Language is soup is an elegantly compact way to explain that the human brain has multiple areas dedicated to the creation and processing of language, and that your primary language shapes them in measurable, recognizable ways, like soup shapes up in measurable, recognizable ways depending on what ingredients you use.

Soup is a universal constant. Whether miso, borscht, or chicken soup, all cultures have some version of: take plants or animal pieces, boil in water, throw in herbs.

When I speak Japanese I’m not inventing soup. I’m using the same mechanisms of my Romanian and English capacity, but with slightly different ingredients and flavours: far fewer pronouns, for one.

This is what I teach my students when they get stuck once again on the whys and wherefores: you’re making a different soup to yours. The base is going to be the same, but you’re using different ingredients and it takes a while to adjust to that. Ingredients change everything from flavour, to texture and even the time it takes to cook. You’re not a bad chef, just an unexperienced one.

Language is soup because all humans that have ever existed had some form of language, and some form of broth. Therefore, grammar, pronunciation, syntax, while important cannot be the main focus of language learning. In the same way all soup has the same purpose: to nourish; all language has the same purpose: to connect humans and transfer information.

Given our current global situation I think it is more important than ever that we remember that humans share far more in common than language, culture or ideology would like us to remember.

All language is soup, and all humans enjoy some version of it. If we didn’t, nobody would be alive today to even argue about which soup is better, and who cooks it the best.

To be perfectly clear, a fluent Japanese speaker at age 3 I was not. I was a child who loved the beautiful and exciting cartoons with the language that sounded like none other. Romania after communism dove head first into capitalism: and we consumed a lot of non-Romanian material. Growing up I didn’t think much about it because it was my ‘normal’. Turning on the radio and hearing songs in any of the likely languages: French, Italian, English, Spanish. Romanian seemed more like an after thought. I spent half my childhood in a small village by the border with Bulgaria, and our house was across from one of the biggest locales for drinking and socialising. Thus, it was perfectly natural to me to hear at 11pm on a Thursday night Romanian pop, followed by Salt’n’Pepa’s Push it, and then Turkish dance music. It was very simple: if you can dance to it, they would play it.

Meeting people from outside Romania was, at that point, still rare, so I didn’t meet any until moving to New Zealand, but having occasionally seen people who spoke other languages around, I didn’t think much of it either. People speak language. Simple, straightforward child logic. Letters, sounds, music, writing, and magical worlds where girls who looked and sounded nothing like me, communicated and laughed and lived vibrantly where the hallmarks of my childhood.

My parents moved us to New Zealand when I was 12. I skipped several grades due to differences in education systems and found myself in the first year of high school, with a Shakespeare book in front of me and surrounded by people who didn’t know my language, didn’t care about my culture, and no traces of Sailor Moon anywhere. What’s a magical girl to do? Sing, naturally. My go-to for everything. Unfortunately my voice grated my father, and my colleagues alike, so I was forced to reduce singing to specially designated times, like choir, and after school.

The downside of having a brain that recognizes patterns easily and quickly is, that it tends to start skipping through them after a certain point. That’s how I found myself being able to predict people’s words before they mentioned their interest, and unable to relate either linguistically or emotionally, I responded with the same platitudes that I’d heard from others. I sometimes wondered if that was mean of me, but then I thought that nobody was trying to speak my language, and I redirected my time towards other immigrant students who could sympathise with the “everything is so weird here”, and “what’s the thing in English?” feelings.

New Zealand taught me that I was, apparently, first and foremost Romanian, and secondly, annoying. Naturally, like my favourite heroines, I figured I would be annoying to the average person and didn’t worry too much about it. I did not expect my parents to start accusing me of it, however. That was the second thing that made me lean into my magical girl identity. Most heroines are, usually, orphans. It hurt less to think I had no-one, than to think I had parents that wanted to treat me with the same disrespect and impatience (if not cruelty) I received from people at school.

