Being young and moving around seems like a virtue but when it comes to learning the local language, going to school to learn with natives.  Let us just say that the concept is completely thrown out the window. You are expected to understand the weird symbols and speak, read, and write in them within the few months and do not forget the other subject’s math and history and more. Put together with all this, it is a one nightmarish journey for someone entering a new country and learning each language, culture, and so on.  

Egypt 2010, a four-year-old is told to learn Arabic. Might seem easy, right? No. Its utterly hard, according to google it takes six years to master the language, SIX LONG YEARS. It felt like I was thrown in the middle with no guide to learn the alphabet. They only decided to play a song with it and not even try to teach. And the whole switcheroo. When it came to my parents, they never spoke it either or anything I just had to figure it out, learn every aspect of this language from base, to make matters worse they did not use the same words to name numbers they had their own way of saying it. My teachers  did not teach anything about compounding words or anything of such which made speaking the language much harder, remember being also sent to disciplinary action cause apparently I did not listen to my teachers, The only reason that I even managed to learn enough to keep up with the people is cartoons. My mom would yell at me for watching too much TV, but honestly, I did not care because they helped me learn more than anything.  

Sri Lanka 2014, as an eight-year-old I had to move to Sri Lanka and guess what, now all that hard work of learning Arabic just thrown out the window and now not one but I had to learn two different languages one Sinhalese and two English the British version, it’s important to mention British I will come back to it later.  This time it was worse cause I was older and guess what I was expected to know this and when I said I did not understand I got the looks like how does an eight-year-old not understand. I went through all the necessary classes and kept going at it but being young and having to learn not a language but a different history and keeping up with math. Well, that was like putting so much stuff in one place to the point it tries to burst out, but you cannot complain, or squeak just move ahead with the learning. But after some brutal months of learning and going to classes I finally felt like I understood the basics of the languages. 

I wish that were the end of the story but sadly no, USA 2016, a ten-year-old when I thought I finally settled, the news came, we are moving AGAIN. When I got here, I thought things would be easier cause its only English, right, not the people here spoke an English so different and so fast. So, we started learning another dialect of a language from the start. This time we started with my elementary teacher who spoke to me like there was no tomorrow, got a lot of critics and missed a lot of stuff just because I was not able to catch and learn fast enough but I guess since I was put through hell already my brain said don’t worry I will take care of it,  and managed to grasp this dialect at much ease then the others. But nonetheless I did fail all my math, and history related stuff in the meantime. I really mastered the USA English only when I entered my seventh grade where my English teacher, such a nice lady, helped me get to the understanding and proficiency of this language as I am today.  

But all I can say is this, just because we travel and see that moving around seems cool just remember as kids that’s the worst nightmare cause you don’t get helped to learn the local language and your met with high expectation to fulfill, but struggle and play tug of war just to make everyone happy.