Multilingual Mind

Although most of us speak Mandarin Chinese at school, work, or other social gatherings, my first language is actually Taiwanese. I didn’t learn Mandarin until I went to kindergarten. However, I don’t recall how exactly I learned to speak Mandarin. The only memory lingering in my head is my mother showed me how to count from one to ten because she said the teacher in the kindergarten would ask me on the first day of school.

After elementary school, I officially started to learn English. The reason I said officially is that I wasn’t completely ignorant of the existence of English. The Catholic nuns near my house often communicated in English and I was also exposed to some American TV programs at home.

Unlike many kids in Taiwan nowadays, I took my first English lesson in the 7th grade. I guess I was blessed to have an unconventional teacher for we were asked to memorize dialogues in English and act them out all the time. I got to know it was critical to think in English if I would like to speak like native speakers.

The rest of my schooling in Taiwan, I forced myself to eat, run, or sleep all in English as so to master the language. Then, I went to Switzerland for college, where I acquired French. I was lucky enough to spend two years in France too. Therefore, my multilingual mind rapidly adapted to the new environment. Believe it or not, I only spoke a handful of times Mandarin for the entire period in France. The best proof is I wrote my journal in French for those days.

What is it like in my brain when I speak French? Do the neurons function in the same way as they do in English or Chinese? Is my acquisition different from those who grew up in a multilingual environment? To what extent is the variation? Would it be possible one can learn several languages simultaneously? And how would neurons handle that as opposed to the regular monolingual learning process?

In retrospect, I know when I spoke Chinese and English in high school, I seldom encountered difficulty expressing myself, be it cognition-related, or ordinary usage in life.