Socialising Dilemmas: Which Language?!

Multilingual life can throw up some curious problems in social situations. Even if the people who get together have several languages in common, things can still get unexpectedly awkward.

A few months ago, my Portuguese teacher's son, Jaime, invited me and his mother for lunch in Madrid. Jaime lives and works in Switzerland, and since his German is a bit on the wobbly side, I'd been helping him with his CVs, interview preparation, emails, etc. for the past year and a half. He was briefly in Spain for a wedding, and this would be the first time we'd meet face-to-face.

Teresa was already there when I got to the restaurant, and we chatted in Portuguese while waiting for her son to turn up. When Jaime arrived, we first had to settle on which language to speak. (I usually speak Spanish with him, and some German.) In theory, we share three languages in common: Spanish, Portuguese and English. We decided on Spanish, based on the rationale that my Spanish is significantly better than my Portuguese and that this way, nobody would be left struggling with the conversation. Or so we thought.

After ordering our food, Jaime and I launched right into catching up, since we'd not spoken to each other in a few weeks. At some point, I turned to Teresa to ask her something. She looked at me blankly. Then she said, "Sorry, I'm not actually listening to the conversation... in my head, I'm correcting everything you're saying into Portuguese!"

Ooops.

You see, Teresa and I never speak in Spanish to each other. Except for when I can't think of how to say something in Portuguese, then she helps me out. I also tend to mess up my Portuguese by mixing in Spanish words and expressions (this drives her mad), and in her capacity as my teacher, it's always been her job to correct me relentlessly. It's a deeply ingrained protocol which has served me (and my Portuguese) very well, but in this lunch situation, not so much...

Writing is Just So Damn Hard!

My Portuguese teacher despairs of me. "So, have you written anything this week...?" I look at my fingernails and shake my head. Nope. BUT, as I'm trying to point out to  her, I have done some 'homework' - I've been reading a novel, I've completed various exercises in my grammar & vocab book, I've listened to a couple of podcasts, I've been watching cartoons in Portuguese while having my lunch. I do realise that one lesson a week is not enough to advance my language skills and that I need to work at it a little bit every day. But... I just don't like writing.

"How can you NOT like writing? You write for a living!" She glares at me in stupefaction. I shift uncomfortably in my chair.

Yes, it's a paradox, I realise. In fact, I love writing. As long as I know what I'm doing. I don't like patching together a Frankenessay of words that just don't collocate, sloshing about in a sea of mutilated grammar. I don't like making mistakes, and what I like even less is having a written record of them. It's like being fat in your wedding photo.

I didn't really start writing in English until I was almost in my mid-twenties, when I had to compose my first ever academic essay. At that point, I'd already spent several years in an English-speaking country, in total immersion, reading, listening and speaking, and so I virtually no trouble producing a coherent piece of writing, more or less indistinguishable from something concocted by a native speaker. I'd had so much language input that, when it finally came to producing output, it all came completely naturally. I'd built up sufficient muscle over the years without even noticing or making a conscious effort.

A little while ago, I read In Other Words, by Jhumpa Lahiri, an American writer of Indian heritage (the fact that she's bilingual and bicultural adds an intriguing twist, but I won't go into that right now). Lahiri is already an acclaimed writer (in English) when she moves from the US to Italy and starts writing in Italian, a language she's deeply passionate about. She's been studying Italian on and off for many years, but without ever becoming fluent. She's determined to finally conquer this language and she's doing a lot more than "just" living in Italy and keeping her diary in Italian - she's actually writing In Other Words entirely in Italian - a book destined for publication. So, she's fiddling about with dictionaries, she's having to write in the simplest of sentences, she's totally out of her depth. It's an excruciating process for her, like writing a letter blindfolded, with a pencil wedged between frost bitten toes. And of course, she needs to have everything proofread over and over again by native Italian writers.

She succeeds, evidently, overcoming her fears, limitations, frustrations and incompetence. And she does become fluent in Italian. Kudos to her.

Lahiri is not the only successful author to write in a non-native language, but I'm guessing that not many have attempted such a feat while their command of the language was still rather on the patchy side.

Do I feel at all inspired to follow her example? If only...

When A Language Is Not A Love Match

French and I have fallen out again. I fear it may be terminal. This is somewhat embarrassing, since less than a month ago (on 8th October, to be exact), not only did I splash out a hundred and sixty bucks on a one-year-subscription to newsinslowfrench.com, but blogged excitedly about my fresh surge of enthusiasm for the language (see here). It didn't last. In fact, I've never been closer to ditching French altogether.

French, it seems, brings out the worst of my fickleness. The reason I started this tête-à-tête in the first place a year and a half ago was due to a sense of long-held, insidious embarrassment. Most people I know have at least a basic knowledge of French, because they were made to study it at school for a couple of years. Some took it further. Most didn't, but smattering of it stuck, and, in my observation, it serves them well.

Every time I delve into classic literature, I find it littered with French words and phrases. This makes sense from an historical perspective: In the 19th century, novels and other works were largely written by middle class authors for a middle class readership, and the middle (and upper) class(es) spoke French. Even today, these French fragments remain firmly on the pages of classic works, largely untranslated, and thereby inaccessible to me. (Or rather, inaccessible to the "Pre-May-2015-Me", which is when I started engaging with the French language for the first time in my life.) My primary motivation was to finally plug this gap in my education, and I assumed that love would slowly blossom, with a view towards making myself another linguistic home in the francophone sphere.

