Struggling to Understand

I'm terrible with languages. Absolutely horrific. My Bryn Mawr academic career began with the head of the French department telling me she had never seen such a confusing placement test. Apparently my results showed that I clearly had learned the language at one point but couldn't grasp how to use it. Welcome to Bryn Mawr, Marianna, you've failed before you've even gone to class. My French career ended a year and a half later with a rather awkward meeting with my professor where she asked me if I had been tested for a learning disability. Awkward laughter and a promise to try harder followed. I swear my passing grade that semester was solely out of the professors embarrassment and desire to end my pain. Despite my best (Lies, best is stretching it) efforts, I cannot learn languages.

I'm great at getting the vocabulary down. I can tell you how to say raspberry in numerous European languages. I taught myself how to curse in Polish by reading the middle school bathroom wall (In the more grandmother appropriate sense OMP also taught me to yell "Co to jest, Kanada!" (What is this, Canada?) at anyone being particularly lazy). I can even break out a few Gaelic words (emphasis on the few) after my semester in Ireland. The problem comes when I have to string them together into coherent sentences. Anyone who has ever talked to me in person or even listened to my award winning podcast will know that my grasp of English sentence structure is shaky at best. I'll use two verbs right next to each other, forget prepositions, it's a mess. Ask me to do it in a foreign language and I'm sunk. Ask me to understand someone else doing it in a foreign language, and it's just a lost cause.

People always tell you not to speak extra slowly and loudly around those who do not understand English because it is demeaning and does not help the situation one bit. I wish people would do that around me! I wish when I was in France people would have yelled at a snails pace at me. Hell I wish when I was in French class people would have talked louder and slower.

Are other languages spoken with a quicker pace than English or do I just hear them that way? We have a cleaning lady, Basia, who is Polish who comes every few weeks or so. The other day she was talking with OMP about whatever it is they talk about in Polish, probably mean things about the rest of the family as we have no way of finding out, when I came in to announce that I was heading to work. It was a Saturday morning and I wasn't intending to see anyone at work so I had on an old pair of pants and an oversize sweatshirt. Basia turned to look at me and immediately launched into auctioneer-speed speech while pointing at me and laughing. I looked to OMP for help and he just responded to her, also in rapid Polish, also with a smile on his face. As I could not pick out any of my choice curse words nor "Co to jest, Kanada!" I assumed they were laughing at my outfit choice and, as I was already angry about having to go to work on a Saturday morning, got a bit huffy with a few "well then"s. After a moment of silence OMP realized that, contrary to his popular belief, I do not speak Polish and told me that Basia had noticed I had lost weight. Oh. Now I feel like a jackass. Luckily my grandmother was successful in teaching me "Thank You" in Polish at one point in my life.

Strangely enough my experiences with being made to feel like a jackass do not make me more empathetic to non-native speakers trying to speak English. We have a houseguest staying with us this week, a colleague of OMPs from Hungary, who speaks near perfect English. That being said, she does not know slang phrases or colloquial expressions, nor should she. Rather than avoid these phrases I seem to drop them into every conversation. It started simple, as she pointed out today that she didn't actually understand "nope" but rightfully assumed it meant "no". Sounds simple, but I give her major props (I've let props drop a couple of times too...) for figuring that one out, I would have just let it slide and assumed I'd never understand. After she brought that up I began to really listen to myself talk, I kept dropping phrases like "Six and a one-half dozen to the other" and "kick in the pants" (fine, I didn't say kick in the pants but I couldn't remember the phrase I used so I looked up common colloquial phrases and this is always a winner). It got worse after I noticed my tendency to use these phrases, then I moved on to referencing obscure American history. I mentioned Benjamin Franklin's home in Philadelphia, Franklin Court, in a manner that would suggest she would be crazy not to know about it. I'd mention local restaurants and streets, reference funny things that happened in our family that she would neither know nor care about, I could not for the life of me figure out what an acceptable conversation topic would be.

I was lucky in this case as her English is almost perfect, so she was able to at least get the idea of my crazy conversation paths. This didn't stop me from internally freaking out over every conversation topic, wondering if I was alienating her the way I feel alienated when others speak different languages.

I had an escape plan, however. In every culture, in every language, whenever the conversation starts to lag....bring up your dog. Even the most topics using the most simple vocabulary and sentence structure ("my dog loves socks" for instance) can last for hours with any dog lover. Just pray the person isn't a cat person.