Today, I Write About my Portuguese

"You never write about your Portuguese," says my Portuguese teacher, with a palpable hint of accusation.

I had to think about that. Maybe it's hard to write about things you're quietly enjoying. Like a box of chocs or a glass of wine at the end of a fraught day. It's easier for me to write about French, because we're still at war with each other. Or German, because it's such a big part of who I am. Or Spanish, because a third of my life happens in that language.

Portuguese is more of an indulgent escape. It's a silly kids' cartoon I watch while unwinding over lunch, a novel I retreat to when I should be working, a chat about the events of the week with teacher (and pal) while I'm fussing her cats.

Don't get me wrong - I've still got a long way to go, but I've left behind the agonising stretch of frustration that wedges itself between the beginners' honeymoon period and the point where you can actually do something enjoyable with a language.

And talking of enjoyable, Teresa (my teacher), just got back from a visit to her home town, Lisbon, with this goodie bag:

Deliciously sweet queijadas, a hunk of cheese from the Azores and a new book with grammar exercises . she sure knows how to stoke my motivation!

So, in short, all is well on Planet Portuguese :)

Want To Get Better At A Language? Just Ditch It For A While!

I've been back in Spain now for two weeks. And I've noticed a difference. A difference I'd read about. A difference other people had told me about. A difference I'd never really been conscious of myself before.

I suddenly feel a lot more at home in Spanish. The gap between what I want to express and what I can express has noticeably shrunk. The right turns of phrase come to me much more readily when I need them. I'm still not 100% there, but getting closer. It's only taken me... uhm... half a decade.

Most surprisingly of all, my French has also improved. Before my summer break in Germany, and after battling with the language for a year already, I was still virtually mute. I'm pathetic like that. I hate getting things wrong. I want to speak in well-constructed sentences. Or not at all.

So, on Wednesday, after having abandoned my French for the past two months, I dragged myself to my weekly French conversation group. I didn't want to go. I went only because I had promised Cristina, our formidable chieftain that I would be there, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

My performance was, as expected, as disastrous as ever. This prompted me, while the rest of the group were chatting away, to message Miranda, my French teacher, to fix an appointment for the next day.

It was in this 1-2-1 session, where we both noticed an improvement, Miranda and I. I seemed to catch much more of what she said, and I actually TALKED. Poorly, for sure, French people would have pelted me with mouldy madeleines for what I was doing to their language, but there was a conversation happening, and this was a bit of a break-through for me. For some reason, I felt less inhibited, more gung-ho about it all.

A friend of mine had once remarked to me how his Chinese took a leap forward every time he returned to China after a period of absence. I remember this comment because I thought it odd at the time. Surely, you'd be nothing but terribly rusty?! Never mind having missed out on weeks' or even several months' worth of exposure and learning experiences! How can a break from immersion possibly be beneficial...? It makes no sense. The brain works in mysterious ways...

Do You Get Paid More For Being Multilingual?

When I was fifteen, a friend's mother, a French professor at a US university, made a comment that stuck with me. She said that foreign languages, in the world of work, weren't worth a dime. Unless you had to offer something else besides, preferably a solid set of technical skills.

At the time, I didn't really comprehend the significance of this statement. All I knew was that I liked languages and that I wanted a job where I could use them. Mme Professor was right, of course. When I was job hunting just a couple of years later, I found out very quickly that nobody will employ you just for being a linguaphile. Speaking more than one language is not a guaranteed route to a well paid job. Or any job.

Now, in the course of my higgledy piggledy professional life, I have indeed been paid for being multilingual, but only once I had half a decade of work experience under my belt. It was at the tender age of 21 when I managed to land a job with an international travel and financial services company who paid a bonus for each language its employees could communicate in. In the beginning, my department was small and buzzed with the fun we all had chatting to the different corners of the world, often rescuing distressed customers who had been robbed of all of their belongings. But after a few years, the operation morphed into one of those behemoth call centres with the tasks becoming ever more mundane. I felt like an automaton hooked onto a headset and taking call after call after call. The personal touch, as well as the gratification factor that came with seeing a complicated mission through from beginning to end, were lost and so I left.

