my space of randomness

So I just told them to add the $20 something onto my bill, and I thought she was going to break down crying right there.

We may have been eating ramen and on-cor meals every night but I had far too much pride to ask for help. 

That Christmas all of our holiday shopping was done at The Dollar Tree. The girls were given $10 to buy things for their favorite people and we made crafts to fill in the gaps. I didn’t want to steal their joy even though I wasn’t sure if I’d have enough gas to get to work the next week. To them ten dollars was $100… to me it was figuring out how to make the grocery budget stretch a little extra.

As we were about to checkout my oldest daughter walked up to me and handed me a stack of gift cards. Confused and concerned she may have pickpocketed someone (she could be shifty at that age) I asked her to tell me where she got them. She pointed to a lady fleeing out of the store and said “she told me to give these to you after she left. She asked me if you were a good mom. I told her you were and she gave me the whole pile”.  Needless to say I spent the better part of the next thirty minutes ugly crying in the middle of the dollar store.

The cashier told me she would come in every few days during December and look for a family who seemed like they could use it. There was $300 in gift cards and that was just enough to get some bills caught up with a little extra to spoil the kids.

Excellent question. I’ve never gotten to that point in my language learning before so I’ll leave this one to the capable hands of the blog. 

It isn’t an either or. You won’t learn a term in one language and lose it in the other.  Chances are you learnt that vocab, grammatical structure in one language and have never had the opportunity to or the need to acquire it in the other. If you do… you will learn both.  Things may appear to atrophy but with the right environmental stimulus your re learning curve is dramatically different from a new learner to the language. Things that were lost do not remain lost.

Now for the even better news.  Speaking, reading or writing in more than one language makes your brain so much more awesome.  Languages are stored (pathways laid down) in different places.  If, the gods forbid, you were to have a Broca’s or Wernikes area stroke there is evidence to show that you knowing more that one language would mean you would keep access to language more readily including a case of one man I know of who could understand in Spanish and respond in Arabic (I may have gotten those details a little off there it’s been a while) despite the damage done to the language areas of the brain.  Bilingualism is correlated with reduced development of dementia and increased flexible intelligence.

Language learning is a ego bruising experience especially because of the expressive vs receptive divide (we can often understand much more than we are able to articulate as we learn, both in our first and then other languages) We can’t help but reflect on how limiting the not being able to say what we could say so easily in one language is.  And how we must be viewed by others.  Or how we view others who speak our native language at the level we speak our new language. Ego bruising experiences are good for the soul sometimes. It teaches us tenacity, patience and compassion.  Embrace the bruise and keep using your helpful thoughts, “Becoming more is hard but worth it”

Me: Kun....do the Thing

Kun: :)