Unfortunately, it ain't happening. For all my willing it, I have not managed to turn, what was clearly a head decision, to resonate with me on an emotional level. The positive feedback loop I had been expecting to carry me forward through the sticky bits is gasping its last desperate puffs, like fish in a shallow pool of tepid water, ready to go belly up at any moment.

French and I just don't connect. It's a bit like growing weary of a house guest, who was exciting and fun at first, but who's now driving you round the bend with his idiosyncrasies and domestic ineptitudes. He ignores the dirty dishes in the sink, leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and never puts the toilet seat back down. AND he expects special treatment.

Endless lists of exceptions in grammar, vocab and pronunciation, which (on a good day) I find so endearing in Portuguese and which, to my mind, give a language its "character", irritate the hell out of me in French. There's a saying that goes something like this: "If you're fond of someone, you don't mind if they drop their dinner into your lap, but with someone you dislike, it bothers you how they hold their spoon". It feels like French is putting up barriers on purpose, just to annoy the learner. And me, in particular. It shouldn't be all that difficult - I'm already fluent in Spanish, my Portuguese is coming along just fine, and so a third Romance language ought to be a piece of cake on a silver platter! Yes, the whole thing is totally irrational, but whether someone takes to a language or not is rarely rooted in logic. Above all, you need chemistry, and that's what's missing between French and moi.

Despite this conclusion and all my whining, I don't consider my having invested effort into learning French a waste of time, not in the least. In fact, it has enriched my life, since I've pretty much reached my goal and can now immerse myself in the tomes of yesteryear without choking on turgid chunks of Français. I've even decided to spend a wee bit more time on it, at least until my command over this enfant terrible is on the same level as everyone else's "Bad French".

My long-term goal is to speak five languages "really well", and the only thing that has changed is that I now no longer think that French is going to be one of them.

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.

Recommended Reads: What Language Do I Dream In? By Elena Lappin

I love to read about multilingualism. It’s not so much the academic side, which intrigues me the most, but the personal account of the experience. What impact does living one's life in multiple languages have on a person's sense of self, on their relationships with others? What rewards and difficulties do people face as a consequence of moving within several cultures? Under what circumstances did they acquire their languages, and how do they keep them alive and vibrant?

Yesterday I finished reading What Language Do I dream In, by Elena Lappin, who speaks six languages (or more, I may have miscounted), five of which are central to her life. As a serial immigrant, she has lived in seven countries and currently resides in London.

Lappin speaks to her parents in Russian, to her brother (who's a German writer) in Czech and to her children in English and Hebrew. Her early attempts to raise her first son in Czech, which she had long considered “her” language because she spent a good chunk of her formative years in Czechoslovakia, failed, since family ties with the country had eroded over time. A mother tongue spoken only by the mother, it seems, is not enough to make it take firm root in a child.

In this evocative memoir, besides tracing her convoluted family history, the author describes her inner struggle with choosing the language she could finally realise her dream in: becoming a writer. In fact, which language to write in, rather than dream, becomes a personal as well as a professional quest.

Counter-intuitively, Lappin choses neither her first language and mother tongue, which is Russian, nor her beloved Czech, in which she says she has always felt truly at home, but English, the last language she learned to speak competently when she was already an adult. And although her story is as different from my own as could possibly be, I can very much relate to this part.

As an aside, the author represents someone I’ve referred to as a “Silver Spoon Multilingual” in a previous post. Funnily enough, one of the chapters of the book is entitled “Silver Spoon”. Her silver spoon, though, doesn't have much to do with her multilingualism, but concerns an actual silver spoon with an engraved name that she does not recognise at first sight, but which turns out to be a Russian version of her own name. 

My rating: 9/10.

I think this is a fantastic read for everyone who's fascinated by the multifaceted reality of multilingual living, including its emotional dimension. The only part, which I perhaps didn't relish quite as much as the rest of the book was the last four chapters, in which the author goes into minute detail about her efforts to disentangle her complex family history. She doesn't manage to get me to care about these ancestral characters as much as she does about the still-living members of her family. On the other hand, her profound need to investigate her roots is precisely what gave rise to this great book in the first place, so fair dues.

Getting Back to Normal Life

I'm back in Spain after seven weeks of home leave in Bavaria. Great though it was to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends, part of me has been anxious to return to my routine. Anxious, in particular, to shuffle both French and Portuguese, which had been brushed to one side over the summer, back into the mix.

In an effort to resuscitate my derelict French, I've signed up for busuu.com (the free part). At rock bottom level. A1. This is just too easy, I'm thinking, as I whizz through the first section, and then I spell je m'appelle with one "p". Not so easy after all. A couple of episodes of dailyfrenchpod.com are meant to help me muster up the courage to re-instate my weekly 1-hour-long French lessons. I think I'll give myself another week's respite.

French conversation group starts again on the 13th. Cristina, our fierce and dedicated group leader, has maintained WhatsApp contact with me over the summer, maybe because she senses that I might jump ship at any point. She keeps us on a tight leash. That must be the reason that this group has been going for years, instead of disbanding after six months, as most of them do. Kudos to her.

On the Portuguese front, I'm watching kids' cartoons over lunch and I've received an email from my long-suffering Portuguese teacher. I've been ordered to her house for tomorrow morning. I already know what she's going to say about my deteriorating Portuguese, and it won't be flattering. I'll be armed with Austrian chocolates and a short essay which I'm going to write today. I'm also going to tell her that I've booked a weekend trip to her home town, Lisbon, for October.

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!”