Cross-cultural communication （30）　

30）What is my native language?
I was asked to visit a flight attendant who was a passenger on a F airline, so I took a taxi to the hotel in the afternoon after finishing my morning rounds. When I went to the room, the patient was a Caucasian woman. I thought she would at least greet me in French, but she greeted me in fluent Japanese, saying, “I'm sorry to trouble you with a house call. The illness itself was thought to be a mild viral gastroenteritis, and the symptoms were improving, so there were almost no problems. There were no problems with her Japanese at the medical interview or the conversation during the examination, either. Perhaps because she realized that the condition of her illness was not serious and she was relaxed, she became quite talkative and told me about her life story in fluent Japanese.

She is half-Japanese, born to an Australian father and a Japanese mother, and spent half her childhood in Japan and half in Australia. After graduating from university, she worked in France as an intern in the tourism industry, and while she was there she married a Frenchman. After having children and settling down a little, she was formally employed by the airline company she works for now. So she can speak Japanese, English and French almost naturally.

“So you're a trilingual. That's wonderful.” I said. ‘It's not wonderful at all. I'm not good at any of the languages, and I don't feel like they're my native language,’ she replied, not being modest, but rather expressing her true feelings.

Even though her Japanese sounds fluent on the surface, she says that she can only vaguely understand words that she doesn't use very often in everyday life, such as receipts and medical certificates. She says that there are many words like this in English and French too. Perhaps this is what gives her the feeling that they don't feel like her native language.

Next time, I would like to think a little more about the merits and demerits of learning multiple languages based on my own experiences so far.

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