Lost In Translation
Apologies to a member of the Blinq commentariat named bedece1 for my returning for another bite of the Geno's story, but I have some expertise in not knowing the local language: I spent three years in Germany and couldn't hold a conversation with a kindergartner.
You want to talk Ugly American? That was me. I had taken a couple dozen classes in German at Penn before I landed in Berlin the summer of 2000, and then spent most of the next half year in the Balkans. At least that was my excuse. To go to the cobbler to get new heels, I had to take one of my sons, who went to a German-American school, and I sensed what it must have been like for my great-grandparents when they came here and had to rely on their children to do business with the outside world.
My German was fine for the bakery or taxi, and worked well enough on Lufthansa, but God help me if the flight attendant veered off course and asked me about anything other than Would I like something to drink? Which they didn't, of course, because German is one language and culture where if you memorize little dialogs you can get through three years none the wiser.
The guy in the TV store down the street was always telling me to speak German, not fathoming how I could be so ignorant in the local language. He was Greek. He was a nice guy, I think. We made small talk for three years, and I still couldn't tell you what was on his mind other than he liked Bill Clinton. That was pretty much the experience of those three years in Berlin. I rarely had a conversation of any depth in either language. That was the most frustrating part. Playing with words or tone was not possible.
It was worse in other countries, and my job required I report on three dozen of them. In Balkans cabs, where English fell flat, we'd have to communicate in German. Ja, it's a wonder I ever got to a story in time. In France I could get by on high school French, but Italy could pose problems, like the week we vacationed on an island called Ischia, which is next to Capri, and has been colonized by German tourists who understand its waters to be curative. The place we stayed served a nice supper, which was included in the low price of a room that viewed a castle island used in shooting the "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Only I didn't speak Italian, and the owner didn't speak English, so when he presented a delicate veal piccata, he called it 'Schnitzel.' Which immediately took away the flavor.
Basically, wherever I went, if I tried to speak the local language, the natives would soften. I thought it was important to know how to say 'please' and 'thank you' in every language, and also to ask for the check, because if you didn't do that, you might wind up sitting in a restaurant forever.
The work to find a common language was the beauty part. I remember one day in particular, when we had scaled a mountain in Crete, and knocked on the door of a solitary restaurant, which commanded an spectacular view of the island. It was a little early for anyone else, and we weren't sure the place was even in business anymore. A woman let us in. Her menus were in Greek. There was no third language for us, and we had do it all by gestures. So she took my hand and led me into the kitchen, where she opened the fridge and let me point out my meal. That steak. Those tomatoes. Garlic. Potatoes. It remains one of my favorite moments.
Hi from Ischia! :-)
That is so cool! How are the waters?
You shouldn't beat yourself up for this, Dan; it's the educational system you went through that did the damage. I got lucky: bored out of my mind in high school, somehow I internalized enough French so that when I actually found myself in France, decades later, somehow my brain shocked itself into recognizing it in its printed (first) and spoken (second) forms. Then all I had to do was get over the self-consciousness of actually trying to communicate with it. There's also the fact that, after a certain point, you just can't learn another language all that easily. It comes easier for people who are surrounded by other languages: drive from Berlin to Nice via Genoa, and you've driven from Philly to Florida. If you had to pass through three other languages in that drive, you'd probably know a bit of each, and not feel weird about at least stumbling around in each of them. There's that old joke: what do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American (or, in some variations, British). With the world shrinking like it is, it's imperative that American kids get the same treatment as European kids do: start learning a second language (probably Latin American Spanish) in the third grade, add another one (I'd recommend a European one like French or German) in high school, don't let 'em graduate until they've passed exams in both.
I took enough French in h.s. to not have to take it in college, so I figured I'd pick up German easily enough, despite Mark Twain's warnings. I still cannot say 'I lived in Berlin for three years' without having to check the usage. My wife, toward the end of our tour, ordered a chocolate cheeseburger at a McDonald's drive-up, though I think that's due to having a car full of kids, not age. And three months into our adventure we were awakened by loud, barking German - it was one of the boys, talking in his sleep. Three months it took him.
Let's just call this the controversy that will never die. Anyway, I liked your story about finding ways to communicate when you don't speak the native language. About 10 years ago, I was in Europe with a friend. I spoke some German and some Spanish and she spoke some French. She met a Turkish guy that she liked. He didn't speak English, and obviously, my friend didn't speak his language. But he did speak German as did I, so guess who got to translate for them? It's a fine romance, when you need a friend to do all your translations. Later in the trip, I shared a train car with a Brazilian soccer coach. He spoke Portuguese, but no English. Opposite for me. We both spoke a little Spanish. That worked out pretty well too. Ahh, the international language of love...
Sure, Dan. Kids pick it up easier. The younger you start, the easier it is to add 'em. Coots like us, on the other hand...
Just leave it to the whinny liberal civel rights wussies to make such demands when this country was founded by the english and not by illegal aleins speaking in weird lanuegs where is the universal translator?