You Are Not Dich
(Translator's note: dich means you)
My experience with languages is the following: I grew up speaking Italian, never learned the endangered language of my homeland, studied French in middle school and forgot almost everything until I need it to survive1, studied Japanese on and off for years and floating between N5 and N4 with no good direction, currently locking in on German, attending an A2 course. I was also pretty good at ancient Latin when I was in high school, and I used it to write some lyrics too2.
By now, I'm familiar with the process of starting to study a language: it goes from sounds not making any sense, then you start at least being able to write some words. You learn the basics and can slowly start speaking, although at the beginning (which could be a long time) it's never enough: you need the grammar, you need the vocabulary, you need the nerve to make mistakes again and again in front of people who speak the language while you don't. I severely lack the latter. But more than that, I'm bothered by how I say things.
Are you picking the very exact words you should pick when trying to convey something? Is the manner you speak appropriate to the image you want to convey, or the one you have of yourself? When I was younger and more naive, I was very fascinated by the concept of personal pronouns in Japanese; read it up, if you don't know. Even without very little understanding of the language, I spent a long time researching what pronoun would fit me best on a certain situation. Are you a boku or a ore person with your friends? Oh, don't tell me you're one of those who's learned watakushi from anime. Do the classic rich girl laugh now, I dare you.
If you don't know a language enough, you're just guessing how you sound. Actually, that often happens in your native language too; do you have any idea how mad it makes me to discover that I've always used a word in a way that's just sliiiightly wrong? I have this very vivid memory of when I was a small child and told my mom and my friend's mom that we were playing another game at the park, because my friend "si è rotta le scatole"3. I remember my mom's face and the idea that I'd said something that was slightly off. I remember it every time I risk mispronouncing "beach" as "bitch"4. The ghost is upon me every time I have to pick one of 23 synonyms in German.
So no, "you" are not "dich", nor "君" nor "tu" or "vous". If we really want to stretch this, you're a slightly different person each time a new conversation starts. Considering this, maybe it's fine to fuck up a sentence or two sometimes.
I never say I speak French, because I'm barely A1 as far as I'm concerned. But I understand it enough to sometimes use it as a wildcard when I don't get what someone is telling me in Swiss German.↩
I could make a joke about all the programming languages I know, but I'll refrain. I could write lyrics in C# though.↩
"Rompere le scatole" is a way to say "to get on someone's nerves" that's not very polite, while "si è rotta le scatole" could be something like "(the game) got on her nerves". The subtext here is that "scatole" ("boxes", as the sentence is literally "to break (someone's) boxes") is actually a more family friendly substitution for "palle" or "coglioni", namely "balls". End of the Italian lesson!↩
My brother once tried to hit on a girl on holiday with "I come from Sardinia, land of beautiful bitches".↩