Uneven Fluency

I use three languages every day, yet I do not feel fully free in any of them. Rather than accumulating fluency, my linguistic life feels divided—each language attached to a specific role, context, and way of thinking. What I experience is not multilingual abundance, but a kind of asymmetry: languages that function well within their own boundaries, yet resist being transferred beyond them.

Korean is my first language, but it is no longer actively trained. I use it almost exclusively at home, in emotionally familiar settings, and rarely in situations that require precision, explanation, or expansion. Because of this, my Korean feels stable but stagnant—fluent in intimacy, yet increasingly limited in range. Being a native speaker has paradoxically made me less attentive; I assumed the language would take care of itself, only to realize that proficiency without deliberate use quietly erodes.

Japanese, by contrast, is the language of daily life. I manage administration, logistics, and casual interactions in Japanese, often relying more on listening than on deliberate formulation. It is an ear-based language for me, acquired through repeated exposure rather than systematic study. I often understand what is being said before I can articulate it myself, and I can navigate situations smoothly without being able to explain why certain expressions are appropriate. It feels like a language learned by skin rather than by text—intuitive, situational, and sometimes resistant to conscious verbalization.

English occupies a different position altogether. I use it almost exclusively for research, writing, and professional communication. Emotionally, it is the most distant language I have, yet that distance comes with an unexpected freedom. In English, I feel less exposed, less constrained by how my words might reflect back on me. This detachment allows me to take intellectual risks—to write tentative thoughts, incomplete ideas, or speculative reflections—without the discomfort I would feel doing so in Korean. It is the language in which thinking feels safest, precisely because it feels least exposed.

These differences in how I use each language are not only practical; they shape how visible I feel within them. This becomes most apparent in professional settings, where language carries implicit expectations about competence, restraint, and social alignment.

One situation that consistently unsettles me is receiving a professional email written in Korean. Although Korean is my first language, professional Korean feels like a space I have not fully inhabited. It carries assumptions shaped by professionals who live and work in Korea, who have developed a shared register through years of institutional and cultural immersion. When I write in that context, I feel acutely aware that I am crossing a line—from private, familial Korean into a public, normative domain where deviations are more noticeable and less easily forgiven. As a native speaker, I am not afforded the margin of error often granted to non-native users; my words are expected to be polished, appropriately formal, and socially calibrated.

For this reason, I find myself relying on generative AI more heavily when writing professional Korean than when writing in other languages. This reliance is not about generating ideas, but about reducing the risk of subtle misalignment—choosing the wrong level of politeness, an expression that feels slightly off, or a tone that does not meet unspoken expectations. In this sense, AI functions less as a creative assistant and more as a tool for norm matching, helping me approximate a register I feel increasingly distant from.

In contrast, my relationship with professional Japanese is unexpectedly stable. After more than fifteen years of daily use, especially in administrative and institutional contexts, I have internalized a set of procedural anchors. I know how to begin an email, how to close it, and which phrases signal appropriate levels of deference or caution. Expressions such as 「お世話になっております」 or 「どうぞよろしくお願いいたします」 provide a predictable structure, and I have developed my own practical rules—for example, when 「大変恐縮ですが」 feels appropriate, and when 「恐れ入りますが」 does not. Even though Japanese is not my native language, its norms feel legible and navigable. Writing in Japanese rarely produces the same anxiety, because the boundaries are clear and the scripts are familiar.

Spoken Korean, interestingly, occupies yet another position. Recently, I have had the opportunity to work alongside Korean colleagues—something that was rare for me in earlier stages of my academic life. We quickly became close, meeting regularly for long lunches that often extended into hours of conversation. These interactions are warm and enjoyable, yet they leave a subtle residue. Afterward, I find myself replaying the conversation, wondering whether my word choices were too casual, too restrained, or somehow misaligned. This retrospective self-monitoring is something I rarely experience in Japanese, and never in English. In English, I allow myself the comfort of non-native status. Errors are expected, tone mismatches are forgiven, and I rarely feel compelled to audit my language after the fact. This asymmetry is striking: the language in which I am most distant emotionally is also the one in which I feel the least constrained. Distance, in this case, creates safety.

At first glance, this pattern might seem to reflect cultural differences, as languages are inseparable from the social norms that accompany them. English, often associated with a global or Western professional culture, allows a certain expressive latitude; Japanese is commonly perceived as highly rule-bound; Korean is often described as more flexible in everyday interaction. Yet my own experience complicates this general picture. Despite prevailing assumptions about cultural strictness, I feel more constrained when writing professional Korean than when writing Japanese.

One possible reason is that Japanese professional communication offers explicit, repeatable structures. By adhering to established conventions—indirect phrasing, predictable openings and closings, carefully calibrated politeness—I feel permitted to make requests, raise issues, or negotiate, precisely because I am operating within a clearly defined framework. In Korean, by contrast, professional norms feel less externalized and more contingent on shared background and social intuition. As a native speaker, I am expected to possess this intuition automatically. The resulting pressure does not come from rigidity, but from the difficulty of knowing where the boundaries lie.

Taken together, these experiences suggest that linguistic proficiency alone does not determine ease or confidence. Rather, it is the interaction between language, social expectation, and perceived legitimacy that shapes how freely one can think and express oneself. What feels like fluency in one context may feel constraining in another, not because of linguistic ability itself, but because of the norms that accompany its use and the position one is expected to occupy within them.