My HL has made learning Spanish much much easier. Certain words in my HL better encapsulate certain concepts, and it is easy to think of them in that way. Sometimes I prefer using words in my HL than in English while conveying scientific ideas. Certain jokes and cultural cues were hard to get when I came to America, because things were understood differently. For example, the English word auspicious has a very positive ring to it in India and certain ways of using the English language flows from grammatical structure of my HL. Which made others find me a little hard to understand (even during presentations). My HL has greatly benefitted my educational experience. I have used it to find friends. Make people happy by speaking it. I have been able to use it to gain some cultural capital and privilege in certain groups in America. Once at a bus stop in Champaign on Green, I was subjected to some racism because I was speaking my HL at that time. In India, my HL isn’t spoken by the people in my city, so it made it quite difficult to talk to the locals as they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I started picking up Kannada because of it. I didn’t speak my HL in informal settings with friends, bus drivers, fruit sellers, etc. Thus, my Hindi is a lot more formal and uses a lot more Hindi words as opposed to someone who speaks Hindi regularly in informal settings and thus use Urdu words. I don’t understand very many Urdu words, and that caused some difficulty in communicating with Pakistani friends who heavily use Urdu words over Hindi words. Although north Indian friends could easily understand us both.