My next position was as a Braillist for the RNIB (Royal National Institute for Blind People) who also paid a language skills supplement. The objective was to transcribe a wide range of printed materials, including text books, magazines and exams, into Braille. Before being eligible for the extra pay, I first had to learn Braille and then pass tests in the language-specific Braille codes, the training for which was provided in-house. Oh, I loved that job - imagine being paid for reading books all day, I was in heaven! - but I eventually quit when, due to a regulation change, we were consigned to spend our waking days transcribing gas and electricity bills and very little else. I was bored shitless. That was not what I had signed up for.

In my experience, bonus payments for language skills are rather rare. Most of the time, foreign language requirements - no matter whether they are an "essential" or a "desirable" part of a job spec - do not translate into a neat, quantifiable wad of dosh that rolls into your bank account at the end of every month. However, if you have the skills for the job, being more than monolingual can give you the edge over another candidate, as well as widening the choice of jobs you can apply for.

If anyone has any opinions or experiences to share on this topic, I would sure love to hear from you.

The Curious Case of German "Mobbing"

If a German tells you that he was mobbed, try not to look too horrified. He probably wasn't pummelled into the ground by a horde of rabid yobs. What he's most likely trying to convey to you is that he has suffered an incidence of bullying. Not a pleasant experience, for sure, but it creates a far less violent image in one’s head than "mobbing".

Mobbing is another case where an English term has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into German. And it didn't only lose the fight, but also its original meaning. In German, Mobben/Mobbing is used for all manner of bullying, be it at work, at school or in one’s personal life, regardless of whether the perpetrators are a pack of club swinging thugs ganging up on someone in an alleyway or whether it’s one single, mean-spirited person orchestrating a slur campaign behind the victim's back.

I've not yet been able to figure out 

a) why another word was required for something for which plenty of German words already exist, for example (and depending on context) schikanieren, drangsalieren, hänseln, nötigen, triezen, zwiebeln, (jemanden) fertigmachen, ausgrenzen, verekeln, the list goes on...

b) why, if the existing possibilities did not suffice, it had to be an English word 

c) why they picked the WRONG English word 

The noun (das) Mobbing, or, alternatively (das) Mobben, as well as the verb mobben, were added to the Duden (the most authoritative German dictionary) in 1996.

Curiously, the Duden also features the compound noun Mobbingberatung, meaning “a professional counselling service for those affected by Mobbing”. I'm guessing the reason for this is that Mobbing's primary connotation is with psychological harassment in the workplace, with the aim of making someone resign from their job. 

I don't endorse bullying in any shape or form, but I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon was much more common in Germany compared to other countries like the US and the UK, since it is nigh on impossible in Germany to fire an employee on a permanent contract, even if they deliver a performance that would make an arthritic sloth blush. See here for an amusing blog post which puts a bit of a dent in the myth of "German Efficiency".

  

The Different Types of Multilinguals

The Silver Spoon Multilingual

The lucky bastard was born right into the Holy Polyglot Grail full to the brim with grammar broth and vocab wontons. He doesn’t even have to tilt his head back to imbibe the linguistic manna. Spawned by parents of different nationalities, he grew up on three continents and has been tended to by a string of imported nannies. He burbles away blissfully in five languages before he’s potty trained.

How to spot: Oh, don't bother looking for him, he'll stand out wherever he goes. And don't feel bad - he's been created for the sole purpose of making you jealous. Not even his farts have a whiff of an accent, FFS!

The Hawker

To him, language is but a workhorse. He is the used car sales man of the multilingual world. He’s in love with making a sale, not the language. The language is merely what gets him there. The hawker exists in many guises: He could be selling leather bags on a beach or be the CEO of a multinational conglomerate.

How to spot: Just aim straight for his Achilles heel and watch him fall. You’ve surely met that hotel receptionist who, at first, seemed like he was fluent in six languages, but when you tried to talk to him about anything non-hotelrecpetionisty, he drew a big fat blank. 

