My English is still elementary, if not broken.
But recently I discovered that I don’t censor or control myself as much in English as I do in Turkish. It’s this constant child-like feeling: short sentences, simple paragraph without almost any proverbs or local expressions, no historical connotations whatsoever. Definitely a different person than the one I know for the past 25 years, almost as if I’m rediscovering daily life from scratch.
One might rightfully argue that not all immigrants have the same level of foreign language. But all non-native language speakers go through this child-like stage at some point when they first move to a new country, trying to adapt not only to the culture or language, but also to this new person they discover in themselves, speaking an in-between-language all day where jokes aren’t as funny and thoughts aren’t as immediate. Unlike home, words are not connected to a collective memory but to a constant sense of floating.
Maybe it’s a different form of expression.
I wonder how it would translate into image.