I leaned into my Romanian background as much as I could, because New Zealand society made no sense to a Romanian 12 year-old, but when my parents became polar opposites of what I knew, culturally, parents were meant to be, and New Zealand society started making sense, I gave up on logic altogether and dove deeper into Japanese: if nothing makes sense, you may as well not worry about it.

Surprisingly, Japanese culture made more sense to me than New Zealand culture, and it was a perpetual shock to hear commentary to the contrary. I figured the maths held true: if Romanian is given the value + and NZ culture — ; and then NZ culture is given + by Kiwis, and Japanese gets — , then as we all know + times — = — (minus) and so if we take out NZ culture altogether, it made sense that I found Romanian and Japanese equally positive, or at least a lot more connected, in terms of customs, seasonal festivals, approaches to nature, every day habits like removing your shoes when you go in the house, etc.

It was the dark ages of the early 00s, so my dictionaries were of the primitive, paper kind. After trying to find equivalence between Romanian and English words, which proved frustrating most of the time, I gave up altogether. Nobody wanted to know about Romanian culture, and my parents hardly would let me speak of anything to do with Romania lest it got “depressing”, so I thought I’ll just do English like everyone else around me seemed to: without thinking.

Like every great heroine, however, I had my songs, and dreams as company, and who wants to be an average high school student anyway? I had entire worlds made of anime characters in different languages, across different universes, and they all found me delightful! As did most of my teachers. And my friends’ parents. To quote another more modern magical girl: I give good parent.

Getting to university was exciting, although, less so than getting into a Romanian university since New Zealand doesn’t have entrance exams. I thought that was neat, but being used to study hard and get free university education, I did feel that it was not only anti-climactic but also generally a poor move to charge me that much for my education. Particularly when compared to my first 6 years of schooling in Romania, New Zealand schooling was so lax so as to not really feel like education.

Thus, I spent most of my summers doing summer courses in order to get through university faster. This is how I finished a double degree (projected to be 5 years) in just 3 years. I had gotten into Golden Key in my first year, I was recipient of multiple scholarships, I was the lead in my language classes particularly Japanese. All the makings of a person who has a bright future ahead of her. Yet, all I wanted was to sing duets in Japanese with the one friend who I felt knew me better than most people ever had, my parents included. We studied together: hours and hours of dissecting the Japanese language, of karaoke, of laughter and tears and her drawings all over my notes. Both our focuses were 2D. My first buddy in fandom. She leaned to shounen series, and I to shoujo, so to this day I can do karaoke featuring most of the soundtracks of popular 90s, 2000s and mid-2000s anime series.
My achievements, or popularity were not things I spent time on. I did what I wanted to do because I loved it. When you have nothing to go to, even half a space to rest is heaven. Japanese, my colleagues, friends, and professors were my oasis. I split myself neatly between school and home, then school, work and home. I did not realise not everyone had to do that.

Magical girls are out of alignment with most people, so well-used to my inability to relate to my peers, I figured this was just another part of my leveling up.

I started my Masters in May, then promptly applied to go on the JET Programme. At the same time of starting my Masters the following year, I was already living and working in Japan. The JET Programme was, and remains, one of my happiest moments of life. I made life-long friends, I built community, and I saw SO much Takarazuka that my family took turns scolding me over my lack of financial prudence. I still feel that Takarazuka saved me, so, financially, I am okay with how much I invest in it still.

The most magical of magical moments was moving back in 2018 and becoming a citizen of the city. Takarazuka has been, at this point, a bigger part of my life than my father, my time in Romania, my grandfather, and my time in New Zealand. It allowed me the space and safety to process and discover things I am still learning to voice. It gave me friends and family like I could have never dreamed. It gave me a life in the country I love with my entire heart where I want to stay for good. It is a haven for other magical girls, other creative women who are just out of alignment with general society. The nerdy, passionate, creative, entrepreneurial type who have big aspirations and even bigger expectations of themselves.