The One With The Itchy Feet 

He'll suddenly announce that he's taking up sticks. His family stare at him in wide-eyed incredulity, his friends are aghast. A job offer he couldn't refuse? A whirlwind romance with an exotic minx he charmed in a chat room...? No and nope. He fabricates some story about being fed up with the weather and needing a change of scenery, blah blah, because he knows that nobody is going to take "I'm going because I just need to learn X language" seriously. While everybody's still scratching their heads, he's already off to the airport with a one-way ticket in his backpack and no plans to return for Christmas.

How to spot: Look for the foreigner who shuns his compatriots as if they were maggot-infested weasels and only hangs out with the locals. 

The Hermit

This one hardly ever leaves the confines of his bedroom. Give him a break, he’s only fourteen. If he had friends, he would try to impress them with his language skills. He has no friends because he tries to impress everyone with his language skills.

Should you ever get the chance to approach such a specimen on one of his rare forays into the real world, do not, I repeat, DO NOT make the mistake of calling him a “polyglot”. That would be far too pedestrian and bound to offend his sensibilities. He’s a “hyperpolyglot". You have been warned. 

How to spot: On YouTube. He’s made 15,000 videos of himself rattling off rote-learned scripts in 35 languages which have 0.5 views between them. 

The Lingacademic

After somehow managing to spend 79% of his formative years supertuning his epiglottis on the international student exchange circuit, he will eventually scale far enough up the linguistic syntax tree to call himself a real university-cultivated linguist with enough letters after his name to have exhausted an entire alphabet.

How to spot: Appears to be listening attentively to what you’re saying, but is, in fact, silently (or not so silently) correcting your grammar and/or listening to the Italian family arguing at the next table. 

The Impostoglot

He’s almost always a native English speaker whose entire foreign language repertoire consists of two dozen loose words and six phrases, half of which contain the word “beer”.

No matter which country he’s in, he will claim, without batting an eyelid, to “speak the lingo”. Why, he actually believes that he does! He manages to maintain his delusion because, whenever he goes about peppering his speech randomly with his paltry, mispronounced melange of scraps, the targets of his efforts prefer to humour him quietly instead of catapulting him out of his ignorance. 

In the rare cases when he does become aware that communication isn't actually happening, it's because they have a heavy accent. 

How to spot: In a bar, yelling “una biérrraay per favore!”

Not Lost But Omitted From Translation

Sitting on the train in Munich yesterday, I payed closer attention than I normally do to the warning notice aimed at dissuading fare dodgers (Schwarzfahrer). I noticed that the text had not been translated in its entirety into the other languages.

[To make it easier to read, I've cut the French and Italian texts from my rather blurry photo and just left you with the original German along with the English translation]

As you can see, in the translation(s), the notice limits itself to stipulating the amount of the fine (€60) you will incur if you are caught without a valid ticket and the legal ramifications. The original German text, however, contains two extra sentences (highlighted by me) which are... how to put this delicately... bordering on the contemptuous:

Whatever reasons you may cite [for not having a valid ticket], there is no excuse which we haven't already heard before. We know them all, and none of them are going to wash with us. 

I wonder why they did not translate this part. It wasn't for lack of space, that's for sure. Were they, perhaps, worried that the condescending tone might ruffle tourists' sensibilities...?


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After publishing this post, a fellow blogger sent me this image, which was part of the 2014 campaign against fare evasion run by the Berlin Transport Company:

"Fare dodgers are getting ever more daring"

Foreigner Beware Of Crinkly Forehead

A few weeks ago, I went to the doctor's. It was a big event for me. I'd never been in need of medical attention before. Not in Spain, anyway. I'm of robust design, you see. I don't pander to fancy foods that can't be eaten with a spoon and I don't get illnesses that can't be cured by an aspirin. However, a rebellious mole on my back was starting to morph into an octopus and it needed to be stopped by a professional.

Health centres are confusing places. I glanced around in a daze for ages until spotting a desk with a person who wasn't either bellowing into a phone or being harangued by a patient-staff scrum. I approached the woman stationed there and told her that I had an appointment at 11:30. Turns out that this was the desk where you make appointments and not the desk where you go when you already have an appointment. Once this was clarified, I asked her where I needed to go next. Up to the third floor, she said.

I followed her directions and arrived in a big central waiting room surrounded by four walls with lots of doors with names on them. Only then did it occur to me that I was missing a vital piece of information.

