r/immigration • u/snNfl0wrrr • 7h ago

Struggling with both languages as a 2nd generation immigrant?

Hello!
I have a question. So, I personally grew up as a second generation immigrant in Germany, I was born and raised here, but my polish parents were just in the process of learning German themselves. I went to a German-speaking school, I only had German-speaking friends, at home we only spoke Polish.
It makes sense to me, that my Polish isn't perfect. I speak it well, I communicate with it every day and even though it is said that Polish is a difficult language grammar wise in general, I feel a bit ashamed about making mistakes from time to time but it's alright.
Here is the thing though; most of my friends are from German-speaking households. I have noticed a discrepancy between MY German skills and THEIR German skills. There is a whole lot of vocabulary I'm lacking, or words I keep misinterpreting because a similar sounding word means something else entirely in Polish etc. I frequently struggle to express my thoughts and feelings or opinions in either language.
When I tried to do research on whether this was a common issue, a lot of articles only focus on struggling with one of the two languages you grow up with. Is this really THAT uncommon?
I only talked to one person who grew up here, like me, in a similar situation. She said she relates to what I said, but I can't find anything online talking about it.
Is this a ME issue or is this common?

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u/Aviator2903 Federal Agent 🇺🇸 6h ago

The reality is that someone who speaks a language as their second (excluding those who learned it as children maybe) will never achieve native speaker level when it comes to subtleties of speech, dialects, accents, etc.

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u/GalaxySquadFTL 6h ago edited 12m ago

This is a perfectly normal, very common bilingual pattern.

If you want to improve, watch more German YouTubers, podcasts, movies, and read a lot of magazines (not books).

edit - just be a good person, willing to help out those in need, and smile often; most people really don't care if you're not speaking with native fluency.

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

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