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A love letter to the English language - This is why you mean so much to me


While this is not really a love letter (which would be privately addressed and for the eyes of one person only), it is a blog post about why English means so much to me. People often ask me whether I ever plan on going back to Germany, and when I say no, hardly anybody understands. And I usually don't explain because I know that only very few people would truly listen and understand my reasons. In this blog, I do not explain why I do not want to live in Germany, but I will explain why I want to live in a country where people speak English (and basically, Germany's not one of those countries). 

It has nothing to do with English being one of the most influential languages in the world. It has nothing to do with English being more beautiful than other languages (though to me it is). My reason for loving English is because to me it is the language of life. The language that gave me hope when there was none in my life.


It is the language of the people who taught me more about life than the people who were supposed to teach me about life. It all started when I was eight years old. My parents had given me my own TV, so I would hassle them less often. TV introduced me to two of the most influential people of my childhood: Captain Picard and Michael Jackson. While Star Trek was translated to German (and it's not even that bad, I would say), the first time I saw Michael Jackson, I did not understand a thing. It was the movie "Moonwalker" and I had turned it on when it was on a song, so not during the story. I was fascinated, but I had told that part of the story somewhere else already, so I keep this short. The result was this: I started to understand that my dream of ever telling Captain Picard something I wanted to tell him, or asking Michael Jackson for his help, would never really come true if I wasn't able to speak their language! And as a child, I was SURE that Michael Jackson or Picard would turn up in my life, and that I would only have to be able to communicate with them to get their help. 

So, I got myself some cassettes (yes, no CDs at that time yet), and as luck wanted it: a new magazine series (English for beginners or something along that line) just had started. It came out every two weeks and each issue had a cassette with it. I also got myself books from the library when I had the chance. I just wanted to be able to a) understand what Michael Jackson was singing about, and b) I wanted to be able to talk to him and Picard (and any of the other heroes who later entered my life). I wanted to be able to ask them for help. The funny thing is that the first, fully English conversations I ever had in my head were conversations I never ended up having in real life at all! 

So, English came into my life because it was the language that gave me the hope that I would one day meet someone special - and that I would need to be able to speak English to talk to him (or her, because later on I wanted to meet Janeway and Xena). The older I got, the more I also started to enjoy English for other purposes, i.e. literature. Tolkien came into my life - and of course he is one of the masters. The way he expressed ideas and told stories was just like magic to me. He took me to worlds I did not know of before, worlds I would not want to miss in my life.

English has given me access to so much so early in my life. Of course, later on, I also started having "proper" English lessons at school, and sometimes hated it because the English teachers were to anal about rules no English speaker actually cares about. But in general, I just loved everything new I could learn, new words, new sentences, new expressions. However, I had a love of languages in general - I found them exciting, and I saw them as a way to explore different worlds.

However, no language ever replaced English as my most important language. To me, it's the language that kept me alive because my hope kept me alive. I don't know where I would be now without Michael Jackson or Picard. To be totally honest: I do know. I definitely wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have made it. So that's why I want to have English around me all the time: to me, it is life, and one day I might even find that special English speaking person who would listen.

My attraction to certain English accents is another story - and the explanation for that I do not know myself! There's just a certain way, a certain type of voice that I could listen to forever. Sometimes I hear it in a Welsh person, sometimes in a person from Leicester, sometimes from a person in London, and sometimes it might not even be a native speaker - maybe it is because those voices remind me of positive experiences with fictional characters, who knows! It would make sense.

So, there you go. Take English away from me, and you might as well shoot an arrow through my heart.
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Comments

  1. kate loving shenkFebruary 7, 2015 at 11:35 AM

    Your story is sweet. Michael Jackson had quite the effect on so so many, for good reason.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elrond HalfelvenFebruary 7, 2015 at 12:46 PM

    This is fascinating, Kim. I've often wondered what it would be like to grow up with a language different than the one most popular media/entertainment is presented in. As someone who hasn't quite achieved mastery of a second language, despite three years of Spanish in high school, I'm very, very impressed by how well you've learned English. Your grasp on the language both in speech and writing is obvious, and you write far better than, I dare say, the vast majority of native English speakers.

    I remember wanting to learn a language for similar reasons. There was a Portuguese actor I really admired, and I thought that, if I were ever to meet him, I'd want to be able to speak to him in his own language (even though he was fluent in English). So I spent some time studying Portuguese, but I never really made much progress. Hah.

    Thanks again for a great piece. I enjoyed it.

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