May 2, 2008
At least it’s not Basque
[I]n my early thirties, I went with my parents to the Basque country. . . .
This trip went down as the most colossal linguistic failure in Harris family history. Never mind the fact that Basque has twelve grammatical cases (versus Latin’s cushy five); it’s linguistically unrelated to any other tongue. This means—as I learned when I cracked open the textbook Dad [a famous linguist] and I had each bought—that trying to learn it is like trying to stick Velcro to particle board. I’d do the exercises, biting my lip, and get them all wrong. The moment I’d finish, I’d forget everything. You don’t know how close I came to hurling the damn book off the subway. Me? Unable to learn a language? This was a soul-challenging, humbling, deeply frustrating first.
“Bet Dad can do this,” I thought. I emailed to find out. “How’s the Basque going?” His reply: “Fucking language from hell. This is a waste of my time.”
—“Tongue Tied” by Lynn Harris, at Nextbook, my place of employment
I’m currently attempting to cram a bit of French for a trip, and this article makes me feel a lot better—about French, not my inability to learn it. I could be trying to learn Basque! Or Hebrew!
So, dear Clusterflock, what languages are you competent in, and which ones would you like to learn?
comments
24 Responses to “At least it’s not Basque”
Leave a Reply
I was born in Tehran (to American parents) and spoke Persian until I was five. When we returned my dad tried to speak with me but assuming (correctly) we’d never return, I saw no need to respond. Today it saddens me to hear the beautiful language and not understand it. I took a few semesters in college hoping it would come back quickly and easily. It didn’t.
I took something like eight years of Italian, between middle school and college, so I can kind of get by in it, if I have to. I also took two years of German, one in H.S. and one in college, and can absolutely not get by in that. Still, it’s been useful to know a bit of it—especially when I was trying to teach myself Dutch. And since 2005 I’ve been trying intermittently to learn enough French to not get treated with disgust when I’m over there; so far, not much luck. I can understand a lot more of it than I used to, but I can’t speak it worth a damn. Sigh.
Next up, I’d like to try to learn some Russian, since one of my favorite bands. is from SPB and I’d like to at least be able to read the buttons on their website, if not their reportedly obscene lyrics.
I’m “competent” in english. After 13 years of Spanish class, I can understand a tiny bit as long as the speaker is speaking very slowly. Now, I wish I’d taken Spanish class more seriously.
Well, being fluent in English is useful . . . at home.
I feel like my personality changes when I go to a place where I don’t speak the language (or speak it badly). Because suddenly I can’t stick up for myself—unless, as I did when a cashier in Paris yelled at me for not having change, I reply in simple words that everyone can understand: “Fuck you.” But I would rarely resort to such blunt repartée at home.
Oh, India, I think “Fuck you” works quite well in these here United States. Perhaps with the added flourish of “asshole” or “cunt.” Very clear.
Oh, Cindy, I don’t deny it! But I like to have other options, in case I should happen to wish to take the high ground, for a change.
Alas. The only languages I know are both dead, even then, my grasp is pretty tenuous these days: Latin and Koine Greek.
Fortunately, I have enough knowledge of them right now to hack through a translation right now and I could, if the need arose, regain my once great facility. I study a year of German but can pretty much only swear and say hello.
I would love to learn French and German, both so I could find myself in those country with the ability to communicate and to read some of their great literature in their native tongues.
Yes, India, I know what you mean. But I get very happy when I witness articulate people resorting to the basest of language. It’s the closest I come to populism.
This is the second time today I’ve posted without proofing. Might the comment edit feature be turned back on?
Everyday I practice the cinco words of spanish I know with some of the workers at The Greensman.
At the end of the month Danny’s going to Tokyo to conduct Train the Trainer sessions on a couple of the courses he teaches for ESI around the country here. He minored in Japanese at University of Minnesota circa 1990-94. He’s pretty sure he remembers how to say “hello” and “good bye” count to ten and say “well, I should be going now.”
I speak French. But not professionally.
Tracy, might you share with us an appropriately high ground response to a Parisian clerk yelling at her American customer for not having change?
