As a linguist, I find this question frustrating, and as a student of both languages, I hear it far too often and can never answer it. English is my first language and the language spoken in my home, but I have been exposed to Spanish for nearly as long. I have been learning Spanish from the moment my grandparents cooed to me in their native language a few hours after I was born. Filled with constant ups and downs from changes in linguistic exposure and practice, my proficiency in Spanish is a rollercoaster I’ve been building for 21 years, from my grandparents to the Spanish lessons I received in school to my visit to Spain two years ago. In comparison, my acquisition of Arabic is a mountain I’ve only just begun to climb. I picked up a bit of spoken dialect while living in Morocco in 2018, and I began to formally learn the language a few months later during college. My experiences learning these languages could not be more different; my motivations towards learning as well as the barriers to acquisition are different. My future in each is different. I’ve learned from studies in linguistic theory that assigning arbitrary labels like ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ to any language undermines its complexity and its speakers, but I’ve learned from my experience that every acquisition is a journey; it is easy and hard and every adjective in between.

While many of my relatives are bilingual, having a monolingual, English-speaking mother means I’ve nearly always been able to see language barriers. Even families that speak the same language can have problems with miscommunication, but when family members are trying to convey important messages across language, what gets “lost in translation” becomes even more important. From the time I was a baby, both my immediate and extended family have had miscommunication issues with things like arranging childcare, communicating health information, and giving instructions. Because of these language barriers, I’ve always felt a pressure from my mother to learn Spanish so that I could help my father fill the gap between her and her Spanish-speaking in-laws. However, once I became a bit older, that pressure turned into a desire to form that bridge between languages, to communicate with my grandparents more effectively and deeply, to help the stressed traveler at Penn Station who needs directions, and to converse with hundreds of millions of people across language and culture.

While many similar desires fueled my study of Arabic, I never felt that same need to learn the language; it was just something that I wanted to do. At first, my interest in Arabic revolved around an interest in Middle Eastern politics. While my interests have shifted over the past few years, after living in Morocco for a few months and planning to live in the Arab world for many, many more, I remain deeply invested in the culture. Overall, the reason I continue to study Arabic is because I enjoy it, something that is more difficult for me to say about my study of Spanish. While my need to continue learning Spanish comes from my environment and the people around me, my need to learn more and more Arabic comes from within me: it’s a thirst that I can’t satiate.

As my interests in each language differ, so do the barriers to learning them. Acquiring a new language is always challenging, but I’ve had many more resources and opportunities to help me learn Spanish than Arabic. I have received formal Spanish lessons through the public school system since I was six years old, whereas my first year of college was the first time I was able to enroll in an Arabic course. There are also many more websites, apps, and media designed for Spanish language learning than the Arabic equivalent. I also have more exposure to the Spanish language in my day-to-day life: beyond my relatives, growing up in Northern New Jersey, I’ve met countless Spanish speakers, but only a handful of Arabic speakers. Before going abroad or starting college, I had very little exposure to Arabic conversation, and even since beginning college, I have had hardly any experience conversing for anything more than educational purposes. In contrast to my time spent in Spain, while I was in Morocco, I had no formal training in Arabic, and while I picked up some conversational Arabic, I was not able to practice any language that I’d actually studied. I hope to study abroad in an Arabic-speaking country, but, as of right now, I have much more real-life experience using Spanish than Arabic.

Nonetheless, one of the biggest barriers to my Spanish learning is barely applicable to my Arabic learning: my insecurity. While not being able to recall something in Arabic can be frustrating, when I am practicing Spanish, I find myself disappointed in how little I truly know how to express, despite learning the language for so many years. I find myself reluctant to practice at all, knowing how difficult it will be and feeling like I don’t actually know Spanish at all. While my Arabic skills are lightyears away from flawless, I don’t expect myself to know things the way that I do with Spanish, regardless of how unrealistic those expectations may be. A conversation in Spanish often leaves me frustrated and ashamed of how little I was able to express, whereas a conversation in Arabic leaves me excited over how much my conversational skills have improved from a year or two ago.

This past semester, when confronted with an overbooked schedule, I made an important decision: to drop my Spanish class. Before then, I’d been struggling to figure out how both Spanish and Arabic fit into the academic plan for the rest of my undergraduate education. However, I realized that my interest in Spanish was much more recreational: I wanted to chat with my grandparents and listen to Latin American alt rock music and watch La casa de papel with the captions off. While my interest in Arabic is also recreational, it’s academic as well. It’s the language I plan to translate from and, because of the many differences from English, it’s the language I enjoy analyzing syntactically and semantically in my linguistics classes.

Overall, I am in very different places with each of my language acquisitions. While I could attempt to choose which language was easier for me to learn, the truth is that my linguistic journeys in both languages will never be the same. My Spanish skills feel like an innate ability that I have been gradually building since birth, a roller coaster that has been under construction for over two decades. While it is fully operational and well trafficked, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, perhaps an extra loop or some repainting. Meanwhile, my Arabic skills feel more like a mountain, a large land mass full of flora and fauna, of which I have only explored a small section. While I’ve acquired the basics of hiking a mountain and I’ve cataloged a few flowers, much of its beauty is still slightly out of reach, waiting to be discovered.

Jaimie is a junior at Smith college and a linguistics major and Arabic minor planning to continue their language studies abroad as soon as it safe to do so. Jaimie hopes to help bridge gaps in linguistic and cultural understanding between communities in the US and the Middle East.

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