A fear that I recently became aware and anxious of is the thought of receptive bilingualism. Hungarian is my first language and it was the language that my family used to speak at home. Since I grew up in the states, this language barrier made it difficult for me to learn English in elementary school, so overtime we transitioned to speaking English at home. Recently I became aware of the toll this has taken on my Hungarian. During video calls with my grandparents, I’d always answer their questions with a simple ‘igen’ (yes) or ‘nem’ (no), and would ask my mother to help me formulate more difficult sentences. Concomitantly, I would understand exactly what they were saying but would struggle to translate my english thoughts.
The main obstacle I can think of here is that this is a mental and intangible fear and I would need a physical way to articulate it. I would like my project to represent someone talking to me in Hungarian and then represent me trying to respond. This could be physically represented with a head that is receiving dialogue, but not responding to what it is hearing.
Keywords:
- Translation
- Speechless
- Confused
- Anxiety
- Response
- Bilingualism
- Fading
- Lost
- Hungarian
- Grandparents
