student kind of removed me from the reality that some people don’t know what a heritage language is. 

I posted about heritage languages a while ago on my main blog and someone had no idea what the term was, but said it totally applied to them and that they were happy that a term actually existed. 

I’m currently reading a book (reference in last cube) written mostly for researchers, students, people in the academic realm--and found some things that I wanted to share and that others might find usefuuul. 

One thing to note is that the book mostly includes studies done on bilingual heritage language speakers (i.e. those who to some extent grew up being exposed to another language, and includes speakers who may not have ability to produce but can understand), as opposed to people who did not grow up exposed to another language but feel a cultural connection due to family ties, etc.

Enjoyyyy and lmk if there’s any additional questions regarding this topic/if I was missing some useful information that would be helpful. ✨