My Broken English Is My Superpower, Not My Shame

I started writing publicly on Medium in January 2023 because of shame.

I had spent almost five years in Australia, but my English was still awkward. I occasionally sounded like a drunk Russian. You could meet my strong accent sitting on the first half of every sentence.

Although I worked as a full-time Marketing Executive and wrote daily marketing content in English, I still considered myself "not fluent enough."

I was a master of words in my homeland. I felt like someone had cut both my hands when I needed to express myself in a language I didn't have a perfect command of.

I Tested the Audience

I was at a low point in my life, mourning my father, who died 13,000 km away from me while I was locked in Australia during COVID-19.

Writing had saved me multiple times in my life, so I started writing online again. I exposed myself to an audience to see if I could write under my full name in English — as I had done in Serbian for years. (Trivia: I was a parenting influencer and blogger in Serbia. Words were my playground.)

I forced myself to publish articles one after the other, and it took me ages to deliver each one.

I was positive that people would laugh when reading my writing and maybe leave comments like:

• "Look how bad her English is."
• "Look at these obvious mistakes and Frankenstein sentences."

Did that happen?

No.

I found a community of nice, supportive people who actually liked my writing — even with all my typos and lack of deep language knowledge.

Some of them even admired my attempts after finding out I had seriously dived into learning English at age 36.

Others disregarded my occasional mistakes because my stories were interesting enough to them.

You Don't Belong There

Being an immigrant carries a fair bit of shame. That weird feeling that you don't belong.

Imagine: you're a big tree, pulled from the land and taken to another landscape.

Your roots are cut.

Your inside is broken.

Yet you must smile and try to fit into the new soil while your open wounds bleed.

That's how I felt as a new immigrant.

I still feel like that sometimes, after six years of being in a new country.

Then I realised something: Australians do not know other languages. Their eyes go wide when they realise I am a native Serbian speaker who also learned Russian and French in school. (92% of European students learn another language in school — it's simply what we do.)

The bottom line is that my English will always be better than their Serbian.

My Broken English Is My Superpower

Someone speaking broken English just means that person knows more than one language.

It's time to celebrate that achievement — not to be embarrassed by mistakes or a non-native level.

Things are even more complicated when you speak both languages simultaneously. In my family, we speak Serbian at home and English everywhere else.

My brain works at 100% speed, managing both languages at the same time. Do you know how difficult it is to think in one language and speak in another?

I speak English, but I think in Serbian.

Unlike my youngest daughter, who was 7 when we came to Australia and is now a teenager — her brain often chooses English over Serbian. It's clear why she is so much better in English than me. Her young brain is far better at constantly switching between languages.

As a professor of linguistics at Northwestern University explains:

"Every time you go to speak this new language, the other language is like, 'hey, I'm here, ready to go.' So the challenge is, you have to suppress this thing that is so automatic and so easy to do, in favour of this thing that's incredibly hard to do as you're first learning it."

This also explains why many of us sometimes struggle with our native language. I was a journalist for 12 years and was really proud of my language command and skills. After 6 years fully immersed in English, I often feel insecure about Serbian grammar and sentence style.

Instead of ending up as an average speaker of both languages, I choose to practise them both, fully immerse myself in both, and push my brain to benefit from each one.

I choose to be proud of my language knowledge and wear all my mistakes as honour badges.

If you're an immigrant struggling with the shame of imperfect English — I see you. Your accent is not a flaw. Your mistakes are not a weakness. They are proof that you had the courage to start again in a language that wasn't yours.

That's not something to be ashamed of. That's something to be proud of.

Originally published on Medium.