Memoir

Language has had and continues to have a huge affect in my life especially living in such a culturally diverse country like the UAE. English is my first and only language however throughout school life, I have touched in other languages such as French, Italian and Greek but none of these progressed to a level where it was fluent or where I would be comfortable speaking in that language. Being exposed to an international school and having many different friends with various ethnicity's and languages, I have always been very enthusiastic of the idea surrounding languages, how they are created, understood and communicated. I lacked a second language and this lead to me often feeling a bit excluded when friends would talk in their native tongue but also the idea that they had access to a whole other culture and way of living. I found this extremely interesting and after so many years of studying languages and never being able to grasp them, it made me question how all of these students and teachers learnt and adapted to an English school system so quickly and the way of switching what they spoke in matters of seconds.

I am Australian and lived there until I was 13, so I of course had an Australian accent however being schooled in Abu Dhabi for four years in predominately American schools, I caught onto that accent and automatically changed from an Australian accent around my parents to an American accent around anyone else. This is where I began to have somewhat of a concept of how the brain could work and became more fascinated that even if I tried changing something as small as an accent, I couldn't. Friends would want me to have an Australian accent because they were curious however it was almost if I forgot how to talk in that way unless I was around my parents or other Australians. This demonstrated to me how cultures mimic each other and their surroundings to create how they are and how they think. This lead to the idea I had, that a country's whereabouts on a map, or their history could mimic their language and change the way that they communicate with their citizens. I decided last year to partake in an exchange program in the Netherlands because of my many whirring thoughts and the desire for another language. It was a 12 month program and I left in August of 2016 to return in August of 2017. Exchange programs are available all around the world and most exchange companies give you the ultimate choice of where you want to study and what you want to learn. I had many Dutch friends and I thought their language had a very distinct sound to it which I liked and also had thought to myself that I could see myself living there as I had visited the year before and was infatuated with their culture.

Living in Holland, the way I was expected to learn Dutch was by just engaging in other people's conversations and immersing myself in that life. In the beginning, I was quite skeptical of how I would learn a whole language just by hearing it, with no translations or books to guide me. However the time that I spent there, enlightened me in ways I did not expect as I started to differentiate how English people form their sentences along with the Dutch. Things that I would say on a daily basis did not literally translate and as I began to learn how they translate things when I would reverse it back into English, it was interesting to see how the majority of a Dutch persons behavior coincides with the way that their language is spoken. The way they all seemed to think, was the way their language was translated and said. Their grammar and tendencies was reflected in their mental processes in dealing with situations and coincided with their culture.

Living in Holland instead of just learning Dutch from a book gave me an immense understanding of their language and how to 'think Dutch' which I would have never been able to pick up from a book. It also helped me to understand how we as babies would pick up our first languages when originally we were born, understanding nothing and also not being given a book to read or translations. This exchange experience was key for me in unlocking a new way of looking at culture of a place and how that affects the way language is spoken and understood. I was also separated from my family and friends for the entire course of the exchange so I was not only discovering new things in language perspectives but also seeing life in a new psychological way, in terms of how I interact with people and what I truly care about. It really redefined in my mind, of how I want stimulating conversations and true connections with the people around me. All of the rest of what I was doing seemed irrelevant. I think in understanding language, we understand the world.