Managing as a semi-fluent adult

I never thought I’d be the type of person who doesn’t live their day-to-day in their own language. I think, just like loads of other people, I just assumed I'd remain in my own country, speaking the language I was raised in. But here I am, 23 years later, and I'm still living abroad.

My entire day-to-day is in English. My work, relationship, friendships, entertainment and internal world are all in English. I can't really tell if it's challenging or not because I don't remember living any other way. I have loads of friends who, despite being non-native speakers, consider themselves fully bilingual and live just like me, doing everything in their life in a second language. Other friends switch, they prefer to keep English just for work. It would be too exhausting otherwise.

Now that I live in a new country and have to speak a new language every once in a while, a language I have only rudimentary skills in, I can relate to my more tired bilingual friends. I thought moving somewhere new was hard, but at least when I moved to the UK I could already speak the language fluently (even if it was of the US variety). This time around I had to start learning a new language as an adult. A language with very few non-native speakers, very little content or good quality learning resources. And I have to do it as an adult, with a job, hobbies, friends. Not only that, my English skills grew and developed together with my life's complexity. My school classes, understanding of the world, and administrative needs grew and developed in step with my knowledge of English, pretty much like a native speaker's would.

But when you move to a new country as a fully grown adult with responsibilities, you have to ramp up really quickly, and the capacity for failure, as well as the cost of it, are much higher. All of a sudden I have to do things like calling a notary or immigration, booking a dentist, or even advocating for myself in an emergency room.

It’s humiliating. It’s humbling. It’s a great learning experience. It's exhausting! It's certainly different than your language evolving almost seamlessly with your life. And it's not at all like sitting in a classroom for an hour a week and learning the plural form of bobcat or the latest irregular verb form. You know, the really useful things in life.

Since I don’t get many opportunities to practice speaking my new target language, progress has been slow and the bar for success in these everyday situations is surprisingly quite high. Failure can mean, at best, having someone treat you in a patronizing way, or, at worst, having a drastically reduced access to services and much lower quality of life.

I can’t say I’ve cracked it yet but I've picked up some tips and strategies along the way:

1. Prep

Unless you're put on the spot, try to spend some time beforehand and look up words relevant to what you're about to do. If you are going to a dentist, figure out useful and relevant vocabulary to do with going to the dentist. That could be words like appointment, tooth/ teeth, pain, cavity, filling, anesthetic. If you are feeling particularly organized, add those words to a flash card app like Anki, and learn them beforehand. If you have generous native speaker friends ask them to give you an example sentence for each word. Then add those to your flash cards too!

2. Learn Helpful Stock Phrases

Learn a few core phrases like “Could you speak slower please?” or “Can you say that again please?” or “I don’t understand, sorry”. Practice them in real-life situations like at the grocery store or if someone asks you for directions. It’s better to have experience, so that when a stressful situation does occur, the words can come automatically. People are willing to repeat themselves if you ask them, don't let yourself feel shy about interrupting them. That could mean getting a better deal for your internet plan or even understanding a medical diagnosis better!

3. Focus on getting the gist of things

Really. Don’t force yourself to try to understand every single thing immediately. Don’t try to translate live in your head, word for word. Real life conversations move too fast. People mumble, miss-speak, use slang, or dialect. As long as you understood a part, you can clarify it and ask about the rest. That, and if you've developed the confidence to interrupt and ask for clarification! Often people will summarize the core point, but that can only work if you learn to identify which parts of a conversation are important and which it's OK to let go of.

4. Getting your point across

It's absolutely fine to muddle through, instead focus on being understood over being correct. Yes, it's embarrassing. Yes, it will make you feel like you've lost half your brain cells along the way. And yes, people will look at you like you don't have any brain cells at all actually.
But there's no way to get better if you don't try, if you don't embrace making mistakes and sounding ridiculous. It's all a part of learning and getting better.

5. It’s OK to pause

Functioning in a new language is exhausting, demotivating, and painful. It's ok to take breaks, to switch back to something you're more confident in, but don't let that discourage you, don't give up. The only way to make progress is to keep trying! Maybe read a short article or even just a paragraph, or listen to a song or two in your new language, don't let it be this exhausting, stressful thing you avoid and only do when you absolutely must.