By Jane Sonnenschein · April 27, 2026

A few days ago, I wrote an essay about whether a person can have only one mother tongue. The comments on Xiaohongshu¹ soon wandered off in all sorts of directions.

People began debating how “mother tongue” should be defined. Some shared how many years they had lived abroad, how many foreign languages they spoke, or which language they used in their dreams. Others brought in academic definitions, migration studies, dialects, and the relationship between dialects and having two mother tongues.

I went back and reread the essay several times.

I could not understand where my writing had gone off course, or why almost everyone was discussing something other than the question I had actually wanted to explore.

Eventually, I began to realise that the problem might not have been entirely in the essay itself. Some experiences are simply difficult to explain unless you have lived through them, or taken the time to think one level deeper.

What I had really wanted to discuss was never the abstract question of whether a person can technically have two mother tongues.

What I wanted to know was this: if someone genuinely develops two native-language systems from early childhood, what does that experience actually feel like?

For me, that question had always seemed to sit behind a thin veil.

I am not someone with two mother tongues. I speak three languages, but I know very clearly that Chinese is my only true mother tongue. I can use German and English. I can communicate, work, and manage everyday life in both, and other people sometimes think I speak them very well. Yet only I know that there is still a distance between speaking a language “well” and possessing it as a mother tongue.

When I speak German or English, there is often still a process involved. The process has simply become shorter as I have grown more fluent.

When I first began learning these languages, the process was obvious. A thought would appear in Chinese, and I would translate it step by step into German or English. Later, as I became more fluent, the conversion grew faster—sometimes so fast that I barely noticed it happening.

But when I need to express something more complex, subtle, or abstract, I can still tell that the language arising at the deepest level is usually Chinese.

For me, becoming highly proficient in a foreign language has therefore often meant that the conversion becomes faster. It does not necessarily mean that the conversion disappears completely.

That is also why I found it difficult to imagine what it truly felt like to have two mother tongues—until one day, I discussed the subject with my husband.

He is a native speaker of both English and German and grew up in both languages. I asked him, “What does it actually feel like for someone like you to have two mother tongues?”

He thought for a moment and gave me a remarkably vivid answer.

“It is like opening drawers.”

Because I do not share that experience, abstract discussions about mother tongues had never allowed me to imagine the feeling clearly. It was only later, as I repeatedly encountered similar questions while translating, producing videos, and working across different linguistic contexts, that I gradually understood what he meant.

When he needs a particular language, he simply pulls open that drawer.

He does not first think in the other language. There is no translation and no transitional step. He enters that language directly.

The moment he said it, I understood. The metaphor was so precise that it illuminated a difference between us that I had never been able to describe properly.

For me, speaking a foreign language can still feel like walking from one room into another. The journey may now be extremely short and fast, but there is still a sense of crossing over.

For him, there is no need to walk anywhere. Several drawers are already in front of him. He reaches out and opens the one he needs.

The difference is subtle, but once you understand it, you begin to see that the remarkable thing about native-language access is not the size of someone’s vocabulary. It is the fact that translation never needs to enter the process.

This reminded me of something else that had troubled me for a long time, although I had never managed to explain it fully.

When I worked at a U.S. military base in Germany, I encountered quite a few translators and interpreters.

With some of them, you could immediately hear that they were working through a foreign language. One person would say a sentence, and they would translate that sentence. Much of their attention seemed to be directed towards individual words or sentences.

They could still do the job, but the process felt more like linguistic replacement. It was as though they were taking apart an expression in one language and then finding roughly corresponding pieces with which to rebuild it in another.

My husband’s experience of simultaneous interpreting between English and German was different.

He did not usually translate one sentence against another. He would listen to an entire passage, grasp what the speaker truly meant, and then generate a complete expression directly in the other language.

The unit he was processing was no longer a word or even a sentence. It was meaning.

That distinction matters, because truly advanced translation is never simply word against word. It is meaning against meaning.

I encountered the same issue again when I began making German-language parenting videos.

I am not a professional translator, but creating these videos has frequently required me to move between German and Chinese. Translation tools can, of course, translate automatically. Sometimes the vocabulary appears correct, and the sentences may even sound fluent.

Yet over time, a deeper problem becomes visible. The question is not merely whether the translation is technically correct. It is whether a Chinese person would ever actually say it that way.