I returned to the desk lady for help. "Sorry," I said, "I don't actually know which doctor I'm supposed to be seeing. Could you tell me their name, please?"

And there it was.

The dreaded Crinkly Forehead.

I repeated my query, only to be met with yet more crinkles towering over a blank stare. I asked again. The crinkles assumed attack formation. I tried once more, in really simple Spanish, words spaced at one second intervals (I've had some practice at this, as you can tell). I repeated my question three more times. Still nothing. In an act of desperation, I grabbed a pen and paper from the desk and wrote it down. Finally, the name of my physician was divulged.

The most flabbergasting aspect of Crinkly Forehead is that it can spring into action BEFORE verbal communication even has a chance to commence. This happened to me in my local phone shop. As I handed my phone to the girl and drew breath to ask if she could please top it up with twenty bucks, I found myself confronted with a quizzically cocked head disfigured by crinkle over crinkle over fucking crinkle! They were humping each other, I swear! Then they called for re-inforcements and a bundle of veins as thick as anacondas after a meal of jungle elephants joined the wrestling match and... Christ, I did not know that the rosy baby bottom face of a twentynothing could even do that!

I'm guessing her inner thought process must have gone something like this: She looks like a foreigner, so whatever she is going to say will be incomprehensible. But I will try to help, because I'm a good person. But... what if she tries to make me speak in English?!?! Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God! I've only studied it for ten years at school, I can't say a word!!! What am I going to do, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?!?! At this point, she reaches the conclusion that it's safest just not to understand anything.

The Crinkly Forehead is the nemesis of every language learner, tourist, or foreigner in general. It is the iron curtain, the NATO missile defence shield and the wall Trump is gonna build all rolled into one.

Once the contortions commence, once you spot the merest ripple, the slightest tell-tale twitch in the face that may have been smiling benevolently at you just a heartbeat ago, dear language learner, you are doomed. It is the manifestation of Blue Screen of Death in a real live person. A re-boot can only be effected once the obstruction has been removed, and the obstruction, my hapless foreign friend, is YOU.

Attempting to engage with Crinkly Forehead is not like flogging a dead horse. It's like flogging all the sausages, lasagnes, burgers and chicken nuggets that its macerated remains found their way into, expecting the clapped-out old mare to re-assemble and run the Grand National. It ain't gonna happen. No chance. Go home. Talk to Siri.

I, my dear people, will be talking to my mole. At least it is forthcoming, if only with tentacles.

Getting My Bavarian On

Barbara Engleder won gold for Germany in Rio yesterday in the women’s 50m rifle three positions event. After being declared winner, she went totally berserk, crashing to her knees, beating her chest, the ground and the air with her fists and hollering victory at the top of her lungs.

Although this exuberant display of emotion may have been a tad out of the ordinary for a German athlete, there was something even more striking about what happened next.

In the post-competition interview, in which Engleder explained her joyous outburst as the need to release the build-up of tension, she spoke in the broadest Bavarian imaginable. 

My mum was aghast during the entire news report, while I stared at the screen with bemused incredulity. We are both native Bavarian speakers, to be sure, but there is a widely held consensus across Germany that dialects are only to be used in informal situations, e.g. with friends and family, but NOT in formal settings like TV broadcasts or job interviews.

On such high-brow occasions, you are meant to speak Standard German (Hochdeutsch), which every German can understand. By switching to dialect "inappropriately", the speaker risks coming across as an uneducated, uncouth hillbilly*. Or worse, a farmer. 

For the past few years, whenever I’m on a home visit, like I am right now, I make a concerted effort to stick to Bavarian as much as possible, even with strangers in shops and restaurants, as long as I think that they, too, are Bavarian.

I generally find that the reception to my speaking Bavarian is overwhelmingly positive, with most people replying in the dialect without raising an eyebrow.

If there’s one advantage to getting older, it’s that you care much less about what people think of you. So what if anyone takes me for a barn-raised redneck? 

