Are you a receptive bilingual?, It’s all in the language

Do you speak a foreign language other than English? How hard was it for you to learn a new language other than your native one? If you were taught your mother language at a young age, did you retain it and use it to this day or did you become a receptive bilingual? If you’re not familiar with what it means to be receptive bilingual, well it’s being able to fluently understand a language but cannot actively speak it. I’m guilty of being a receptive bilingual and it’s been that way since I was young, from what I can remember I was around five or six when I started to learn to read, write and speak English and the language that was spoken at home (Somali) was starting to dissipate from my everyday speech. Having said that, being a receptive bilingual in my perspective seems to be a blessing, a curse, and here’s why. For one, I can understand a second language but I can only respond in English which makes it challenging when the person you’re trying to convey a message to someone from your culture who barely speaks English. Furthermore, language is a reflection of the culture and it cultivates unity for its people to identify commonality in one another immediately. Moreover, one thing I can say confidently that I didn’t stray from was the culture that the language (Somali) is within, even though I’m a born American and have been westernized to the American culture since I was a child. For some that are receptively bilingual, they probably have had to experience some shame from people of their culture chastising them for not being able to fluently speak their mother tongue and this might cause one to question how connected they are to their culture. So, I pose this question, do you think a part of the culture is absent in an individual if the person is still connected to it even though they have trouble with a vital aspect of the culture which is the language? Let me know down in the comments and thank you for reading.