Guides

Keeping a journal in two languages.

Speak the way you do at home4 minute read

Your grandmother scolded you in one language and praised you in another. You count in the first, argue in the second, and dream in whichever arrives. Then you sit down to write in a journal and it asks you, without quite saying so, to pick one.

If you grew up between languages, that choice costs something every time you make it. Some memories simply do not live in translation.

A memory comes back in the language it happened in

People who study bilingual memory have found something you probably already know from the inside. Ask someone about their past in the language they spoke as a child, and the memories that surface tend to come from childhood. Ask in the language they learned later, and later years come back. The language is not a label on the memory. It is part of how the memory is kept.

The feeling travels with it. A word of comfort or a telling-off in your first language lands in the body in a way its translation does not. That is why writing about your mother’s kitchen in the language of your office can feel like describing a photograph of a meal.

You are allowed to mix

Switching languages mid-sentence is not a failure to speak either one properly. It is how millions of people actually talk at home, and it is precise: you reach for the word that fits, wherever it lives. A journal is the one place nobody needs to follow you, so there is no reason to tidy that away.

A few habits help:

Tell each memory in the language it happened in. If the story arrives in two, let it. Translate later, or never.
Keep the exact words people said. What your father called you when he was pleased is not the same sentence in English. Keep his.
Write names the way they were spoken. A person is one person whether you call her 阿嬷, Ah Ma or Grandma. Use whichever comes out, and note that they are the same.
Leave the untranslatable alone. If a word has no equivalent, the word is the entry.

Say it out loud

For many people the home language is spoken far more than it is written. You may be fluent at the dinner table and slow on a keyboard, or never have been taught the script at all. Speaking removes that barrier completely. You do not have to spell your childhood. You only have to say it.

It also keeps the sound of things: the particle at the end of a sentence, the borrowed word, the way an aunt’s name was always said twice. Those are exactly the details that vanish first.

Questions for the language of home

What did the adults call you when you were small? Say each name the way they said it.
A phrase from your childhood that you have never managed to translate.
What language were you told off in? What language were you comforted in?
The food you cannot describe properly in any other language. Describe it in that one.
A song or a rhyme someone sang to you. Sing it, or say it.
Something you can say in one of your languages that you could never say in the other.

For the generations on either side of you

If your parents or grandparents are still here, their stories are in their language, not yours. Ask them in it, and keep what they say as they said it. A translation can always be made later. The voice cannot.

And if you have children who are losing the language, a journal kept in it is one of the few things you can hand them that still sounds like home.

How Lapriland handles it

You talk the way you talk. If that is two languages in one sentence, it is written down as two languages in one sentence, word for word. If you would rather read everything in one language, that is a setting you can turn on. A Name Book keeps one person as one person however their name was said, so 阿明 and Ah Ming do not become two strangers in your own story. For now the screens themselves are in English. What you say can be in anything.