I’m really enjoying putting a conscious effort into expanding my Bavarian vocabulary. I’ve learned at least a dozen new words this summer already. My home village is a rich picking ground, and people of the older generation are particularly rich source of terminology, which is fast falling out of use. It pains me having to watch my very first language dying a slow death. (I did not start to speak Hochdeutsch until I went to kindergarten). But who knows, now that I have an Olympic gold medallist on my side, maybe there's still hope?

[Click here to listen to an interview with Barbara Engleder]

(*Hinterwäldler in German).

Lost For Words - Why My German Sucks

My mother just can't help herself. She had to slip in another comment about the frightful gaps in my  vocabulary. We were having coffee at her friend Maria’s house yesterday when, recounting an anecdote, Maria mentioned the German word for ‘fairground ride’, and I remarked that I couldn’t remember having heard that term before. There was guffawing and stares of disbelief. How can you not know that?! Last week, there was a similar incident on the train with Mum berating me for failing to recall the word for (railway) sleeper.

My pointing out that, in fact, I do know what things are called, but... in English, does nothing to mellow maternal consternation. 

I guess it’s hard for her to understand my predicament. It’s just one of those things you don’t really get unless it happens to you.

Mum spent all of her 65 years immersed in the language of her native country, listening to German, reading in German, thinking in German, speaking nothing but German. I’ve had less than a third of that time to assimilate my mother tongue. Much of the passive vocab, which I once possessed as a teenager, has slipped into oblivion during the past quarter of a century of living abroad.

I also made the fatal mistake of not reading any books in German for two decades, which must sound paradoxical to anyone who knows how much of a bookworm I am. Since moving to Spain five years ago, I have been trying to remedy this sad state of affairs, and I have the Kindle archives to prove it.

I do know where my mother is coming from. I, too, took my German for granted for far too many years, never making an effort to maintain, expand and update it, believing that it would always be there for me, held in suspension, pristinely preserved, like a pickled marsupial in a museum display cabinet. But nope. It’s very much a case of “use it or lose it”.

The Multilingual Thing - Why Does It Even Matter?

Who hasn’t been shaking their head, on occasions, over people waxing lyrical about the most pointless of pastimes? But then, who's to decide whether something is worth getting excited about or whether it's a total waste of time? 

In the end, I would argue, it's all down to your chosen perspective.

You could look at it like this: In another four billion years or so, the sun will run out of fuel, it will explode and wipe out our solar system. And since we can barely get off this rock - and certainly not far enough away from it to reach and wreck some other beautiful planet - we’ll be done for. In the face of this inevitable event, what does anything matter? Football, saving humpback whales, getting junior to eat his broccoli, fashion, music, gardening, knitting sock puppets, building a log cabin in the woods with your bare hands – it's all equally pointless in the (very) long run, why invest effort and energy in anything if it will all end up burnt to a crisp?

Actually, I find the thought that we're all just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic strangely comforting. Even at the risk of fucking up royally, you might as well try to cultivate yourself a nice little obsession, since, ultimately, you’ve got no more and no less to lose than anyone else. 

My personal take is that what matters most, while we’re all hurtling towards our chargrilled finale, is what gets us fired up as individuals. The scope ranges from pleasing solely oneself to enriching the lives of others. Maybe we should aim for a bit of both?

We all find different things rewarding, it’s as simple as that, and it’s more about how we cultivate our interests, rather than what they are. If what's keeping us back is the fear that the choices and sacrifices we make in pursuit of our foibles will seem ridiculous to others, then we wind up in a lose-lose situation: we won't be able to pull off the causes others deem "worthy" for lack of emotional impetus and commitment, and neither will we succeed at what we actually do care about if we keep our hooves glued to the starting blocks.

When, about three years ago, I mentioned to a group of acquaintances that I was going to start learning Portuguese, one of them said, "Oh, yet another language you won't ever need." ¡Caramba! What the hell does this person know about what I need or what may or may not be useful to me? 

We don’t choose our passions. We find them – or, as some airy fairy tree-hugging folk would argue, they find us – and they ignite us, often for unfathomable reasons. They can crack open doors that would otherwise have remained firmly closed to us. If we are passionate about something, it makes us feel connected – to our own selves, to other people, to the world around us – and without that connectedness, we cannot function effectively as human beings. 

