“What’s with all this telephone nonsense of “‘Press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish’? You live in America. Speak American, you damn illegals, or go home.” Ah, the words of the xenophobes. Well, yer blogger has figuratively “pressed 2 for English” in every country she’s ever visited.
In the 1970s, my little school offered only three foreign languages, Latin, French, and Spanish, and instruction began in 9th grade, well past that of most other countries. I started out as a Latin student, feeling it would serve as a good foundation for one-day learning Italian, the native tongue of my grandparents (from whom I stupidly failed to learn any basics beyond standard greetings and commands like “shut-up,” “be careful,” “eat,” and “go to hell”). By 10th grade, Latin was discontinued (we could have used a character like Rushmore’s Max Fischer to save it from educational extinction). So, I switched to French.
At that time, Française was considered the international language (par avion, as you’ll recall, was standard on airmail envelopes), and I was determined to someday become an internationalist. Ironically, aside from my love of French Impressionist art, the New Wave films of Godard and Truffaut, and the ’60s fashion creations of Cardin, Courreges and Givenchy, I never actually yearned to visit France the way I longed to explore Italy and England. And this had nothing to do with the long-held American perception that the French are snobbish or unfriendly. Eventually, I would end up visiting Paris several times, finding the people most cordial and helpful. My tip for getting along in foreign countries? You smile at the locals, they smile back. Oh, and in fashion-conscious countries like Italy, don’t wear fanny packs, sun visors, or tennis shoes; they hate that. As for French food? Meh. And the music, particularly their rock-and-roll, sucks.
Still, I struggled through three years of high school French, taught by a downtrodden, ulcer-afflicted man who was so determined to make us linguistically proficient that he took nine of his students, myself included, on a trip to French-speaking Quebec City and bilingual Montreal in June of 1976. Due to our instructor’s liquor-imbibing ways, my friend Barry drove our van during much of the journey (and he only had a learner’s permit!)
Our adventure did little to improve our French skills, but we received quite an education in liberal sexual mores. Montreal was, and still is the sex capital of the Western Hemisphere (as is Bangkok in the East). We spent more time studying the window displays of the ubiquitous sex shops and gawking at men openly kissing on the streets than we did practicing our language skills in shops and restaurants. (What the heck was that thing on the menu called foie gras?) And we all went to our first porno film, titled Insatiable. No ID required. We handed over our pretty, multi-colored Canadian bills (some graced with the image of Queen Elizabeth II) for billets and walked right in. The boys took seats in the front row, for optimum orifice ogling, and we girls sat in the back row, blushing and going eeewh during the movie’s big climax (ahem) – The Orgy Scene.
When I started college and was required to study a foreign language, I once again chose Française. Why let what little French I’d learned in high school go to waste? I had a friend, Anny, from the French city of Nancy, who tutored AND tortured me. But I was eventually able to carry on very basic conversations and read simple text. Today I recall next to nothing, except for a few phrases I occasionally use to impress the bourgeoisie at soirées. My favorite expression is l’esprit de l’escalier. It means “the wit of the staircase” – when you miss your chance to make the perfect retort, as you descend the stairs. Ironically, I never remember to use this expression until after I’ve left the party.
And aside from the scant French I learned in school, I had to accept the fact that my underdeveloped uvula would prevent me from ever mastering those guttural sounds. Hmmm…maybe I wouldn’t become an internationalist, after all.
And then along came Nihongo.
Before I began a two-year stay in Tokyo in 1998, I took three weeks of intensive Berlitz lessons. On my initial day of one-on-one instruction, the first thing the sensai did was hold up a pen and say, kore wa pen desu ka. It meant, “this is a pen.” During Day One, I also learned the word for subway (chikatetsu), a useful term, and, curiously, ashtray (haizara). At that time, there were no smoking/non-smoking sections in most Japanese restaurants (other than Western chains like McDonald’s). I guess the curriculum developers at Berlitz determined that in the rare case a restaurant table lacked an ashtray, the gaijin (foreigner) could summon a waiter and say, haizara!
