What We Lose When We Don't Speak the Same Language as Our Immigrant Parents | Hacker News Reader

What We Lose When We Don't Speak the Same Language as Our Immigrant Parents

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25 pointshomarp34 comments

I was born in Crimea in a Russian speaking family that lived mostly in Ukraine and had a great grandmother born in Moldova before WW2 who spoke Yiddish and Russian. The recent war has basically made me not want to speak Russian again. It's been useful when I travel (once in Japan weirdly and once in Cyprus).

But I don't consider Russia to be my ancestral home. I don't even really consider Ukraine to be either.

I'm jealous of people like in this article who have a clear national heritage they can draw on.

Nationalism is overrated and often poisonous. Reading this comment I can’t help but think you can have a deep connection and pride with your incredibly varied cultural heritage without needing to commit yourself to being one thing or another. Nothing is simple and you as an individual certainly do not need to be.

I don't know, I think I am not even understanding nationalism and national heritage on a deeper level. I still live where I was born, one side of my family from here and the other is from a different, neighboring country. I often feel they're closer to the local culture here than the rest of the country I live in, at other times it's the opposite. But in general I don't feel I could name a lot of things where I agree on the culture I'm supposed to be having. When on vacation I'm always glad to not run into fellow countrymen because I usually find them annoying. So what does cultural heritage actually mean and what is it good for? I've been on the internet since I was 15, depending on the day of the week I write and read more English than my native language (at times even speaking it the whole day at work). It's not that I hate my country but I don't think I'm seeing a lot of positive points either.

National heritage is not only a matter of utility for the ease of cross-nation communication. It comes with some debts we all have to pay to really earn it.

> even though I knew that what they were really saying was that I was “articulate for being Black”

I can understand where this comes from, but I also wonder, how could one honestly compliment someone like the author for being articulate without it being taken this way? I sense it as someone having a chip on their shoulder (maybe for good reason), but it seems some folks are looking for offense when none is intended.

If you can tell someone has a chip on their shoulder, I'd just steer clear of them in general. It's not your job to carefully craft compliments so they don't get upset.

When was the last time you've heard a non-black person described as articulate? I can't think of any, personally.

Well, maybe you should meet more people? I have black cousins whom I would absolutely describe as articulate.

Would you remember if you had?

Yes, I'm not a goldfish.

You have unusual metrics.

What a clever turn of phrase!

> ow could one honestly compliment someone like the author for being articulate without it being taken this way

Maybe, just don’t? Compliment them about something else instead.

Generic praise is kind of useless in the first place. Make your compliments specific. "You said, '<something you enjoyed>.' What a clever turn of phrase!"

Haven't read the article yet, but I re-learned the language my family lost about 3 generations ago. Studied over there in university, returned to my ancestral village... felt like it filled in a missing piece. It feels a bit like a superpower now to be able to read news in another language (or two) in order to get a different perspective on the world.

If I go three generations back (great-grandparents), I'd have to learn at least three languages other than english. It can be rewarding to learn this stuff, but it scales about as well as hyphenated last names.

The typical track is: First generation speaks their native language at home. Second generation is bilingual. Third generation is monolingual english. It sounds like the author tried to accelerate that process and it blew up in her face.

I do wonder if the author will teach her kids korean. I'm guessing she'll try, but I doubt they'll be as fluent as she is.

>It sounds like the author tried to accelerate that process and it blew up in her face.

Someone should be free to speak in and learn or not learn any language they want. Deciding you don't want to speak a language anymore in order to fit in seems perfectly rational. Why is the mother forcing the daughter to take Korean lessons in order to continue speaking to her, instead of her taking English lessons?

Kids are unfit for taking long term decisions! Their brain is not properly develop yet (and won’t be till they are 18/20) therefore it is up to the mother to intervene and make the right choice!

Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu is a neat but heartbreaking short story about this topic. It won a ton of awards—Nebula, Hugo, etc. definitely worth reading.

This article sponsored by: every immigrant parent ever.

Not necessarily: my mother mainly suppressed the languages she had grown up with as the country we were living in (and where I was born) had explicit racial laws that discouraged non-white immigration and she didn’t want us to suffer for either speaking a wog language or error English skills. We pretty much used only words for things that couldn’t really be expressed in English.

