Audio Essay Reflection – Darpan

When the professor first gave us this topic, I was a little moved. My essay was going to be about all the difficulties I have faced with the language till now, about the country and family I come from, and a few embarrassing moments. I had the fear of being judged by everybody after sharing this story of mine. I knew that I wasn’t alone, and that there were 2 to 3 more people like me who struggled with the language. So I decided to do it.

After listening to my classmates’ essays, I got to know that everybody was in the same boat, and everybody was struggling with one language or more. Everybody was a little nervous to tell about their linguistic identity because of the fear of being looked down to, which usually happens when one can’t speak a language. I observed that there were two types of people – one who had difficulties speaking their own native language, and the other who had difficulties speaking English (like me). There were people who had difficulties learning their own language because they focused so much on learning English while growing up, that they missed out on their own mother tongue. For example, Anson and Jacky said that they forgot their first language as they started speaking English. Jenny regretted not learning Chinese while growing up and then she was having a little difficulty in communicating with her family. Nazima’s and Gauri’s stories showed that English was given more importance than their own language, Urdu and Hindi, in their home country as people believe that speaking English is a high status thing. I could relate my experience to Jhenyuan’s experience. Both of us being strong at our own native language, we struggle at English. And we speak a mixture of the first language and English in our country, like Hinglish (Hindi and English), Runglish (Russian and English) and Chinglish (Chinese and English). I also observed that parents played a major role in this. Some parents like mine, who don’t know how to speak English, used more of the first language, and I learned the same. Whereas Gauri’s parents forced her to speak English at times, which enhanced her English speaking skills.

After everybody was done sharing their stories, there was a vibe of togetherness as all of us got to know that we were not the only ones struggling with a language, but almost everybody was. For me, it was a great assignment as it removed the little embarrassment of not being able to speak English fluently, from inside me. It made all the students in the class feel that there was nothing to be ashamed of. We all should keep trying to get better at both the languages, English and our first language, and give equal importance to both.