As one who learns by visual images, I looked forward to deciphering those Japanese characters. Discovering how to write them would be like learning an exotic form of calligraphy! Well, I gave up on the reading/writing notion fairly quickly when I learned that in order to read a mere newspaper headline, I’d need to master three types of characters. Kanji, containing more than 8,000 characters, is the major alphabet of the Japanese language, derived from the Chinese system. Those characters include hiragana (used for words of Japanese origin), and katakana (developed for foreign words). In addition, I found that I’d need to know hundreds of words just to be able to COUNT. There are strict systems for counting items of different categories. To name just a few: cylindrical items, flat objects, bundles of food (like asparagus), buildings, furniture, paired items (socks), guns, machines, and small animals. Ships, octopuses and squid are in a class by themselves.
After a short time in Tokyo I realized how easily I could navigate a densely-inhabited city of 13 million people without even the most rudimentary knowledge of the language. Signs for major streets, subways, and train lines are in English. At least five English language newspapers are published daily. The majority of business people and ever-accommodating restaurant and shop workers possess English skills ranging from basic to fluent, and they kindly helped this language-lazy American determine which of the latest Sony cameras to purchase and how to choose the best brushes and paper for her Sumi-e class (I never got past the seemingly simple ability to paint bamboo stalks and leaves). Sadly, I only learned enough of the spoken language to be able to seek directions on the street and ask for my shoe size in department stores (niju-san is twenty-three, the equivalent of size six in the U.S.). If I heard an interesting song playing in a restaurant, I was able to ask the server, Dare ga utatte imasu? (“who is singing?”) The polite server would then scurry off to get the CD and show it to me!
Once, during a dinner in Tokyo, a friend asked me to say a few words in Japanese. Tsugi wa, Kokkai-gijido-mae, I proudly exclaimed, to the amusement of my Japanese hosts. It means “next stop, Kokkai-gijido-mae station,” a phrase I heard the subway conductor announce every day on my way back to my apartment in Shibuya from places like Roppongi, Ginza, or Jiyūgaoka – the home turf of my brilliant friend Margaret, herself a multi-linguist who COULD read Kanji.
A few years back, realizing the importance of exercising my brain, I decided it was finally time to seriously learn a new language, preferably one with a non-Latin alphabet (Asian characters excluded). My deep interest in Jewish culture drew me to Hebrew. However, my longtime fascination with the clandestine goings-on behind the Iron Curtain – from the October Revolution of 1917 through the Cold War – also led me to consider Russian. (Plus, the font-lover in me is crazy about those cool, reverse-character Cyrillic letters!) Which language would I choose? I knew just the person to ask.
My dear, departed friend David Kremen, a true Renaissance Man, spoke five foreign languages fluently. During one of our final conversations before he died last June, I asked him which language – Hebrew of Russian – would be easiest to master. He said, “It’s not a matter of which is more easy, but rather, which is most difficult.” After a detailed examination of the structure of the two languages, he decided that Russian would be harder. So, guess which one I’m choosing?
Having traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe, I know the challenge of pronouncing vowel-deficient Slavic words and phrases like strč prst skrz krk. That’s Czech for “stick your finger through your throat,” a term I learned from Czech friends who told me how to find relief after long nights of drinking slivovice in towns like Plzn and Brno.
Russian grammar is incredibly complicated. The language has six possible labels you can stick on a sentence: nominative (subject case), accusative (object case), genitive (possessive case), dative (using to plus a noun), instrumental, and prepositional. Learning the language may well prove so stressful that I might have to….dare I say it….resort to meditation to calm my brain. In any event, my Bulgarian friend Vanya, a Russian teacher, has agreed to instruct me. I’m gearing up for the challenge. It will be equal parts fulfilling and frustrating. But then, as Shirley Manson of the band Garbage once sang: “I’m only happy when it’s complicated.”
© Dana Spiardi, June 24, 2016
NOTE: The “Matryoshka” nesting doll is a popular Russian item. The modern ones pictured above were designed by Alejandra Valencia.