At the end of the day, Takarazuka offers me applied multiculturalism: people who naturally exist across social and cultural lines. It allows me to see my life experiences reflected on stage, and it perpetually reminds me that, as humans, all our differences (especially linguistic and cultural) are superficial. We are united by our shared humanity.

A world of love and dreams where magical girls can not only exist, but succeed. An alternative paradigm to everyday life that challenges without meaning to, simply because it centers humanity and love above all else. A place where all my languages can unfurl and dance over musical notes coming from the live orchestra pit. A place where at least for a few minutes, people can be themselves wholly and apologetically entranced performing and consuming humanity in its truest form: people having emotions across time and space. A space where even a third culture kid can feel like they seamlessly belong.

The Magical Girl Paradigm is not about enclosure, it’s about developing into your truest self beyond cultural background, gender, history, or health. This is why I prefer it as an alternative to every other paradigm I’ve been a part of. I don’t have to be Romanian, or Kiwi, or a scholar, or a language expert, or an amalgam of psychological diagnostics. I can just be, as all of the above, all of the time, and know without any doubt that there is space for me as I am, and people who will accept my full self. Before we are any label, we are humans, that is what shoujo culture teaches us, through art that bridges borders and languages.

So what is my identity? An eternal magical girl, who seeks to create beauty in the world, and connect people beyond language barriers. It may not fit neatly onto business cards, but humanity never fit neatly into any boxes anyway.

I didn’t know I was Romanian until I moved to New Zealand.

Sure, I was aware of it — like I knew my name was Dana and that my eyes were brown — but I hadn’t yet understood it as something others would fixate on. Overnight, my defining trait became “Romanian.” Every misunderstanding, every awkward silence, every flash of alienation was chalked up to cultural difference. What else could explain the glaring dissonance between me and most of the people around me?

Romanian culture became my default answer — until my father’s abuse escalated. As a child, I reasoned that he was simply one of those people who were “bad at being Romanian.” He wasn’t the wise king of a folk tale, nor a villain as dramatic as the stepmothers in fairytales. He was something more banal, more invisible. And because he isolated us from the Romanian community — abusers thrive in isolation — I was cut off from any cultural mirror that might have shown me another way to be.

When we finally escaped, I expected to feel free. Instead, I felt crushed. All the things he had tried to suppress in me — my joy, my loudness, my eagerness — turned out to be unwanted by society at large, too. Co-workers found me pedantic, insufferable. I was accused of showing off for mentioning university, even in passing. I told myself it didn’t matter. Someday, I’d leave New Zealand behind and its ritual of cutting down those who stand out — what they call “tall poppy syndrome,” but which might more honestly be described as:
A society built on abuse will standardize and perpetuate abuse against anyone considered “other.”

Becoming Romanian in Japanese

Since I couldn’t be Romanian in New Zealand, I chose to be Romanian in Japanese.

Studying Japanese gave me space. It let me revisit conversations, rehearse social scripts, and sharpen my English indirectly. In Japanese, people asked me where I was from because I was clearly not Japanese. That made sense. But in New Zealand, where I looked local and held citizenship, I still got backhanded comments like:
“Well, English isn’t your first language,”
or worse,
“You chose to study in New Zealand.”

The second one came from a university staff member tasked with supporting students’ academic writing. I never asked for help again. At that point, I’d already held New Zealand citizenship for five years.

What Is a Third Space?

A Third Space is neither your home nor your workplace. It’s a cultural or conceptual in-between, where identities stretch and recombine in unexpected ways.

Japanese became my third space in New Zealand. Later, Takarazuka became my third space in Japan. Third spaces are where people connect not by nationality, but by shared interest and mutual respect. In these places, a German, a Romanian, and a Chinese fan walk into a café — and speak the same language of love, fandom, and belonging.

Multiculturalism really is that simple.

