A lot of people have parents that moved to a country to afford a better future for them, some have people who moved because of safety, others for education, etc. My parents also moved to the US to afford a better future for us. I never knew how hard it actually was for them until I moved to Germany after I got married.
We can never understand truly what someone went through unless we went through the same thing, but what I want to do today is at least say my experiences and give you some information on the difficulties one can go through.
Many were required to take language classes at school, I took spanish. Not saying it’s helping me now, however going through a process of learning a language helped me a lot. Because I took a language class I was able to learn better here in Germany, also being bilingual was a plus point. It also made it easier for my brain to learn a third language.
The most difficult thing about moving to another country is language. Not being able to communicate like you do is really difficult. When you know what you want to say but arent able to it makes you aggressive and feel stupid and that is enough to make one sad. It’s like you’re a child who can’t express himself, and then just starts crying. It’s the same for me here in Germany, sometimes it makes me really sad and I feel like crying. Especially when you need so long to learn a language. Going through that for years can make you feel down often.
Learning the language is what can open many doors for you, and can also shut many doors. In the US it was easier for me to plan things, it was easier to know what to do first and second, but when I moved to Germany I didn’t know anymore what should come first or second. Should I learn the language, get a degree, then have kids? How many years will that take? Or should I learn the language, have kids, then start studying again? Or even what I want to study. I can’t figure it out because of this one obstacle. Learning a language isn’t as easy as one thinks, it’s not like Spanish class in high school. Learning a language is the first step and then communicating with what you learned is the second. Sometimes you learn a language and know a lot of words but it’s hard to communicate. Then one needs to be comfortable in communicating the language. Which needs a lot of practice and fear can stop you from practicing or speaking.
So language is the most difficult for me at the moment, it’s also the reason I had to change many plans I had. It’s also the reason why sometimes one needs to do things even if they don’t like it. Work jobs that they don’t like or want to but need to in order to live. The time it takes to be fluent can also make one not know what to do as a career. I usually think, “It might take me 5-6 years to learn German. After that, what should I study so that I can have a stable life when I´m in my thirties?”
It’s really hard to be honest and it’s really exhausting. It makes you aggressive and makes you feel behind. It is way harder than one thinks and to truly know how difficult it is one needs to go through it. Not travel for a year or two in a different country but at least five years to know how difficult it is for the people that are going through it.
However what I really wanted to say is don’t make fun of the ones who learned a language and have an accent, it’s enough the difficulties they had to go through, don’t make it harder on them. Another thing I want to say is the ones who left their country for their family or for another person, you guys are hella strong.
You never know the difficulties one had to go through in another country, learning the language, adapting to the country, etc. So don’t make it even more difficult on them by laughing at them or looking down on them. They did something that is way more difficult than getting a job or a degree. So be proud of them and make them feel welcome because this Earth doesn’t belong to a group of people but belongs to all of us together.
So with this blog post today I just went over how difficult it is for one to move to a different country that speaks a different language. In another post I will talk about other difficulties I went through.Thank you so much for reading Adyans Blog! Have a great day:)