一心多用

我在Twitter上常常看到一个叫阿波连的网红。她是个上海人和冲绳人的混血儿。她的账户经常分享汉语的词汇和学习方法，因此对学习汉语的人很有帮助。因为她的目标受众是日本人，所以帖子都用日语。我刚刚发现她有一个YouTube频道。在所有的视频中，有一段引起了我的好奇心。视频时长也不算太长。标题差不多是《50个在日常生活中很有用的句子》。

不过我没有立刻看，而是第二天在上班审阅英语文件的时候才看到。为了不让老板发现我在上班时松懈，我偷偷在后台播放那段视频，只听到声音，没有看到画面。视频里，她一个接一个地说汉语的句子，然后直接给出日语翻译。虽然我日语没有那么好，但日语翻译很帮我更好地理解汉语句子的意思。突然，我意识到我在同一时间使用了四种语言：用日语听汉语老师的讲解，用英语阅读文件，还用印尼语思考如何让那份文件变得更好。

我并没有炫耀的意思，但我就对自己感到非常骄傲。经过多年学习这些天壤之别的语言，我能够做到这一点。身边有很多人告诉我，语言现在是一种一文不值的技能了。但我刚才向你讲到的喜悦，不是所有人能够体验到。我感到很庆幸被卷入了学习语言的漩涡。

Multitasking
I often see a social media influencer named Aharen on Twitter. She has Shanghainese and Okinawan roots. Her account frequently shares Chinese vocabulary and learning methods, making it very helpful for those studying Chinese. Since her target audience is Japanese people, her posts are all in Japanese. I just discovered that she has a YouTube channel. Among all her videos, one caught my curiosity. The duration of that video isn't too long either. It’s titled something like '50 Useful Sentences for Everyday Life’.

However, I didn't watch it right away; instead, I only watched it the next day while reviewing English documents at work. To avoid letting my boss notice I was slacking off at work, I secretly played that video in the background, only listening to the audio without watching the visuals. In the video, she said the Chinese sentences one by one, followed directly by their Japanese translations. Although my Japanese isn’t that great, the translations helped me better understand the meanings of the Chinese sentences. Suddenly, I realized that I was using four languages at the same time: listening to a Chinese teacher explaining in Japanese, reading documents in English, and thinking in Indonesian about how to improve that document.

I don't mean to brag, but I immediately felt very proud of myself. After years of learning these vastly different languages, I was able to do this. Many people around me tell me that language skills are now worthless, but the joy I just described is not something everyone can experience. I feel fortunate to have been sucked into the whirlpool of language learning.