I speak Japanese, English, a little Swedish, and a little German. Japanese is my mother tongue. I studied English at school, but it was not enough to learn speaking skills, so during high school, I also attended an evening school for businesspeople. Living in Japan, I hardly had opportunities to speak in English. Unless you are very motivated to learn, it is almost impossible to reach the level of intermediate speakers in Japan. The very first time I started using English in my daily life was when I did an study exchange in Sweden back in 2019. There I learned a bit of Swedish too. After I came back to Japan from Sweden it was really difficult to maintain my English and Swedish skills.
It has taken me as almost 4 years to return to an environment where I need to speak in English and at the same time study a new language. From my experience in Sweden, I was expecting everyone to also speak English in Switzerland, but that was not the case. Moreover, Swiss German is completely different from the German that I studied at university. My motivation for studying German became directionless. The first few weeks I felt a bit lost before I started hanging out with other exchange students. In the first semester, I was taking an A2 level German language course at university, but I was facing a constant dilemma between speaking only English or trying to study German. In my exchange students’ community, I was always speaking in English. I only used German in class; 4 hours per week or at supermarkets. Learning a new language requires so much motivation and commitment. For me, it has been already overwhelming to speak and study in English every day. After some months it became too stressful for me to learn 2 languages at the same time, so I decided to rather focus on English. For German and Swiss German, I am trying to speak as much as possible at the cashier or restaurants where I can memorize the most used phrases.
Being in a multilingual country where people can speak more than 3 or 4 languages, mainly German, French, and Italian, I lost my confidence because I share only one common language which is English. Depending on the mood of the day, even English can be difficult too: I can speak it with confidence but sometimes this confidence can be very broken, too. Whenever my mental condition is unstable, I am overwhelmed by other people who speak English much better than I do. I start doubting myself by comparing myself to others. For me, as a non-native Germanic language speaker, it is especially difficult because we do not even have alphabets in Japanese. Everything is completely different. Language is also a big part of culture. How we speak and word choices are different in different cultures. In Japanese, we speak in euphemistic ways most of the time. We have a strict hierarchy of politeness. We have formal Japanese and casual Japanese. You need to speak in formal Japanese depending on your social status and distance. Normally, even though the other person is just one year older, you need to speak in polite Japanese. The formal Japanese is especially euphemistic. We use phrases to put others in higher status and lower ourselves. You refrain from talking too much about yourself but rather give other people more time to talk about themselves. When I am speaking in English, I think my personality changes. I do not have a sophisticated English vocabulary. It results in speaking in indirect expressions all the time. I do not need to lower my status and speak equally and closely. I feel like I can get close to others much faster. When I talk to Japanese people, I try to sense the unspoken feelings of others and try to make harmony in the conversation by carefully choosing words. On the other hand, it is quite difficult to do the same with other people from different cultural backgrounds. Also, I feel that it is not required to match my opinions with others when I talk to them rather, they expect me to have my own opinions and express them. I also found out that I need to speak in a clear voice. Whenever I lose my confidence and start mumbling, it makes it more difficult to communicate well with others.
Now I always try to speak with confidence. I used to be worried a lot about grammatical correctness but now I am worried less about it. Of course, it is important to keep studying the language to be able to expand the variety of expressing what I want to deliver but it is equally important to swallow my pride. Speaking English helped me not only to provide a tool to speak with others but also allowed me to be confident and have my own opinions.
-Chisato Todaka
MILSA blog 
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