The hazards of learning a new language

Learning a new language can be a wonderful experience. It refreshes and challenges the mind. With perseverance it eventually can be a gateway to meeting new friends. Finally, after much effort, it enables one to enter the deep thinking of another culture. As Charlemagne is reputed to have said, “Avoir une autre langue, c’est posséder une deuxième âme”. (To have another language is to possess a second soul.)

However, learning another language is not without its hazards. I often encourage language learners, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. That is all part of the game”. 

In fact, language learning cannot be that difficult. Even two-year olds can do it. They do it by constantly making mistakes and constantly being corrected. The rub of course is that we adults do not take so readily to constant correction.

Anyway, when I speak about making mistakes in language learning, I speak with some experience. One of the first living languages that I learned to master was Swahili. This language is a blend of inputs from the bantu languages of East Africa plus Arabic. Early Arabic traders from the Gulf Coast intermingled with the local African population and after several centuries, the Swahili language emerged.

I have found that the Africans are wonderfully accommodating in helping us poor expatriate “wazungus” as we have tried to master this beautiful language. I personally found for some time that when I wanted to say “I understand”, I often got strange looks from my African colleagues. Finally, one kind soul told me “Bwana you are saying it wrong. You are trying to say ‘I don’t understand (naelewa), but instead you are saying (ninalewa) 'I am drunk!'”

Spanish is another language that I have had the joy of learning. I did this by spending some time in Spain taking language classes there. One evening our language group went out to eat paella, a favourite Spanish dish that includes various sea foods mixed with rice. The group was chattering away in Spanish and I with my weak Spanish chipped in to say “ Hay muchos maricones en esta paella “. I wanted to say that there are a lot of seafoods (mariscos) in this dish. I got it quite wrong. Much to the enjoyment of the gathered group, I had said instead that there were a lot of queers in the paella.

Later on, my Spanish was somewhat better so I spent some time doing water supply consulting work in Latin America. I seemed to be having quite a difficult time in Bolivia. One evening I wandered into a pizza shop for supper. I made my order with the server and then he asked me,”Qual es su nombre?” Now in my confused state nombre sounded a lot like `"number", so I figured that they must have some kind of numbering system here to order the meals with. I knew nothing of this numbering system so I said, “No sé qual es mi nombre”. (I don’t know what my name (nombre) is). The chefs in the back must have had a good laugh about the poor gringo out front who didn’t even know what his name was.

When I travel I often carry with me a small cushion (cojín) to put behind my back when travelling in buses or cars. One day I seemed to have lost my cushion, probably in a small travel agency that I had been in. So I went back and said to the young woman in charge, “ Se perdío mi cojón.” I thought I was saying “I have lost my cushion”. The problem is that cojón means "testicle", so I had said, “I have lost my testicle”.

Oh said the young lady “Lo siento mucho”. (I am so sorry). “Como es ?”. (How is it?). I indicated with my hands that it was about one-foot square. “Oh senor, su cojín, lo tenemos aqui”. (Oh sir, here is your cushion. We have it here.).

Now if that is not bad enough, a friend of mine at times is afflicted with the same language learning difficulty. She is a language teacher and often says, “To master a language, unfortunately, at first, we often have to massacre it”.

Once in Senegal, she was shopping in a food market with her 16-year-old son. Now in a market it is often expected to bargain over the price of things. She was buying some bananas and asked the price for the bunch. “Cinquante francs (50 francs).” “Oh no, she said “I will only pay cinq cent francs (500 francs)”. The seller was obviously pleased with the bargain, but her son yelled out, “Mom, do you know what you have just done!”

Another friend also pulled off another language learning first. In one sentence she managed to combine three languages together. Now such tri-lingualism is a feat that one can be justly quite proud of. This woman had just arrived in Montreal. She stopped the car and asked for directions. A little unnerved by the newness of the place, with her emerging French, she came out with “Hello sir…, je cherche l`UQAM…, et muchas gracias”.

It is quite common when entering a new language place to get the vocabulary mixed up. The wonder of it all is that after a few days, our wonderful brains are usually able to sort it all out.