Precerpt from My 20th Language: 🌱 My First Language and the Path to Others

English was my first language, the one I absorbed without effort as a child. It was the language of my family, my community, and my earliest immersion in the world. I didn’t study it at first; I lived inside it. Every year, my understanding deepened as I listened, spoke, and eventually read and wrote.

When I entered school, English became not just the language I spoke but the subject I studied. Teachers corrected my spelling, my grammar, and my word order. I learned that sentences had structure, that verbs carried tense, and that word placement could change meaning entirely. Grammar became a framework I could lean on, even if I didn’t realize at the time how valuable it would be later.

That foundation in English proved indispensable when I began learning other languages. With Germanic languages, I found familiar ground in the shared grammar framework. With Romance languages, the gift of 1066—the Norman Conquest—was still alive in English. So many words had already crossed into my vocabulary that I could recognize and remember them more easily. English had quietly prepared me for both families of languages.

Yet language learning is not only about grammar and vocabulary. The sound system of English was set in me early, and after brain lateralization, I discovered how hard it was to reshape my mouth and ears to another language’s sounds. I had to work diligently to avoid sounding foreign. In some cases, with much effort and study, I managed to approximate native speech. In others, despite my best attempts, my accent betrayed me. That struggle taught me humility and persistence: language is not just learned, it is lived, and living in another sound system takes more than rules on a page.

Looking back, I see English not only as my first language but as the foundation of all my later linguistic journeys. It gave me immersion, instruction, grammar, and vocabulary. It gave me the tools to reach toward other languages, even when the sounds resisted me. And it reminded me that every language carries its own identity, just as my English carries mine.

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