There is a quiet illusion in multilingualism that almost no one likes to talk about.
The illusion is simple:
the more languages you speak, the more people will understand you.
In reality, I have seen the opposite happen many times.
A student once told me about her friend.
The friend spoke several languages. Four, maybe more. She communicated easily, confidently, fluently. And yet, at some point, she said something that sounded almost paradoxical:
“All my life I wanted people to understand me.
The more languages I learned, the less they did.”
At first, this sounds like an emotional exaggeration.
But if you look closely, it isn’t.
It is a diagnosis.
This article is also available in other languages:
– Russian version
The first illusion: communication is not freedom
Let me start with a simple situation.
This woman could talk to different people in different languages.
One colleague spoke Ukrainian. Another spoke Chinese. She spoke both.
Individually, there was no problem.
She understood them. They understood her.
But there was one thing she could not do.
She could not make them understand each other.
And that is where the illusion collapses.
Because if language were just about “speaking”, she would have been a bridge.
But she wasn’t.
She was an interface.
She had learned how to operate languages, not how to carry meaning across them.
Language learned as phrases, not as thinking
What was missing?
Not vocabulary.
Not grammar.
Not speed.
What was missing was something much deeper:
she had never rebuilt her thoughts inside each language.
She was doing something most learners are taught to do:
She took a thought that lived in her native language
and moved it into another language.
But she did not reconstruct it there.
That difference is crucial.
Transferring a thought is not the same as creating it.
When you transfer, you keep:
- the original logic,
- the original hierarchy,
- the original emotional weight,
- the original sense of responsibility.
You simply search for “how to say it”.
This produces fluent speech — but not freedom.
You cannot remain the same person in every language
There is an uncomfortable truth that many language courses avoid:
You do not stay the same person across languages.
Not because language changes your identity —
but because it changes how reality is structured.
Every language:
- distributes responsibility differently,
- encodes distance differently,
- allows or forbids directness,
- reshapes what sounds natural, polite, rude, or excessive.
Trying to be the same person in every language usually leads to one result:
You end up fully living in only one of them.
The rest become translated versions of yourself — not lived ones.
The second situation: when fluency excludes others
There was another situation involving the same people.
They were walking together when they joined a group that spoke a language unfamiliar to one of the women.
The other woman spoke that language fluently and immediately switched to it.
The conversation flowed.
Everyone was engaged.
Except one person — her friend.
No translation followed.
No short explanations.
No attempt to keep everyone inside the same field of meaning.
Later, the question arose:
Did she not want to translate — or could she not?
My answer is uncomfortable but honest:
Most likely, she could not do it without breaking her own flow.
She was not operating in a “we” mode.
She was operating in a “me practicing language” mode.
And these are not the same thing.
Mediating meaning between people requires:
- holding multiple perspectives,
- interrupting your own fluency,
- reconstructing thought for someone who was not part of the exchange.
That is not conversational skill.
That is cognitive responsibility.
The third scenario: language as a closed code
Now let’s be fair.
There is another scenario — and it is fundamentally different.
Sometimes people deliberately switch languages so others do not understand them.
This is not a lack of competence.
This is control.
Language here becomes:
- a private channel,
- a group boundary,
- a social filter.
This requires high fluency.
But it serves a different purpose.
And that is the key question underlying all scenarios:
Do we speak in order to be understood — or in order not to be?
Confusing these goals leads to serious misunderstandings about what “fluency” actually means.
The most dangerous illusion: being understood by those who are used to you
The last scenario is the most subtle — and the most deceptive.
I once lived with a person whose native language was not Russian.
She spoke Russian fluently, quickly, confidently. She was a professional translator. She lived in the language daily.
I understood her perfectly.
Others did not.
Why?
Because I had adapted to her version of the language.
Her pronunciation was technically correct — too correct.
So precise that it sounded unnatural.
Her word choices followed the logic of her native language.
For example, she used structures equivalent to “I can” where a native speaker would say “I want”.
I automatically decoded it.
Others could not.
This is a critical moment.
Understanding here was not proof of clarity.
It was proof of habituation.
I did not understand her because she spoke clearly.
I understood her because I had learned how she speaks.
This kind of “fluency” works only inside a narrow circle.
Outside of it, communication breaks.
Four modes of language — and only one leads to freedom
When you look at all these situations together, a pattern emerges.
Most people operate in one of these modes:
- Survival — speaking to get by
- Flow — speaking to stay inside the conversation
- Code — speaking to exclude others
- Habit — speaking in a way familiar to close listeners
Only one mode leads to real freedom:
- Thinking — rebuilding meaning for the people who are here now
Freedom in language does not begin when you can speak without pauses.
It begins when you can reconstruct thought from scratch
inside another linguistic logic
for someone else.
A hard conclusion
You can speak five languages and live in only one.
You can be fluent and still not be understood.
And sometimes, the more languages you add
without rebuilding how you think in them,
the narrower your real communicative space becomes.
Language is not a collection of phrases.
It is a way of organizing reality.
And until that reality is rebuilt — not translated —
fluency remains a performance, not freedom.
Author’s column by Tymur Levitin
Founder, Director, Senior Teacher
Levitin Language School / Start Language School by Tymur Levitin
Language is not about saying more.
It is about meaning being born again.
© Tymur Levitin