More and more people out there speak more than one language – though honestly, if you don’t live in America, this has been the norm for quite some time.

If you are someone who lives in the first world and only speaks one language you’re probably American – and here are 17 things bilinguals (or more-linguals) say you’ll never understand.

17. The brain fog.

Brain fog, when asked to translate, at a critical vocabulary moment. You need that one word to make the perfect translation. But it is not there.

16. There are a few things.

The fact that I no longer “translate” in my head when I use my second language.

The fact that I can be unaware which language I am reading.

I have a bit of a stutter in one language but not the other.

Jokes that work in both languages are the funniest.

15. It’s exhausting.

Family visits with outsiders are exhausted in a bilingual household. You are having dinner. There’s a good topic everyone wants to pitch into. Suddenly it becomes overly engaging and language speeds up between 3 out of 4 people. A B & C are on a roll having a good time.

You notice an angry glare directed at you as the 4th D can no longer keep up. It is your job as The Translator to make sure everyone is included.

Which then means that you have to mentally pause a still moving conversation and recap to D. However the original 2, A & B will still expect you to contribute to the conversation and keep rolling with it.

Having caught up, person that was excluded D starts adding in again. C is comfortable and engages D with their native language. A and B absorb the new content and listen in. Before you know it the languages have flipped as everyone knows at least a little of that one as well.

However eventually B reaches the limit of their understanding. You notice a confused glare directed at you The Translator…

Rinse and repeat over the whole week and it explains why I need a holiday after being on ‘holiday’ visiting my parents.

14. It doesn’t register.

I often don’t remember whether something was in English or Spanish.

Especially if it was a conversation with bilingual friends – I can tell you what they said, but not what language it was said in.

13. The sayings are hard.

The struggle of explaining / understanding sayings. Americans use a lot of sayings like “let’s play it by ear” , and in Spanish we also have sayings that don’t quite translate.

Also when I’m too excited/ angry etc my brain switches to my native language and can’t quite express myself correctly the other language.

12. No such thing.

Literal translations rarely work.

A lot of monolingual people seem to think other languages are like their language but with other words, and every word as an equivalent.

11. Hard to remember everything.

Forgetting words from your native language if you are using the second language too much.

I have lost count of how many times I knew what I wanted to say in any other language, yet I forgot how to say it on my own native language. I end up remembering them later on anyways, but it is such an embarrassing feeling.

10. Everyone has an accent.

Having an “accent” regardless of which language you’re speaking.

Edit: Learning a language allows you to feel better understood as we interact and build connections with others. So it’s frustrating when you feel as though you’re not communicating as clearly as you would like to express yourself. It’s been great to feel understood!

I’ve enjoyed reading through the comments and learning that there’s a lot of people that are actively becoming multicultural.

9. Back and forth.

Speaking two languages at the same time. Usually because you forget certain words in one language but remember it in the other or because a word is easier to say.

“Je n’ai aucune idée what the f**k you’re talking about.”

8. A shocking realization.

Yes! I have lived in the US for a very long time before travelling back to my country of birth. I was shocked when my old friends told me at our reunion that I had an accent when I spoke my native language.

The accent disappeared after several days of me being in the environment where I only used my native language, but it was a shocking realization to me that I had an accent in the language that was native to me.

7. It’s confusing.

Seriously, I don’t know why but I can count MULTIPLE TIMES where in french class my brain goes: “Not english? Must be Mandarin time!” because I speak Mandarin and I just end up saying thank you in Mandarin to my french teacher and I just die of awkwardness.

6. More than one skill.

Translating is a whole different skill than speaking another language.

When I first learnt english, I would translate things in my head to understand them. As I became fluent, I stopped doing that because I didn’t need to. When someone speaks to me in english, I don’t translate stuff in my head back to french to understand them, I just automatically understand it.

Cue to if someone speaks english, and another person doesn’t, and ask me “hey, can you translate what he said ?” : I completely suck at it, I can ultimately do it but it means I need to take what was said in english, and reprocess it in french and find the most adequate words for translation and it’s honestly not that easy to do.

5. It’s pretty common.

My ex was native Spanish and I English but we could both speak each others language, and it would often naturally mix to Spanglish based on what was easier, which I think is common.

Also my sister speaks some Spanish and often we will speak to each other in a weird mix of intentionally broken English, Spanish, and straight up gibberish and will still be able to understand. We do it bc we think it’s funny.

But it also makes you realize language in general is kinda weird and funny.

4. Too many variants.

How impossible it is to translate words when there is only one word for something in one language but multiple variants of it in another.

For instance, the word for cousin in English is just “cousin,” but there are eight different words for cousin in Chinese, all extremely specific – older male on maternal side, older female on maternal side, younger male on maternal side, younger female on maternal side, older male on paternal side, older female on paternal side, younger male on paternal side, and younger female on paternal side. There is no general cover-all term for “cousin.”

So when an English speaker says, “I was having dinner with my cousin last week” – how do you translate that into Chinese, for a Chinese audience, without knowing which of the 8 cousin categories it falls into? It’s not like you can pause mid-flow on stage and ask the speaker to give you information about the cousin’s age, gender and family line. It creates a “404 Error: Cannot Compute” in the interpreter’s brain.

If you are ever giving a speech in English to a Chinese audience and want to see a look of crazed terror on your interpreter’s face, just use the word “cousin” and watch the panic and despair unfold.

Source: was an interpreter

3. No sense.

Some jokes make no sense in other languages.

…especially wordplay, puns, sayings, idioms or spoonerisms.

2. Not straightforward.

That the way language is constructed is not straightforward. It’s not just a different set of words and rules of grammar, it’s kind of a whole different way of processing thoughts into speech.

1. Dang it!

Forgetting a word in every language that you know lol

It’s a whole big world out there, y’all.

Learn another language – live a little!