Free Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich Page B

I was a moron, and would have to be for months. But as much as I'd coach myself—"I'm prepped, I'll just plunge in"—it all got wearing.
    In half language, I couldn't make full sense of the world. I'd note and accept the inexplicable: Each morning, Alka would answer the red phone that rang all through breakfast, her voice crisp and official. It was as if she was engaged in helping to run a business, though she never reported any messages to the men. By nine, when the phone was silent, her tone was once more hesitant; she had now only ever been a housewife. In half language, it's the shape-shifting that gets you, the casual mutations in yourself and others.
    To learn a second language, you have to be willing to give your self up, the self encoded in your first one. You are no longer a person who speaks with facility and authority. You are less than what you were as a child: You cannot transact a phone call without help, discuss matters more complex than the color of fruits and vegetables. You cannot signal who you are. Most of us, by the time we're adults, speak in so many words. We convey information through tone:
I am sad,
or
I am displeased,
or
Is it not clear? I am important.
Our speech acquires layers so that directness, when employed, has power through force and rarity: "I don't like what you did." But at the beginning in learning a language, you can only be direct. You can say "
Tea is required here,
" not "
Can I get a cup?
"—a vast difference in terms of your popularity.
    In half language, you're half what you were, half an overgrown child. You speak like a child, are received as a child. In this other state, you lose abilities.
    "I was amazed at how quickly my English..."
    "Fell apart?" a cognitive neuroscientist named Arturo Hernandez, who'd also done time abroad, said, and laughed. This was a year or two after my return, and we were comparing notes. "There's this very weird thing that happens where your language starts to bust apart. It's because there's language in your head and there's language in the environment." The one absorbs the other, he explained, the external one filters into your thoughts, becomes, to some extent, your inner one. "We think of language as ours," he said, "but it's not. It's on the news, and we speak it with people. We use other people's language all the time. It all makes you question, What is knowledge? What about that—is knowledge in our heads or in our environment? And if it's in our heads, how fast can it break down?" He mentioned that overseas, when you're aiming for fluency, you try to suppress your first language. "You don't want to use it," he said, then paused. "It's interesting. Language is a lot more fragile than we think it is."
    Those weeks of white India are stamped in babble in my head, in Hindi, mostly, in Hinglish, in American, Indian, Victorian English—a problem when you consider, as David Green says, that "there's an intimate connection between language and memory. If you cue people in one language"—that is, people who have more than one—"you get memories from the times they were using it." If you ask Russian immigrants to the United States about their lives, as Cornell researchers did, you'll likely hear stories from Russia if you speak to them in Russian, from the years after if you speak in English. Bilingual patients in therapy, bilingual therapists note, often dodge feelings by relating painful events in the tongue they weren't using at the time of a particular incident, a muting effect that provides safe distance from what they're attempting to stare down. Though "people who speak about trauma in the language it occurred in get a sense of relief they don't in the language it didn't," Green says.
    But then what if something occurred when you were between worlds, when you were in a fragile language that was still evolving? If you can't re-create that particular half language you understood it in—and how would you reproduce the