Having a Persian family taught me Farsi, growing up in Germany taught me German, moving to the U.S. further advanced my English skills that I obtained in my previous schooling, and the obligatory tertiary language requirement in my previous school got me into Latin. My case is applicable to many individuals since they become multilingual by only knowing their mother tongue on top of langua franca English. Looking around me and considering myself, I can conclude that being multilingual is not a choice. As I compare most multilingual speakers, they all have a foreign background or lived in various places. In our case, living in various places just means that we had to drag behind our parents while they moved to countries which we have many exemplars of in our student community because it is a metropolitan area home to individuals with international careers, we are at an IB school which attracts students with already an international background or those who are aiming to develop a cosmopolitan mindset. For individuals like me being multilingual is a result of trying to survive in the foreign country by knowing their language. You get thrown into the society and mastering the country’s language is essential to succeed in that society. Therefore, it is a process in which you acquire a language by living in the society, want it or not you will learn it unless you isolate yourself entirely from the native society. The fact that I lived or visited the countries of which I know the language of was the key for being paralingual in at least three of the languages I know. Now the fourth language,Latin, I never mastered entirely which I like to justify with the fact that I never lived in a Latin speaking country(aka Vatican City) and acquiring this language was limited to theoretical learning. Here the difference of learning a language in theory versus learning it through living in the country gets obvious. Latin, the only language I studied in theory is the weakest I know whereas Persian, German, English I all learned by being around societies that communicate in those languages. I am well aware that the school can only do so much to teach us a language and they cant send us off the country from which we are studying the language every class period until we mastered that language. Although learning a language through being in the society is the most efficient way but for now we have to suffer through the foundation building phase of studying vocabulary, grammar, conjunctions until the basics are established which will allow the ability to converse in that language. However, it also depends on the teaching method that results in how the students advance in a language. Studying in Latin in both Germany and US gives me the chance to conclude that here through my exemplary Latin teacher Brian Kane I developed communicating in Latin which my previous teachers could not achieve to teach me because there was too much emphasis on grammar.
Languages connect individuals to cultures. As an multilingualism myself I can connect to the culture of the country. Knowing the languages gives insight into the country where the language derives from and it builds a bridge to the society. When reading literature, it has been proven to me that there is a significant difference between reading it in the native, original or duplicated, translated one. The translation can never adapt the original syntax and connotation of the words because these aspects are specific to a language and many times English is too vague to adapt specific literary elements. This got obvious when I read Persian literature and the English adaption of it. Knowing both to a high level gives me the ability to compare and conclude that the ancient Persian is in no way comparable to the English version. Reading the text in English allows me to conclude that the work in translation did not carry the eloquence as the original text has.The words and phrases are relevant and connected to the society, thus that text is much more connected to that society rather than a foreign society. But knowing the language is the key to breaking that barrier and actually comprehend the text with its original expression that the author intended to create. Thus knowing a language builds a bridge to the culture of the country.