I got my partner’s phone the other day to type something and was amazed at how good his autocorrect was. I could type so much faster than on my phone!

The reason? He only types in one language, while my spell check keeps jumping between Portuguese and English (and even Spanish). For instance, words like ‘some’ and ‘false’ tend to become ‘sobre’ and ‘falar’ on my phone.

This is how I feel like my brain works sometimes, forever jumping from one language to the other and making me second-guess myself all the time in both languages. I never imagined that a bilingual life would be like this.

When I moved to Canada, I thought that, since Portuguese is my mother tongue, it meant that I had a box in my brain with all the Portuguese words inside it. And since I had an advanced level in English, it meant that I had my “English words” box almost full. After some years living in North America, I’d have these two containers full to the brim with terms that I could choose from.

But that’s not how this works.

Turns out that your brain doesn’t store languages separately and changes between them like a switch. Your brain stores concepts separately and groups the words you use to give them meaning. So the concept of “house” in my head is together with the concept of “casa”, and the concept of “country” is stored together with the concept of “país”.

Luckily, both my phone’s autocorrect and my brain have some mechanism that switches between modes when I’m speaking different languages, so I can actually string a whole sentence together and talk like a normal person. But the second language is always in the background, trying to push up.

Some years ago I saw a perfect analogy on YouTube for that (unfortunately I can’t find the video anymore). A guy explained it to the viewer using ping-pong balls floating on a bucket of water. The different colours of the balls represented different languages, he said. Whenever you have to speak a second language (the white balls) you have to push your mother tongue words to the bottom (the orange balls) – to suppress them. In this moment he tried to push just the orange balls down, but some resurfaced. That’s what my brain does when I’m speaking in English.

That’s why bilingual people have a harder time speaking a second language when they’re tired or nervous. It also makes me understand why I got so exhausted during the day in my first months in Canada. I used to get home from college and didn’t want to say a word to anyone. Despite that, I think over time I got more agile in pushing Portuguese words down and things became more natural.

But the problem is that it’s not just words you have to suppress.

There’s grammar too. Other than having two dictionaries with word meanings in my head, I also have two sets of grammar rules, and dealing with this is the real challenge. One notable example are the prepositions ‘in’, ‘on’, and ‘at’. In Portuguese, they’re all just one word: ’em’. So I’m constantly getting them wrong since they don’t always make sense (you’re “on the bus” but “in the car”??).

I don’t think I’ll ever stop making mistakes like this. It’s not just a matter of how much vocabulary you have, is a matter of too much conflicting vocabulary in your head. Maybe if I only lived my life in English, I would be able to push Portuguese more to the back of my mind. But that’s not likely to happen, nor do I want to get rid of my mother tongue.

That’s the destiny of a bilingual person, living with one foot in each world. Vida que segue.