Feature photo by bravenewtraveler. Photo above by Jeremy G.
While most are content with knowing one language, others seek to learn much more.
Being fluent in English is like laying on an inflatable raft in the middle of an ocean.
It’s easy; it’s comfortable, and it gets you places. But I’m addicted to the process of looking at a symbol that means nothing and unlocking it until I lose access to that meaninglessness.
It’s a weird feeling, that transition.
Imagine that you are driving down the highway and have no idea that orange traffic cones mean construction. Can’t do it? You’ve crossed the semantic fence, where orange will never just be orange anymore.
I wish I knew what every symbol meant, every tattoo, every weaved garment whose stripes indicate tribe status, every letter of Hebrew and even every corporate logo.
Unlocking them is nothing like lying on a raft. It’s like treading water in a vast ocean, with lots of liquid in your ears.
Photo by el_monstrito.
Spanish
I first started learning Spanish for a relatively stupid reason. I got in a small but friendly fight with a girl from Guatemala in my seventh grade science class, and at the end of the day she slipped me a note on ripped paper.
It said, “Paz, hermana. Soy más linda que tú.” I looked at it for a long time, but the component parts didn’t mean much.
I first started learning Spanish for a relatively stupid reason. I got in a small but friendly fight with a girl from Guatemala
I got home and typed the phrase into Altavista’s Babelfish translator, and her message came up seamlessly (which rarely happens with internet translators, making this somewhat of a lightning bolt experience).
It read cruelly, bluntly, “Peace, sister. I am prettier than you.”
By looking up what this girl had written, I had dodged a formidable attempt by another person to both a) screw with a dumb American and b) become an ignorant player in a snotty girl’s game.
We still became friends after that, believe it or not.
I went through about four years of formal training in Spanish later on, and I realized there existed a realm of verb conjugations, object pronouns, and my favorite grammatical lair, the idea of mood.
In Spanish, talking about hypothetical or non-existent scenarios requires a whole new way of tweaking at words. For example, if you say, “I want you to make me dinner,” the verb “want” actually exists, but the “make dinner” only exists in the speaker’s mind, so it has to be conjugated differently.
All of these implicit complications of communication intrigued me. I began to go to bookstores to look at simple Lonely Planet phrase books, excited by how differently the process of ordering a beer was structured in another language.
Photo by juliadeb.
Portuguese
The next language I started learning was Portuguese. I read an article in “Rolling Stone” magazine about a Brazilian band called Bonde do Role.
Apparently their lyrics were unrivaled in their inappropriateness. I decided that I was going to attempt to translate them. I didn’t want to be a dumb American listening to dance music that was talking about gang rapes, bobbing my head along on the treadmill all the while.
Portuguese enchanted me in a way that Spanish never quite did. First of all, it was harder. The sounds in the words blended together; they were more lackadaisical and less easy to pick out.
Not every letter in Portuguese has a consistent sound, which made it more formidable and elusive, like English.
Photo by Soctech.
English
I think English speakers must have an implicit knowledge that ours is one of the most wacked-out languages on the planet, because for me, learning any language that has a lot of order and consistency renders me suspicious, as if the language weren’t real.
Our words are a mix of Germanic structures and Latin-derived structures, so some verbs we conjugate on the inside, like “sit/sat,” and some we just shove an “ed” at the end of, along with countless other oddities.
But what makes English so unique is that it accommodates foreign words and rarely assimilates them. We leave “tequila” as “tequila” instead of trying to phoneticize it into our own system as “tekeeluh.” (Notice that we don’t have such a system by how strange that looks.)
Taekwondo is left how it is, words like “laugh” are left with rules of pronunciation that could render almost any learner hopelessly exasperated.
Most other languages I’ve learned distort foreign words into their own system. For example, in Japanese, McDonald’s is called “Maku Donarudo.”
Photo by alexandralee.
Chinese
The language that I’m learning now is Chinese. It’s the language I’ve always wanted to learn, ever since I was about five and used to see Chinese symbols engraved on my mom’s bath soap.
I recently learned the symbol for the word “soap” and this odd sense of déjà vu took me over. Learning Chinese is like putting on a scuba mask and entering into an ocean on the other side of the world, where the water and all the coral reefs are different colors.
The meanings of Chinese words, because they are hinted at in their writing, are all the more vivid and immanent, and because they have fewer syllables in general, ideas like “dao” (As in, “The Dao of Pooh” anyone?) are constantly re-used in different scenarios, making its concepts more interrelated than any other language I’ve encountered.
The best moment in learning a foreign language is when you can feel yourself poke your head above the water, and suddenly you can look at say, a “French Vogue” and know what they’re talking about, or use a Chinese menu without peeking at the English.