So, I thought, what could be a better place for doing verbal cartwheels around one of my most enduring passions than a brand new blog? 

I want this blog to help me reflect on my (at times a bit chaotic and unstructured) multilingual life, turning it into a more conscious and productive experience. I want to go on improving my skills and better integrate my thus far rather poorly developed, peripheral languages, Portuguese and French, more tightly into my everyday life. I also want to record some of those curious language-related daily incidents and insights before they evaporate into thin air. Maybe, I'm hoping, these will resonate with someone else out there…?

That brings me to the other main point of this blog: connecting with people for whom language is not a mere technical tool located in the arid, strategising parts of their brains, deployed on a strict communicate-or-starve basis. For some people, and I count myself among them, languages go so much deeper, they are an integral part of who we are and by merging with new ones, our consciousness expands, we encounter parts of ourselves we never knew existed, and this makes us grow, evolve and change. It is this emotionally-centred, experiential dimension of multilingualism that is to be the heart of this blog.

A New Language Blog And Not By Accident

I was reluctant to start this blog. Wasn’t it, perhaps, just a bit too ‘special interest’? Too nerdy? Head-too-far-up-my-own-arse…?

I’d been ruminating over starting a dedicated language blog for the past couple of years, but couldn’t decide on which angle to take with it. Then, a few months ago, the idea of keeping it focused on everyday life (meaning my life in particular) lodged itself into my head.

I mean, there are already plenty of useful blogs out there focusing on learning techniques, language app evaluations, the ins and outs of bilingual parenting, not forgetting the ubiquitous “my placement year abroad” authored by sprightly twenty-nothings who refer to the heads of their host families as "Mum" and "Dad". All well and good, I peruse all types of language blogs, but maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't hurt to toss another one into to the mix, one that was about life as suffered experienced by the middle-aged, slightly grumpy contingent of language enthusiasts whose memory is starting to conk out on them? A blogger friend suggested the title "MyMidlifeLanguageCrisis", but that would have cut, quite possibly, a bit too close close to the bone... ahem.

Amusing as well as exasperating situations arise when, instead of chugging along on a monolingual rail tied to one country and one culture, one’s life runs on multiple tracks. Keeping all those plates spinning can be exhausting, but it's uniquely rewarding at the same time.

Since early June, I've been keeping a “Language diary”. The key objective, besides gathering source material for the blog, was to record and reflect upon when, how and why I was using my languages throughout the day. This is when I realised a couple of things.

First of all, it struck me that most of what I wrote down was utterly banal. Some serious doubts manifested themselves at that point - who wants to read “answered an email in English”, “asked the butcher in Spanish to cut some chicken breasts into strips”, “skyped with my Mum in German”? I would have to figure out a way of making it more engaging somehow, but without losing the day-to-dayness of it. Hmmm.

Second, I found that keeping a precise log detailing every single activity and the language used to be an impossible task. There was just too much switching back and forth. I might be reading work-related material in English for twenty minutes, quickly respond to a friend’s message in Spanish, followed by looking up an unknown French word in a Facebook post, then go back to my work until skype bleats at me, and so on.

On the other hand, this exercise underscored the validity of my premise – that my life was indeed multilingual, and inextricably so. It wasn’t a case of spending all day in one language and then consciously having to create a time slot to listen to a French podcast or read a newspaper article in Portuguese (although my day is punctuated by these kinds of activities, too). It showed me that I had already succeeded in what I set out to do half a decade ago when I decided to move to Spain, and that recognition was a satisfying one.

That’s right: none of this happened by accident. I did not just fall into a multilingual existence. Like most people I know, I grew up in a monolingual environment, and I could have chosen, quite easily, to remain there.

I felt drawn to languages since my first contact with English at school, when I was about eleven years old. I don't know why. I decided to follow it, I made choices which led me towards multilingualism, often in roundabout ways, while also trying to do a bunch of other things, since life is never a linear route from A to point B.

Often, my pursuit of languages, or "polyglottery", as a friend calls it, had to go on the back burner for a while, sometimes for years, but it's on the back burner no more. The raison d’être of this blog is to keep tending to it right at the centre of my stove.

Why does it matter, anyway? That will be the topic of the next post…