The language-processing difficulties described here belong to my past. I no longer experience them; the practical lessons remain available to readers facing similar difficulties.
At school, I could seem articulate, knowledgeable and full of ideas. Speaking Mandarin at home, I could seem much slower and less capable. The change of language altered how much of my thinking I could communicate.
In upper primary school, I began calling these experiences my “English Self” and “Mandarin Self”. Learning to work with them meant more than learning vocabulary. I needed ways to make myself understood without treating every conversation as a test of my weaker language.
When speaking less felt safer
I had a language delay. After I became able to speak, I still spoke softly and rarely. But the difficulty was not the same in every language.
Speaking Mandarin to my mother was difficult, so I said little. Speaking English was easier, and I spoke much more. Someone who knew me mainly in one language could therefore encounter a very different amount of speech from someone who knew me in the other.
There was another layer. I learnt that people often disliked, disapproved of or made fun of what I said. Even before I had the conscious sense of self I later developed, I could sense the unpleasantness. Speaking less and speaking softly became instinctive ways to avoid it.
This was not a carefully reasoned decision to remain quiet. I did not need to formulate “People will judge me, so I must protect myself” before the unpleasantness affected how I responded. The retreat could happen without that explanation being available to me.
English made it easier to find and express words. It did not make every encounter welcoming. Having more language available and feeling free to use it were different things.
Rachel Tan writes about the connection she sees between her selective mutism and childhood trauma. Her account brings attention to silence and whispering as self-protection. My history includes several strands that I need to keep distinct: early language delay, the greater difficulty of Mandarin, and an instinctive reduction of speech after unpleasant responses from others. Recognising a point of contact between our accounts does not make them the same account.
More than a request to speak louder
A louder question would not make Mandarin easier for me to formulate. More English vocabulary would not by itself remove the expectation that speaking might bring an unpleasant response. A reassuring listener could make an encounter different without instantly changing an established pattern of soft speech.
The same visible result could therefore call for different kinds of help. The person listening needed to know which language gave me better access to what I wanted to say. I also needed opportunities to express something without its content becoming an excuse to ridicule me.
That did not mean every statement should go uncorrected. I could mispronounce a word, misunderstand someone or say something that affected them badly. The useful response was to help me recognise and address the specific problem. Mockery supplied unpleasantness without necessarily supplying the missing understanding.
I would separate getting a message across from practising a skill. During an important exchange, use the language and method that make the message clearest. At an agreed time for practice, there can be room to slow down, ask about a pronunciation and try again. Every conversation need not become a lesson.
The aim is not simply more words or a louder voice. It is being able to communicate what matters, hear what needs correcting and remain a participant in the exchange.
Knowing the written word was not enough
I grew up when the Internet was still in its early days as a public resource. I had no AI tools to help with translation or language learning. Books supplied most of my English, giving me a formal way of speaking and a vocabulary that was not always matched by my pronunciation.
I knew words on the page without necessarily knowing how people said them. “Speculate” became “spec-tech-culate”. “Volunteer” became “bore-larn-tier”, which gave my classmates another reason to laugh.
Reading a word, recognising it in speech, pronouncing it and using it in a conversation were separate tasks. More reading would not necessarily reveal a pronunciation mistake. I needed to hear the word and connect that sound with the one I knew on the page.
For a word I need to use, a useful practice is to hear it, say it and try it in the sentence where I need it. If somebody corrects me, the usable part is the correct pronunciation and a chance to try again, not the laughter surrounding it.
A teacher’s private correction at an August 2018 Waldorf workshop later made another pronunciation script visible to me. Knowing that a pronunciation needed changing did not immediately make the new version automatic. The same workshop also revealed that I still feared speaking.
Recognising a character was easier than writing it
There was also a difficulty with the writing system, separate from speaking Mandarin. In English, I learnt the alphabet and arranged the same letters in different ways. In Chinese, I had to remember thousands of different character forms. Writing one wrongly could lose me the mark in a spelling test.
I could recognise characters more easily than I could remember how to write them. Seeing a familiar form in front of me was not the same as reconstructing it from memory. The difficulty was less about the language itself than the way it was encoded in writing.
The translation inside a reply
English was the language in which I could most readily explore ideas. Mandarin was the language I used mostly at home, where I struggled to express the abstract things I wanted to discuss.
Eventually, I assigned communication and social processing to my English Self. My Mandarin Self became a translator. When somebody spoke Mandarin, I translated it into English, worked out its meaning, constructed an answer and translated that answer back into Mandarin.
This helped me cope, but it took time. My Chinese teacher remarked that I wrote Chinese essays as though they were in English. When speaking Mandarin, I could stutter because the translation could not keep pace.
A pause therefore did not necessarily mean that I had no answer. It could mean that the answer had several stages to pass through before anyone heard it.
When a conversation matters, I would make that process visible: “I understand better in English. Give me a moment to work out how to say this in Mandarin.” Where both people can use them, a written answer, a few key terms or a diagram may communicate the point more accurately than an immediate spoken reply.
Repeating the question more loudly does not remove a translation stage. Changing the question halfway through can add another task before the first is complete.
Let someone learn my language too
My sister adapted to the way I communicated. She used more formal English with me than with other people and became familiar with my special terminology. She still criticised my social mistakes, but we had a way of speaking that made understanding easier.
I need not wait until I can express everything in somebody else’s preferred form before asking to be understood. Equally, my private terminology does not become obvious simply because it is precise to me. Explain an unfamiliar term, use an example and check what the other person understood.
For practical matters, agreement needs to survive the conversation. Saying “yes” is less useful than confirming the action: what I will do, when, and what I should ask about if something remains unclear.
Have a reason to practise the harder language
Later, many people attending my autism sharing sessions understood Mandarin better than English. I wanted my experiences to be useful to them, so I chose to speak Mandarin despite disliking it. I also began thinking directly in Mandarin rather than always translating through English.
There was a purpose I valued: reaching the people who needed the information. That gave the difficulty a different place in my decision.
I would separate learning from getting something important done. A relaxed practice conversation can allow pauses and correction. An urgent instruction needs the clearest workable communication available. Choosing that method is not giving up on learning; it keeps the immediate task from failing while the skill is still developing.