It’s crossing a path of meaning that you once crossed when you stopped saying “goo goo gag a” and started saying “momma,” except this time you can remember it.
Are you addicted to languages? Or wish you could learn a few more? Share your thoughts in the comments!
About the Author
More By This Author
- Jay Rubin: Translating More Than Words (6 comments)
- No Reservations: Deconstructing The Cynicism Of Anthony Bourdain (13 comments)
Related Posts
7 Comments... join the discussion!
-
-
this made me feel so much better about my tendency to pick up and throw away languages. also nice to see you are getting a lot of comments!
the first language i ever tried to learn was russian. in sixth grade i had russian once or twice a week, but i only managed to learn the alphabet and basic travel phrases. both long forgotten. two years later my eighth grade teacher had a french-canadian neighbor and would try to teach the class french as she learned it herself. again, i didn't learn much.
in ninth grade i started spanish which i took for two years. then i decided to study abroad for a year in germany. i got a good handle on german and came back to the states to finish up high school.
in college i continued with german and started hebrew. i took hebrew for two quarters (mind you, today all i can say is i want to drink beer with friends) and studied yiddish in my free-time. i also started practicing reading dutch. then i decided to go to switzerland to improve my german and give french another try. i quickly discovered that i would rather have construction workers outside of my window at night than engage in conversations with french speakers. i really just don't like french.
then i decided to teach english in japan, and now i am studying japanese with a teacher.
after all of this i would sum up my language skills so:
english: mother tongue
german: proficient
spanish: basic level only
hebrew: idiot's level only
dutch: basic reading level
japanese: basic but improving daily
russian: when i hear it on the street i think it is polish
french: i have a rough time ordering a cafe o'laitmy goal is to travel around until i achieve proficiency in a few languages. i really want to learn norwegian and arabic but have recently decided that i can't pursue any new languages until i improve at the ones i have a foundation in. so my dabbling is on hold.
if you're interested you can follow my travel endeavors on my site: http://www.sheenasays.com—
↵ -
i love languages! i love studying, and learning them, dissecting them, and then comparing different ones. i didnt used to be too good at spanish, i could always speak it though, but now i'm starting to make sense out of it. i've played around with french, and i had italian classes, i came in late into the course, and in less than half the time i learned far more than all my other classmates who had been there for a long while. i'm in love with latin and i'm learning it pretty fast, i'm surprised sometimes that i can actually read it. i had never liked portuguesse before, it felt like weird spanish, but recently i've found that i can actually read it without much trouble, and when i tried writting it worked out good! when i was in freshman year i got into japanese and german, which i tackled, but never really got too into it, though lately i have been studying chinese and russian, and i found chinese is not that hard really, i've been trying to pick up on greek, and although i'm still starting i can read words just fine, not so much write. languages are awesome!
↵ -
Terrific article.
↵ -
At last I met people who love languages the way I do! Your article is not less than spectacular, fantastic, superb!!! I'm Brazilian and have always wondered to know what a foreigner would think about our Portuguese, and voilà that's the first time ever I can hear of somebody's impressions. Thanks for letting me know. Today I speak English (considered fluent by many), Spanish (fluent by everybody!), French (learnt 15 years ago and now it's basic as I don't have anybody to practice it with me) and am to start German. For an European it is not that much, but for a Brazilian it sure is. As Benny, the Irish polyglot, said, the Brazilian Northeastern region is needier of English teachers than the Southeastern one. But after this splendorous article, I want to invite Rebecca to stop by Sao Paulo and visit me! At least I'll have the pleasure of speaking many languages at once with somebody! As Brazil is one of your dreams, I'm at your disposal to give you further information in case you need. Just email me: jwt03@hotmail.com. Fabio
↵ -
Hi great article!! I am also a language aholic I love learning new langauge, currently I'm learning Korean and it's just awesome to see how many words I already know because they are similair to English (bit written and pronounced different) and it's awesome to read or write something that nobody in my place understands. Besides Learning Korean I had 2 short courses of Spanish and Chinese. I'm fluent in Dutch and English, and I sort of speak the basic French and German and I know a few words in the Mongolian language. I still want to learn Cyrylic though, since that would everything much easier, altough you can recognize the most important word (supermarket) In almost every language:D
↵ -
I, too, am a language-aholic. I mainly stick to the romance languages. In junior high, I was at a school that forced me to take Latin. Understanding Latin at the age of 13? No way. Not me anyway. In high school I took Italian and fell in love. Now, I’m in college, working hard as a double major in Spanish and Italian (and i’ve even dabbled some in French). Like you though, I just don’t want to be that ignorant American who only knows English and refuses to try anything else.
↵
