My Native Language

 By BOUTSABA SES

Learning a second language or another language is not an easy task at all. You have to pay attention to every single detail to perfect your craft. Learning new languages has many benefits; you are more likely to make new friends, learn new information, and it looks great on your resume along with other things! It also allows you to be proud of yourself and feels much better about yourself. 

For my whole life, I have been learning Khmer. I grew up with my family speaking it to me and others. So you can conclude that I have known the language all my life, I understood every single word, but could barely ever speak it back. I had always tried my best but was often laughed at by my family members. As a kid that made me feel insecure, but as I grew up I realized that I needed to try harder to communicate with my elders and anyone who had trouble speaking English. 

My grandparents and parents lived in many different refugee camps before deciding to immigrate here. My mother had ten siblings but unfortunately, four of them had passed away. I had many aunts and uncles to go to for help with learning how to speak it but none of them knew how to write or read! My mother came here when she was around the age of 6 so she knew how to speak Khmer but never got past the first level of learning how to read and write. Learning English was also easier for her since she was still young; her brain had more plasticity and was able to comprehend the language well enough to be considered fluent. As you all know once you learn a language and when you stick with it all the time you eventually lose/forget the other language you also learned. That is exactly what happened. All my mother did with me was speak English.

 I never really had to speak Khmer unless I spoke to my grandparents. Whenever I spoke it always sounded weird. Broken in other words. I wanted to sound like I knew exactly what I was saying, I wanted to be confident...instead, I sounded confused. I only used that as motivation to get better. I started speaking more and more and eventually, I caught on. 

When I was an eighth-grader a lot of my relatives who were in high school always talked about being in Khmer class. I began to become so interested and decided to take it in high school also. My freshman year I had a Khmer class at the freshman academy during the fourth period. I’ll honestly admit when I had first walked into that class I had no idea what I was doing. I struggled greatly. I also couldn’t get help at home because my mom did not know how to read and write either, because of these circumstances I had to study ten times harder on my own. Eventually, I got better. I studied consistently and tried my best every day. I soon became an A student and have been taking the class for the last four years. 

I started off easy. I learned the “simple everyday words,” and slowly moved up to harder words that you may find difficult to understand and pronounced. I realized that in order to speak the language I could not be shy. Even if I had said the word wrong, I learned how to say it right. Having family members who had always spoken it to each other was also easier because I had heard the words often. While learning I realized that we also need to understand the culture to really break down some words. During this time period, my father became a monk in respect of my grandmother, for this particular reason during the summer of 2018, I was enrolled in a Khmer class with one of the monks. We were not allowed to talk in English at all, but luckily, there were a lot of kids there who also were not that great at speaking Khmer. 

Going back to school in the fall of 2018 I had so many lessons remembered from my summer classes. I felt ahead of the class because I had been able to study beforehand. I picked up a lot of things quicker and understood much more since I was exposed to them consistently. The class almost seemed easy for me. For the next year, I was getting 100’s on my tests, quizzes, and for my final quarter grade. I was genuinely proud of myself and so was my family. 

My grandparents strongly admired my desire to learn our native language. As a young child, they had always taught me to study hard and work even harder. Making them and my parents proud always made me feel even more confident. If you come from an Asian background you understand how difficult it is to please the elderly and your guardians, so even getting a “good job,” from them was enough to make me feel great and on top of the world. I now am able to speak to my grandparents and sure I mess up here and there, but we get to connect and sometimes I get laughed at. Being able to fully understand them and to have a conversation with them has made me so much happier because my grandparents mean a lot to me. I’ve also been able to help out the elderly who are not able to speak English well enough for others to understand. With there being a language barrier for others it feels good to be able to break that. 

Being able to speak my native language also breaks the stereotype of this generation; being that Asian-Americans, more specifically Cambodian-Americans do not know how to speak their native language Khmer. A lot of my friends barely understand a word but I am lucky enough to understand almost everything that being said. Sometimes I feel embarrassed I cannot speak well but then I remember I am fortunate enough to be able to communicate with other Khmer people. 

Khmer was never really a new language for me but my advice to anyone who is trying to learn Khmer or simply another language is to be consistent and patient. It was hard for me although I was already exposed to it so I would imagine that it would be even more difficult to start fresh from scratch. I had spent every day studying for about thirty minutes or so going over the same sections until I was confident enough to move on. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work and I have yet to perfect my craft, but if I am able to, so are you. 

Through our language, we are able to express ourselves in ways others cannot, it represents our culture, emotions, our history, along with many other things. Our language defines and showcases many aspects of who we really are. It’s something that we should all be proud to carry around with us and to pass on to future generations.