People ask why I teach languages. It’s because I want everyone to access these cultural crossroads — the liminal pockets where humanity thrives. Language isn’t just a skill. It’s the user interface for human experience.

Code-Switching ≠ Code-Splitting

Because English wasn’t my first language, I learned early on to adjust. In school, I needed extra time, but in life, people didn’t have patience. They made assumptions. They acted on them.

When I tried to explain that I processed things differently because high school was in my second language, I was met with confusion, eye-rolls, or suggestions to see a therapist. I continued exploring how language shaped thought. Why did the F-word feel weak compared to Romanian swearing? Why could I bypass English entirely by thinking in Romanian while speaking Japanese?

Over time, Japanese became my third processing language. It also dredged up things I’d buried in both Romanian and English.

This made me a better language teacher.

So I focused on creating third spaces — safe pockets where I could just be a person. But even there, anxiety simmered beneath the surface: ancestral, generational, ever-present. When my grandmother died, it exploded. That’s when I learned a new adjective: ADHD.

Medication helped me process decades of trauma. But my body began to break down. I was no longer able to work full-time. That’s when other words arrived — C-PTSD, autism.

And suddenly, the chaos made sense.

Non-Linear Humans in a Linear World

English is a linear language. So is English logic — because logic is built with words. Our first language shapes our thinking in ways that aren’t immediately visible.

I taught this as fact, puzzled that others didn’t see the same patterns. Why did they ask me to repeat what I’d already explained clearly? It turns out most people don’t notice the mechanics of their own language. That’s what makes people like me unusual.

I thought it was because I was a Romanian woman. Turns out, it’s neurological.

I reflected on how I instinctively sorted people into “yes” and “no” piles. Anne of Green Gables would have called them kindred spirits. She was the first English-language character I connected with — so much like me… in English. And in hindsight? Probably AuDHD. Humans follow patterns. And when we contextualize those patterns across cultures, we begin to see the web beneath the surface.

That’s what I teach: the web of words.

I translate noise into music, chaos into form, sound into meaning. My Romanian identity was shaped by Japanese anime, which shaped how I lived in New Zealand, which now shapes how I teach Japanese students English.

Nothing exists in isolation.

There’s No “Just Learn It”

We don’t have infinite brain capacity, so we filter what we learn. But filters become blinders. They get codified in school curricula, passed down like gospel. A kid in rural Japan struggles with irregular English verbs while their teacher shrugs: “Just learn it.”

But language is pattern. It’s history. It’s emotion. It’s identity.

I didn’t understand some of the Japanese taught to me in high school until I had studied Japanese at university — for three degrees.

I used to joke that once you hit three languages, everything else is intuitive. That’s not true. If you only colonize dictionaries, you won’t find the soul of a language. I’m fluent in four by certification, seven in practice. But because I never collected the right paperwork, people often dismiss me — or assume I’m lying.

On job applications, I mention “business-level Spanish,” though native speakers often assume I am one of them — until I tell them I’m not.

Why I Learn Languages

People ask why I study Japanese and other languages.

Because I want to talk to people. I want to be friends with them. I want to live life through different lenses, shaped by different cultures and vocabularies.

But instead of saying all that, I usually just shrug and say:
“I grew up watching Sailor Moon.”

Because some things can’t be explained in linear sentences.

Dreaming Third Spaces into Being

If you’re a non-linear human living in a linear world, third spaces are not luxuries. They’re lifelines.

And if you’ve ever felt like you weren’t “just one thing,” like you didn’t fit into neat identity boxes, like you speak in tangles instead of lines — then this is your invitation.

Let’s dream third spaces into being.

✨ The Sparkle Invitation

If you’ve ever felt like too much or not enough…
If you speak in spirals, feel in colors, and dream in different languages…
If your identity doesn’t fit in a dropdown menu…
You are not alone.
This is your third space.
This is your invitation to rediscover your magic. 💖