A German expression may be perfectly natural in German. Its Chinese translation may also be grammatically correct and easy to read. Yet it may still sound unlike anything a Chinese mother would genuinely say to her child.

This made me realise more deeply that high-level translation is not only about conveying the correct meaning or choosing accurate words. It also requires another judgement: would people within the culture and context of this language actually express themselves in this way?

That is why I have increasingly come to understand native-language access as something far more complex than matching vocabulary. It means directly drawing upon an entire system of context, tone, habitual expression, and cultural logic.

This kind of access at the level of meaning is much closer to how a mother tongue operates. A mother tongue is accessed directly through meaning, while a foreign language often continues to carry traces of conversion.

This is especially clear between languages such as Chinese, English, and German, which do not correspond neatly to one another.

Many Chinese expressions become confusing or strange when they are translated too literally. Take the saying jiachou buke waiyang². A word-for-word translation is not necessarily impossible to understand, but the tone of the expression and the cultural assumptions behind it are easily lost.

What truly needs to be translated is not each separate character or word. It is the layer of meaning underneath them. Another language may express the same idea through an entirely different metaphor.

The same is true of many English and German jokes, puns, and forms of wordplay. When they are translated literally into Chinese, they often collapse immediately. The humour was never contained in the dictionary meaning alone. It was tied to the structure and cultural background of the language itself.

My daughter once did exactly this.

Her father told her a joke in English. The joke depended on English word formation and the particular way the language sounded. Later, she excitedly retold it in German because she wanted to share it with her classmates.

I explained that it would not work. The joke was funny only in English. Once she transferred its surface content into German, the humour disappeared. It was not that she had translated it incorrectly. The joke simply had not grown in German in that form.

Small experiences like this have gradually helped me understand that truly knowing a language does not mean knowing its equivalent words. It means knowing how that language itself would express a particular meaning.

Perhaps this is what native-language access feels like. I do not first formulate a Chinese sentence and then search for a German or English substitute. Instead, when the meaning appears, it develops directly inside the appropriate language system and takes the form it naturally belongs in.

When I later returned to the question of whether a person can have only one mother tongue, I suddenly felt less interested in arguing about it.

People are often debating entirely different levels of the question. Some are debating academic definitions. Others are discussing statistical categories. Some are trying to establish how many languages they personally speak.

But the question I truly wanted to understand was much simpler: if a child grows up naturally in two or even three languages from a very young age, can more than one set of “drawers” develop in the child’s mind?

I increasingly believe that the answer is yes.

But the decisive factor is not how many languages the child has studied, or how fluent they later become. It is whether, from a very early age, the child receives stable, natural, and sustained input.

Ideally, that input is not random. It is connected to particular people, relationships, and situations.

With Mum, the language is Chinese.

With Dad, it is English.

At school, it is German.

Over time, language becomes more than language. It becomes part of a relationship. The moment the child sees a particular person, the child already knows which drawer to open.

This is why I now think that the most fascinating aspect of native-language access is not how impressive it appears, but how natural it feels.

It is so natural that you do not even notice yourself switching. It is so natural that you may not understand why someone else still needs to take an extra step inside their mind.

That extra step is precisely the difficult-to-define but persistent line between a mother tongue and a foreign language.

Perhaps the reason I have continued thinking about this subject is that the phrase “like opening drawers” stayed with me.

For the first time, it made me understand that some languages are acquired later in life.

For other people, however, they have been there from the beginning—growing inside the mind itself.

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Notes

1. Xiaohongshu（小红书）: Literally meaning “Little Red Book,” Xiaohongshu is a major Chinese social-media and lifestyle platform. Users share personal experiences, recommendations, photographs, short videos, parenting discussions, and consumer information. Its comment sections often become spaces for wide-ranging personal debate and the exchange of individual experiences.
2. Jiachou buke waiyang（家丑不可外扬）: A traditional Chinese saying that can be translated literally as “family shame should not be spread outside.” It reflects the belief that conflict, disgrace, or troubling matters within a family should remain private rather than be discussed with outsiders. The expression is closely connected to concerns about family reputation, social judgement, and preserving mianzi, or “face.”

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 所谓“双母语”到底是什么状态？我先生用了一个很形象的比喻：像拉抽屉

German version: Wie fühlt es sich eigentlich an, zwei Muttersprachen zu haben? Mein Mann fand dafür ein sehr anschauliches Bild: Es ist wie das Öffnen von Schubladen