After navigating traffic jams caused by flocks of sheep herded across the road in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, Lennaert van Veen finally made it to the hostel. The room inside was small, with just a few bunk beds.
He chose one at random, unaware he would be sleeping beneath the woman who would one day become his wife.
“I just remember that very first time I laid eyes on her,” said van Veen. Yoko Tanaka’s hair was standing on end with dust in it after a trip from the desert that surrounded the Mongolian capital.
Years later, the two would move to Australia, marry, have their first son and eventually settle in Toronto — all while continuing to learn English, a language that wasn’t their native tongue.
Toronto is home to three million people and more than 200 languages. For some couples, building a life together means learning a third language, different from either of their native tongues, to create common ground and connection. But that new shared language can also demand extra emotional and cognitive effort. Two couples’ stories, from the first time they met to present day, show some of the challenges — and rewards — of love cultivated through a language that belongs to neither of them.
Dutch and Japanese
Tanaka, who is from Tokyo and was a student at the time, had originally planned to stay with a friend who was studying in Mongolia, but when she arrived, her friend was away — and with unreliable internet access, Tanaka didn’t know until she got there.
“So instead of staying at her place, I booked this hostel,” said Tanaka. That’s where she met van Veen, who grew up in the Netherlands and lived there at the time, and had just finished his studies before he travelled to Mongolia.
Tanaka had stayed in Australia for a year before, so she spoke some English. In Mongolia, she and van Veen spoke English together, and she said they could understand each other most of the time in everyday conversations, but sometimes it was hard to go beyond that.
Because van Veen was considering Japan for a post-doctoral assignment — he had just started studying Japanese — they exchanged email addresses. A few months later, he did go, and then they started dating, using English for communication.
The two later moved to Australia, where Tanaka took on her husband’s last name after they married, and continued to learn English. As they were building their household in Melbourne, they had very little money, so they were looking around for cheap furniture.
“One of our friends told a joke, ‘Oh, you can go to the Salvation Army,’” said van Veen. Tanaka asked van Veen what the military was doing in Melbourne. “How do you explain that there is a generous organization that calls itself an army?” said van Veen.
Van Veen said he often struggled to speak Japanese so would switch to English. The couple eventually settled in Toronto, in the Beach.
“It makes sense that he found English easier to learn,” said Safieh Moghaddam, an associate professor in the linguistics program at the University of Toronto.
Moghaddam said learning a new language is mostly about how much effort is needed. Dutch and English use the same alphabet and share many cognates, which are similar-looking words, so it can be easier to build vocabulary.
But when you’re still learning and speaking takes a lot of effort, certain conversations can be exhausting.
“When I get emotional, it’s hard to find the right word” in English, said Tanaka (who became a van Veen), now 45, who added she often has to slow down when speaking.
Van Veen, 53, said he thinks primarily in English, but slips back into Dutch when he’s around other native speakers, or when he’s really tired.
Moghaddam said that’s because your first language is closely tied to memories and emotions. In stressful moments, the brain prioritizes automatic access, so it feel easier to retrieve words in your first language.
“Bilinguals don’t keep two separate ‘boxes’ for their languages that they open and close,” said Moghaddam.
Instead, both languages are available in the brain for words to be retrieved from, depending on the context. The setting you’re in or the people you’re with can cue your brain to tune in to one language more than the other. In linguistics, that’s called context-dependent bilingual mode or language mode.
Spanish and Polish
While van Veen and Tanaka’s journey spanned three countries, Martha López, 30, and her husband Przemek, 36, first met right here in Toronto.
In 2017, López came to Toronto from Bogota, Colombia, as an international student. One night, a Turkish friend invited her to Crocodile Rock, a popular bar and nightclub. That’s where she met Polish-speaking Przemyslaw Grzywacz — Przemek for short — on the dance floor.
“His first words were, ‘I don’t speak English.’”
Przemek was working in construction at the time with his uncle, who grew up in Toronto. He had lived in the U.K. with his sister for a year, so learned some English words, but spoke Polish more often than not.
López said that didn’t bother her.
She was quiet at first, relying on Google Translate to speak with him. For the next six months, they spent almost every weekend together until she had to return to Colombia.
“I was devastated, like I’m never going to see this guy again,” said López. They’d get married six years later and live together in Toronto. Sometimes they dabble in each other’s language, not without some difficulty, but primarily speak English together.
“A lot of things that have certain meanings in his language, when he was trying to translate (to) me in English, it wouldn’t make sense,” said López.
A Polish word most know for its difficulty translating to English is kombinować, which can loosely be described as dealing with a problem in an unconventional or creative way.
According to some Canadian research, translation is like a complex negotiation of meanings and cultural context, not just swapping words, so conveying the full sense of an idea from one language to another requires careful interpretation — and this can be laborious, even in a loving relationship.
For Lopez, the efforts were worth it.
“There were moments where the language (difference) didn’t even matter,” said López.
“I just thought he seemed like a really nice guy who always tried to make me smile. After being with him for a few months, I just couldn’t see myself with anyone else.”
