I recently traveled to Germany and to Lebanon to visit my relatives (summer 2012). In Friedberg, Germany, we visited my dad's cousin Ramzi and his wife Heike for a few days. I spoke no German, none at all. The only words I could say with certainty are "Guten morgen! Bitte! Danke! Ein, Svei, Drei! Frankfurter!" Luckily for me, Ramzi and Heike could speak English with ease. It was evident in Heike's schooling, though, that German schools (or at least the one she attended, many years ago) taught a less idiomatic and more literal translation of English to the students: Heike would say something like, "Once, I have been to Brazil, and while I am at the airport a man is approaching me..." The tenses are uneven—so what? It is easier in other languages to tell stories in the present tense because they do not need to use past participles—and the wording is idiosyncratic, off-kilter, though the meaning she meant to convey was understood. "Once, I went to Brazil, and while I was at the airport a man approached me..."
While in Germany, I remained mostly silent, in shopping places, in restaurants, tourist areas, because I did not know enough German to string together a sentence. It is far less embarrassing to not speak to people than to reveal that you are visiting their country have not learned their language. I remember my French teacher telling me that any attempt to communicate in a foreign language is more appreciated than to only speak to someone in the one you know. It shows you have not even tried to learn the other language. In retrospect, I should have tried to use what little German I knew instead of remaining silent.
Learning a new language while in a foreign country is like being a feral child. Feral children are children found in the wild, and act like the animals around them. People can bring the feral children into society with success, as the children understand emotion and relate to other human beings on an emotional level, but there is a critical time frame in to the mastery of language must conform. Feral children can learn lots of words throughout their lives, but most are too old to learn the concepts of sentences and grammar at the pace that ordinary children learn (Aplan). Words can just be funny sounds to them rather than specific way to communicate. In this way, I learned many new words—for instance, I can tell you that a hautbahnhof is a train station, a raised rail platform, and kuchen means cake—but I could not use these words in a coherent sentence; I can neither tell nor ask in German how to get to Ramzi and Heike's house from the hautbahnhof, nor would I understand a German response except for the body language that reinforced it.* When you learn a language at such a primitive level, you never learn useful verbs.
Similarly, speaking with another person in a foreign language, one that you have only practiced in a classroom, is like trying to play a song and realizing that you did not practice enough, because the rest of the orchestra is playing faster than you are and you can only catch one or two notes per measure. The same goes for the ability to hear the nuances of the foreign language that you are speaking. In Lebanon, I tried speaking in French with my cousins Yasmina, Samy, and Ghia. I could hear the words in the sentences the spoke and understood what they meant, but I had to ask them to repeat what they had said because I could not compute as quickly as they spoke except for the last parts of the sentences.
"...-pose?" Asked my cousin Ghia. We were on a family walk, and my cousin Yasmina and I were jogging ahead.
On the flight from Frankfurt am Main to Washington, D.C., I sat next to a black woman, African or Carribean I could not decipher. Irrelevant, in any case, where she was from. I smiled and said hello to her, and she returned the nod and a small smile, but not the "hello." She was silent, and I knew from employing the same silence in this kind of case that she did not speak English, or not much beyond "yes," "no," and "toilets?" She had experienced that same silence as I had, that fear of being perceived as different or inadequate, just being tired of needing help communicating. It can be frustrating and it can make you want to give up any efforts to speak in someone else's tongue.
*If you can't tell, I just recently watched this documentary (July 2012).
**Lebanon was occupied by France before it became an independent nation, so most schools teach the language and many people still use French phrases instead of certain Arabic ones, like merci instead of shokran (شكراً). My cousins speak fluent French, English, and Arabic.
Third and final note: I originally wrote this blog post a year and a half ago, but never published it. I never really finished it, because I didn't think I had addressed counter arguments well enough. I kept the content of this article the same, even though I feel a bit differently about it now than I did at the time. I cited the feral children documentary that I watched, though it now comes from a different source than before. I might write a reflection/response to this post soon! Having traveled a little more and become much more fluent in some foreign languages, I have a different perspective on language than I did before.
Aplan, Rick. "Wild Child: The Story Of Feral Children." YouTube. YouTube, 30 June 2013. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
While in Germany, I remained mostly silent, in shopping places, in restaurants, tourist areas, because I did not know enough German to string together a sentence. It is far less embarrassing to not speak to people than to reveal that you are visiting their country have not learned their language. I remember my French teacher telling me that any attempt to communicate in a foreign language is more appreciated than to only speak to someone in the one you know. It shows you have not even tried to learn the other language. In retrospect, I should have tried to use what little German I knew instead of remaining silent.
