I was thinking – being Polish in England. What does it mean? Well, it means that if you know English you are a non-native speaker of the language, and your mind is a bilingual mind. Trivial.

What is not so trivial though, is how to deal with the fact that I have to learn to think in a way the English language works.

I have been coming to the UK since I was 11 and have been learning English for around 14 years. Even though linguistically developed since my childhood, I still struggle with some issues concerning the use of my second language.

Some time ago I discovered that talking about feelings and expressing them in my second language isn’t the easiest thing to do. Being brought up in a Polish linguistic community I have learnt that we have certain ways of talking and describing our feelings. It is natural that in our mother tongues we attach certain emotions to some words but unfortunately translating these emotions to another language is not always very efficient.

The words seem to be empty, just learnt in order to communicate but not to express genuine emotions. ‘I love you’ may become very meaningless sometimes, and there is a drive to express yourself in your own language but unfortunately the ‘other half’ may not only not understand what you say, but also do not attach any emotions to these words.

What is more, I do not find English as descriptive as my own language is and it is certainly not because of the lack of vocabulary. Sometimes I cannot express myself adequately to the state of my emotions. I do feel that I did not say enough and that there is a lack of expressiveness in my words (no, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and citing them out loud does not help).

Maybe the emptiness of the words concerning emotions depends on the time of exposure to the language we live in, and after x years my mind will create emotional associations with certain lexical items. For now, I have to live with the fact that my bilingual mind does not accept this concept (yet!).