It tore me to pieces when I realized that I have a Farsi (my mother tongue) vocabulary of a 5th grader. It crushed my ego; I lost all hope of ever being able to write in Farsi as an adult would. I am so frustrated; I feel trapped between two incomplete languages. Sometimes I think it would have been easier if I only knew Farsi and lived in Iran and minded my own business. Except things didn’t turn out that way, that would have been too easy. I mistakenly thought I would be an expert at both. I had laid bags of hope in my heart, all which are now torn open, slowly being washed away…piece by piece…There is a price to pay for being a bilingual. It is not impossible to strengthen both languages, it just requires time and patience. But I can’t explain how heavy the weight of not knowing everything feels, it’s like you want to have everything, see everything and learn, but you just can’t keep up. Even in my own house I am sometimes an outsider because there are things I don’t understand, not just in the language, but cultural and political facts about Iran. It tears me into pieces but there’s not much I can do…I just have to accept the fact or look at it another way...
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on June 15, 2005 10:22 AM.
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