Where to start? How violent would you like her reaction to be? We can go anywhere from misty-eyed to broken windows. Your call.
Broken windows, please. Of the high ground sort.
You’ll want to start by taunting her, and then taunting her once again. That should do the trick.
And perhaps farting in her general direction?
India, i wouldn’t bother, unless you can pull of an impeccable Parisienne stream of abuse at a speed faster than light you’ll just get looked at blankly as though you are talking Cantonese; i know, i went to a French school and honestly any language that cannot come up with something more efficient than four twenties and nineteen for 99 has got to be taking the piss as gorgeous as it is.
for my part i speak 4 languages badly and one of them supposedly doesn’t exist any longer; Serbo-Croat a language of the ‘former’ Yugoslavia
Simone that reminds me of the scene in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (the book) where the undercover Englishman speaks to the shepherd in ancient Greek, though i wouldn’t know if its Koine.
I propose a clusterflock field trip to Paris, where we all stand by as Tracy taunts the woman who was once mean to India.
Who said it was a woman, anyway? It was a man, in fact; probably North African, possibly not a native French speaker, and apparently really didn’t like breaking bills over €10.
This was near the start of what has so far turned out to be my worst day in France ever. Worse even than the long, long July day spent on a slow Auvergne-Paris train with busted air conditioning, packed to standing-room-only with a hundred or so pissed-off chain-smokers. You know it’s too hot when even the French passengers, who generally disapprove of air-conditioning, are saying that it’s a crime and inhuman and the goddamn government arf arf arf.
(arf | ärf |
exclamation (usu. arf arf)
1. used to imitate or represent a dog’s bark;
2. the sound India hears when people are speaking French/Spanish/Italian/German/Dutch around her and using words other than the twenty that she knows.
You know. You’ve all seen the Far Side cartoon.)
Perfect, India. (And believe it or not, a dear friend of mine once owned a dog named . . . Ginger.)
I’m fairly proficient in Spanish, though the rust shows on occasion.
Which [languages] would you like to learn? I entertain an occasional yearning to learn Polish, but that’s as far as it goes. I just entertain the yearning. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe I want to try and understand (in reverse) the linguistic achievement of Joseph Conrad. Or read the works of Bruno Schulz as he wrote them.
And Portugese always sounds so lovely — all those ‘wow wow wow’ sounds — that I think it would be a splendid tongue to learn.
As it is, I’m stuck with a command of Spanish that is just good enough to lead me into trouble; a handle on French that elicits either indulgence or scorn, depending; a limited capacity to understand and read Italian; and just enough recall of a bit of ancient Greek to impress people who don’t know their Αλφα from their Βήτα.
Oh. And I studied Old English for a semester, so if ever I run into Grendel (or his mother), maybe I can bellow a threat.
Ah, yes, I can mimic just enough Brazilian Portuguese to sing along with the choruses of my favorite songs. Ditto Spanish.
I’ve long believed, come to think of it, that the key to language fluency is a knack for mimicry, in general. I am not a good mimic at all, but the only time my French is at all convincing seems to be when I’m trying to be funny.
I worked for a French guy . . . uh . . . fifteen years ago, and from time to time I would make a snappy answer to some stupid question of his in French—his accent was so thick as to sound fake to me, and without thinking, I would respond in kind. I hadn’t studied French at all at that point, so I used just whatever I’d picked up from the atmosphere, from watching Diva or Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or from the arguments my boss and his wife used to yell across the office. Fetchez la vache represented about one-quarter of my vocabulary; ouaaaaais was another quarter. Yet every time I’d blurt out one or two words in what I thought was a really obviously mocking tone, he’d brighten and say, “Oh, you speak French?” having apparently forgotten all the previous times when I’d told him I didn’t.
So, clearly, if I could just manage to stay in a perpetual state of mockfulness, I’d be all set.
India, ouaaaaais is one of my favorite things to say when I’m feeling brash (or wanting to feel brash). I imagine that it’s 1960 and I am Jean-Paul Belmondo.
(Speaking of whom . . . that ain’t his real name, is it? Couldn’t be anybody’s real name, could it?)