by Raniel Santos

Growing up, I was surrounded by Filipino culture. My parents spoke Tagalog to each other, our cable package allowed us to watch teleseryes on The Filipino Channel and my mom cooked us dishes like tinola and chicken adobo almost every dinner.

While I was encouraged to learn Tagalog, it was never enforced at home. My parents would talk to me and my sister in both our native tongue and English. However, as we started attending school, they began translating to mainly speaking English rather than actively teaching us Tagalog.

My mom later told me this was because she wanted us to have more freedom than she had as a child. While I’m grateful to have had that freedom, I do regret not taking the initiative to learn to speak Tagalog.

As a teenager, it led to me to feel out of place among fellow Filipino Americans. Everyone in my high school’s Filipino culture club seemed more in tune with our culture than I was.

These days, I try to learn by listening in on family members’ conversations during parties and listening to plenty of Filipino-language pop music. But it is incredibly difficult for any of it to sink in as an adult; I usually wind up looking for English translations online.

While driving around with my mom she would always criticize what I was doing in Tagalog, each time I grew more frustrated and distracted as I tried to translate her words in my head. In the end, I would get frustrated and tell her to repeat the same thing in English because I could not understand what she was saying.

My biggest day-to-day struggle now is communicating with my grandma. Not only is she not very fluent in English, but she is also hard of hearing. We both try our best to understand each other, but it is extremely frustrating for the both of us.

One reason for this is simply because as an adult, life becomes more complicated and you take on more responsibilities. For many, that means they cannot devote much time to fully engaging with their culture to learn t6hat language, or they will be left behind.

A 2014 MIT study expands on this by saying adults’ higher developed cognitive skills inhibit their ability to learn a new language because they tend to over-analyze. As a serial overthinker due to a combination of ADHD and severe anxiety, this contextualizes why I personally have had a hard time grasping Tagalog.

Not to mention, in a political climate discourages some from speaking certain languages in public, lest they risk detainment by ICE, it is crucial to maintain ties with more tangible aspects of culture.

This is also why I’m still going to try, even if it takes me years.

English is still seen as the universal language; even in the Philippines, students are taught in English. They are encouraged to learn English as a second language in order to have a leg up in the international workforce.

But something gets lost when minorities assimilate, a part of their identity that connects them to their families gets left behind. I do not want to lose that, so I am going to keep trying to find it for myself.