My Need to Learn a Language

When learning a foreign language a person has to have a goal in mind where they really feel the need. For example, I met a girl who came to my country as a nanny as well as to learn the language and go to school. She soon found out that being a nanny was a very limiting occupation where her time was not her own and there were few experiences outside of interaction with the children to learn the language. She felt the need to have more conversations with adults.

So she joined a church and explained to her employer that she needed time off on Sundays to go to church. Once she was a member of a church, she met people her own age and began to make friends. Once she had friends and wanted to express her inner self, her "heart", to them, she had to dig deep for language knowledge.

This felt need helped her to learn the language more quickly than being stuck raising children who were not even talking yet.

This is where I came in. I met this girl at church and we soon found that we could communicate without words our interests in each other. But the "language of love" can only carry you so far in a relationship. I began to feel the need to find words in her first language to accurately communicate my feelings. It was give and take. She would ask me how to say something in English and I would ask he how to say something in her language. Before long we were both learning a language that was foreign to us and growning closer all the time.

The only part of her heart that she could not express in my language was her prayer life. That was the hardest to find the correct words in my language to speak. She could speak to God in her heart and it felt like it was coming from her mind. And yet she couldn't say if she were speaking one language or another to God. It was beyond language and more of an understanding.

The only way I knew about this was when we would pray together out loud and she would say she would have to use her original language because she couldn't focus on God and speaking to him and trying to speak out loud in her new language at the same time.

But I love hearing her pray in her original language. That is just one of the many things that made me fall in love with her.

Now that we are married, we have children of our own. She speaks to them in her language and I speak to them in mine. They know that with their mother they cannot speak the same language as they do to me. So our children are growing up bi-lingual!