Learning a new language while in a foreign country is like being a feral child. Feral children are children found in the wild, and act like the animals around them. People can bring the feral children into society with success, as the children understand emotion and relate to other human beings on an emotional level, but there is a critical time frame in to the mastery of language must conform. Feral children can learn lots of words throughout their lives, but most are too old to learn the concepts of sentences and grammar at the pace that ordinary children learn (Aplan). Words can just be funny sounds to them rather than specific way to communicate. In this way, I learned many new words—for instance, I can tell you that a hautbahnhof is a train station, a raised rail platform, and kuchen means cake—but I could not use these words in a coherent sentence; I can neither tell nor ask in German how to get to Ramzi and Heike's house from the hautbahnhof, nor would I understand a German response except for the body language that reinforced it.* When you learn a language at such a primitive level, you never learn useful verbs.
Similarly, speaking with another person in a foreign language, one that you have only practiced in a classroom, is like trying to play a song and realizing that you did not practice enough, because the rest of the orchestra is playing faster than you are and you can only catch one or two notes per measure. The same goes for the ability to hear the nuances of the foreign language that you are speaking. In Lebanon, I tried speaking in French with my cousins Yasmina, Samy, and Ghia. I could hear the words in the sentences the spoke and understood what they meant, but I had to ask them to repeat what they had said because I could not compute as quickly as they spoke except for the last parts of the sentences.
"...-pose?" Asked my cousin Ghia. We were on a family walk, and my cousin Yasmina and I were jogging ahead.
"Quoi?" I responded, not expecting the question and not catching what she had said, though I recognized that it was in French.
"On se repose?" She asked again.
Oh. She wanted to rest. "Non. Euh, nous allons courir à... à l'arbre
là. Tu te repose si tu veux." In a
response, it feels easier, to me,
to repeat the words from the question because they are your grappling hook, the
thing that helps you climb up the wall of the language barrier that keeps you
from hearing and understanding what was said the first time.
I would like to call the following hypothesis the American Traveler's Paradox, though its truth is (very) limited: if an ostensibly American person travels out of the country, the people he encounters will assume that English is the only language he speaks, so that is what they try to speak to him. Conversely, if an ostensibly American person travels out of the country, he will assume that the people he is likely to encounter, such as a hotel clerk or airport customs officer, will speak English. This is what I encountered during my stay in Lebanon. I did not know enough Arabic to carry on a conversation past greetings, but I do know enough French to do so. I told relatives who I noticed speaking French past "bonjour" and "merci"** that I understood French, in French, and they still spoke to me in English. Also, as a corollary to the paradox, if a foreigner comes to the United States, the American will assume that the foreigner speaks English, and will speak English to the foreigner. Of course, there are many more reasons for people wanting to speak to Americans in English, or Americans wanting to speak in English instead of another language that they know (and not all foreigners who come to the US speak English, etc.), that refute this paradox, but it is nonetheless an interesting hypothesis. It is just based on my observations from that vacation.
On the flight from Frankfurt am Main to Washington, D.C., I sat next to a black woman, African or Carribean I could not decipher. Irrelevant, in any case, where she was from. I smiled and said hello to her, and she returned the nod and a small smile, but not the "hello." She was silent, and I knew from employing the same silence in this kind of case that she did not speak English, or not much beyond "yes," "no," and "toilets?" She had experienced that same silence as I had, that fear of being perceived as different or inadequate, just being tired of needing help communicating. It can be frustrating and it can make you want to give up any efforts to speak in someone else's tongue.
*If you can't tell, I just recently watched this documentary (July 2012).
**Lebanon was occupied by France before it became an independent nation, so most schools teach the language and many people still use French phrases instead of certain Arabic ones, like merci instead of shokran (شكراً). My cousins speak fluent French, English, and Arabic.
Third and final note: I originally wrote this blog post a year and a half ago, but never published it. I never really finished it, because I didn't think I had addressed counter arguments well enough. I kept the content of this article the same, even though I feel a bit differently about it now than I did at the time. I cited the feral children documentary that I watched, though it now comes from a different source than before. I might write a reflection/response to this post soon! Having traveled a little more and become much more fluent in some foreign languages, I have a different perspective on language than I did before.
Aplan, Rick. "Wild Child: The Story Of Feral Children." YouTube. YouTube, 30 June 2013. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
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