I’m 21. I’m not bilingual. It’s hard to define what I am. I don’t feel that I really know any language properly, though formally I know three languages - Russian, Hebrew, and English.

In English, I feel as if I’m speaking in the level of a five year old. When I open my mouth in English half of my vocabulary tends to fade away, because I’m nervous. I don’t feel confident enough.

I know Russian, I speak it at home, and Hebrew I spoke in school. In English I don’t have enough practice.

In Russian, I know it but I’m not someone who can prove it to others, for example, because I don’t know any rules or grammar. I never studied in school in Russia, for example. I just hear that this sounds proper or it doesn’t and I have no idea why. In Hebrew, well, again, I know it, but I just don’t have this affinity to grammar. I never catch it in any language, and I know it but it’s not as good as my Russian, in more advanced stuff. Everyday Hebrew I know pretty well. English? I don’t even know how to classify it.

I left Russia when I was five., I learned Hebrew in school. When you live in a Hebrew speaking country you have to know how to ask how much this cost and all that, so you kind of learn it, and you learn Sifrut [literature] in school and you know it, and it’s not like we really had any English in school. It was very formal, you know, but I like reading and I like the computer and I kind of learned it myself, and that’s the problem, that I can't speak because I had no one to speak with.

In order to be a real trilingual, I'd need to get a brain transplant. Maybe if my grandparents would speak Yiddish to me then maybe I’ll know four languages, but I don’t know. Even when I try to learn grammar I don’t really catch it. I never remember it, so I’m not sure I can get any closer to knowing the languages thoroughly.

Sometimes I’m very confused and I want to use all three languages in one sentence or something, because every language has their special words that you don’t find anywhere else, and sometimes it’s very hard to choose and sometimes two languages kind of fade away, and when I’m trying to express myself it’s really hard to do it in one language. Even in Russian, that I think I know the best among them, speaking with a person who only knows Russian is very hard for me, because I keep sticking in at least English, and when you stick English in other languages, people think you’re being stuck up, you know, like “I know English."

If my parents had spoken to me in Yiddish it would just give me another half a language that I know. I don’t believe I would have known it well because even my mother doesn’t really know it well. It’s my grandparents. But I think it would have been a plus.

Bilingual does make it easier for me to learn other things. I’m more a verbal person than a technical person, so even the technical stuff that has to do with verbal things eludes me. I’m not sure that I will ever know languages very thoroughly, but I can use them.

I can translate from one language to another and then to the third one. I’m not sure I can measure my own success.