She was initially unhappy with my son not being raised primarily in English though she eventually came around.

I’m an immigrant parent! I moved from Canada to the US in the mid-90’s. I guess my version of this would be hoping my kids spell words like colour, neighbour, and flavour correctly. :)

I second the sibling comment: not emigrating is no guarantee that your language is safe. For example, there's a long history of trying to suppress the Ukrainian language [1], and until very recently, the Irish language was dominant in Ireland, but is now nearly extinct [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Ukrainian_langua...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Irish_language

Back of the envelope maths here, but there must be hundreds of millions of people in Asia who can't speak the same language their grandparents spoke.

Public schools seem to be a big factor in languages dying off. But you also can't ignore the prestige factor - "my native language is small/backwards/insular/unsophisticated, if I want to get ahead in life I better speak the prestige one and teach it to my kids".

I am one of them. I speak a language that is not widely prevalent in my multi-lingual country. I never grew up around people who spoke it (except family members). My command over that language is poor, but my English is excellent. I speak in that language with my grandmother because I don’t feel judged for not being fluent in it, and I genuinely want to learn the language. But I don’t speak it in front of other people who know this language.

>I hated that people around me would put me in a category that was convenient for them. Because race is a pervasive concept in the U.S., it was easiest for people to label me as Black because I look Black. But I’m not only Black.

This woman is an excellent example of the ignorance, blindness, and cultural narcissism of the modern progressive movement. I am a European who grew up in Korea in the late 90s-00s, in a large city.

Everywhere I went, almost every korean within view would silently stare. The children would point, yell "miguk saram! (Korean for American person)" publicly, sometimes yell "puk yoo!" with middle fingers awkwardly displayed and run away laughing when I wasn't with my parents. Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.

Based on my extensive travel across Asia, the US until recently was one of the least racist countries I have been to. The grand irony here is that it is the identitarian authoritarians who are forcing intersectionality down everyone's throats, and breeding racism.

I'm flagging this post because it is ignorant, narcissistic, political propaganda, and the flawed, accusatory assumptions upon which it is based are flamebait.

> I am a European.

> Based on my extensive travel across Asia, the US until recently was one of the least racist countries I have been to.

These personal anecdotes are beautiful, but you must realize that unlike in Asia, you aren't in the outgroup when you are traveling through the US.

Wouldn't that heavily depend on which part of the US?

> Yet the author is completely unaware, totally conditioned to believe unquestioningly that the US has uniquely "pervasive" focus on race.

That’s weird, given in the very article she described an incident where she was called ugly names for being black while in Korea. Crazy how she didn’t even notice that happening to her, and so obviously believes it’s entirely a US issue.

It is weird. She didn't write just "race is a pervasive concept" - she explicitly added "in the U.S." to it, singling out the U.S. despite her own experience telling her it's just as or more pervasive elsewhere.

Well, that’s why I’m glad we’ve got you here, so she can better understand her own experiences.

I'm not explaining them to her, but to others. If the story had been about two assaults, one by a black man and one by a white man, and then she had singled out only one of them with "violence is pervasive in the black community", you would be perfectly capable of understanding the difference.

Yet make it about countries, and this kind of double-standard exceptionalism gets a pass.

You are taking American conceptual categories and applying them to explain things elsewhere in the world. I think that's a mistake.

"Races" are fundamentally colonial categories. When you are in a world of ethnic nation states, the lines separating the ingroup from various outgroups are based on combinations of ethnicity, culture, religion, language, and history. The differences are often very subtle by American standards. After all, the most important outgroups often consist of people very much like you who happen to live across the border.

In many Asian and European countries, discrimination is primarily based on whether people perceive you as a foreigner or a local, and on how favorably people view that particular group of foreigners. That correlates with what Americans would call "race", but there are important differences. America in contrast focuses much more on "race". You can often fit in better as a white foreigner than a black American, which is weird by European standards. All those differences that separate us Europeans from each other suddenly vanish, and you can easily fit in the ingroup, at least if you don't make too much noise about your foreignness.

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