Analysis Of Bilingual Lives, Bilingual Experience

In 2010, professor Anna Wierzbicka, from the Department of Linguistics, Australian National University, published a preface called “Bilingual lives, bilingual experience” in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, in which she claims that a bilingual faces some problems in expressing and distinguishing between emotions on both languages. She gives the example of her Polish-English background and supports that often people who are bilingual make confusions regarding the cultural and deeper meaning of emotions. However, I argue that a bilingual learns to perceive the world in a more complex way, not only on the emotional side, which is far from being problematic, but enhances as the practice of both languages is growing, but
This permanent switch between languages is also a switch between cultures, which, as the professor claims, may be confusing and may create a discrepancy between what one feels and what one expresses. Nevertheless, I believe that being able to discern between what feelings can be expressed in a language and what feelings in another strengthens one’s ability to comprehend emotions in general. As emotions and feelings are closely linked to the cultural background of a language, a bilingual is facing not a problem of distinguishing between them, but a very large variety of speech and expression, which can only lead to an enhancement of one’s ability to comprehend emotions. For instance, an English speaker learning Romanian as a second language encounters the word “dor” and the idiom “ Mi-e dor de tine”, whose English partial equivalent is “ I miss you”. But he learns that the Romanian “dor” is much more complex than what can be expressed in English, because in Romanian it implies many feelings: nostalgia, wish, sadness, pain and, at the same time, tenderness for the one he is missing. Thus, the emotional spectrum of the English-Romanian speaker is definitely enlarged with new concepts, which can
According to Viorica Marian and Anthony Shook (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), bilinguals have an improved attention to detail which helps them learn more smoothly another foreign language, because they “more easily access newly learned words, leading to larger gains in vocabulary than monolingual people who aren’t as skilled at inhibiting competing information.”
Furthermore, following Geoffrey Willans’ words, “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two”, it can be claimed that the culture of a country is assimilated better by comparisons with others than by learning it independently. For instance, the Romanian culture is strictly linked with the French one, not only in a linguistic aspect ( as many Romanian words are borrowed from French), but also regarding the literary movements that have been inspired by French (such as symbolism) and then borrowed by Romanians, French culture being a great influence in literature at that