Having lived in non-English speaking countries for the past 15 years, one would assume that I would be fluent in at least one foreign language by now.
One would be wrong.
Because, to the annoyance of girlfriends and other friends alike, I remain stubbornly monolingual.
This, they assume, is because I am lazy and stupid. This is not altogether incorrect – I was never one for that ‘book learning’ stuff and, whichever side of the brain that is supposed to be the one that helps you learn languages must have been lobotomized at birth, as was the side of the brain that understands any vaguely scientific subjects like physics, chemistry and biology, plus the use of household objects such as washing machines and cookers.
However, this is only part of the reason why I don’t speak more than one language.
The main reason why I don’t speak any other language fluently is because nearly every educated person in the world speaks mine.
When any non-native English speaker thinks “what second language shall I learn?” it’s not difficult to guess that they are probably going to learn English, because English is a very useful thing. For a start off, you get to understand pretty much all of the stuff that’s on the Internet, you understand all of the lyrics to your favourite songs and you can also watch the majority of movies without needing subtitles or to watch the dubbed version.
More importantly, English is now the world’s lingua franca. This must be particularly galling to the French (ha, ha, ha [being British I am genetically programmed to hate all French - after all we've been fighting them {and beating them) for the best part of a millennium now and so can't find any reason to stop {but recently I've started to dislike Italians even more than French because every time I've tried to do business with Italians they just jibber 'discounto, discounto, discounto' and then, after wasting all my time, decide that they weren't interested in the first place even if you do give them a good discounto. Bastards.]})
What was I talking about?
Oh yes, English being the world’s lingua franca. Lingua franca literally means ‘French language’ but figuratively speaking means ‘universal language’, which today is English. Which must piss off the French majorly. For which I am glad. I actually read somewhere that they hate the English language so much that, every year, they gather together a panel of French linguistic academics to invent a new French word for each new English word that has popped into existence. I can imagine that most of the time this ends up being some long and complicated sentence to replace a very simple English word. They still have a lot of catching up to do though because I read somewhere else that the English language contains more words than any other language on Earth.
This doesn’t altogether surprise me as one of my favourite games to play is called ‘torture the translator’, whereby I make some poor translator try and translate some of the stuff I’ve written. And even the ’sensible’ business-type stuff that I write is not a million miles away from how I write in this blog (although I don’t swear quite as much). I gave this as a test when looking for a Russian speaking translator/assistance and only one in fifty people who took the test came anywhere close to getting the ideas across that I was trying to express.
I’m not the only one either. Take evil McDonald’s slogan of “I’m lovin’ it” for example. The best that the poor bastard French translator could come up with was “c’est tout ce que j’aime”. I’m sure that even the most diehard French loyalist linguist would have to agree that this sounds like utter bollocks. Good job that they didn’t make Justin Timberlake have to sing his shit song in all of the different languages as he’d have really struggled over that one.
I’m going off at a tangent again.
But the point is that all non-native speakers are going to speak some English, if they speak any second language at all.
This is a shame, actually, as English wasn’t meant to be such a dominating world language. At one point this was meant to be Esperanto (I got a book from the library on Esperanto once – did I read it? Did I bollocks.) But the idea was a good one - invent a very simple language from scratch that everyone in the world would use as a second language so that everyone could communicate easily with foreigners.
Although I didn’t read much about it, the one thing that I remember about it was that I thought that the bloke who invented it did a pretty piss-poor job of it and that I could have invented a much easier language than he did.
For example, they still have all that masculine, feminine, neuter bollocks. Why do you foreigners need all this gender crap? It just makes everything that more complicated to try and remember if a table is supposed to be a bloke, a chick or just a thing. It’s just a fucking table after all, for fuck’s sake. It’s not like you’re going to try and shag it (providing it’s a feminine inanimate object because to try and shag a masculine inanimate object would mean that you were gay or a neuter inanimate object would mean that you were perverted, but if it was feminine, that would be OK).
And having different verb endings. If I was going to invent a new language, it would always conjugate like this:
I go
You go
He/She/It go
We go
You go
They go
We bloody well know who’s going because we’ve already said I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they, so why complicate things?
Past tense? Just stick ‘did’ before it.
Future tense? Just stick ‘will’ in front of it.
Piece of piss. If everyone learned my version of a universal language, everyone would be fluent by the age of 14.
I do feel sorry for poor non-native English speakers though because English is actually a very stupid language. The basics are quite easy (because we don’t have any of that masculine/feminine/neuter bollocks, for example) but, to become fluent, is practically impossible for the poor foreigners because everything is irregular. In the world of languages, English is the surly goth kid dressed in black with no friends and a love of anarchy who will get a gun and go around killing all his classmates before turning the gun on himself if he has a particularly bad day at school one day.
I used to think that all of the other languages were a bit mad at having all these weird lines and squiggles over all their letters, but now I realize that they are actually quite useful (although they’re a bugger to type) because, when you see a word, you know exactly how to pronouce it. The poor bastards who have to try and learn English, however, are shit out of luck.
Take the English word ‘rowing’ for example. The poor foreigners have to understand that, although it’s just one word, it has two totally different meanings depending on how it’s pronounced – one way means ‘propelling your boat through the use of oars’ whereas the other means ’squabbling with someone (usually your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife)’
So, in summary, I pity all you poor bastards for having to learn our incredibly stupid and hard language.
But at least you have the motivation to jump through all of the hoops necessary to try and learn it.
I didn’t.
But there’s a reason for this.
Now I imagine that, by this stage, all you smug foreign polylinguists are thinking ‘lazy wanker’ (or something like wanquierre de las lazi’boi in your strange native tongue), but this is not actually the case because, during my lifetime, I have spent the following amount of time learning the following languages:
French: 5 years
Latin: 2 years (now that was a complete and utter waste of time)
Spanish: 2 years
Czech: 5 years
German: 2 years
Russian: 2 years
Plus smatterings of Latvian, Polish and Hungarian.
Now if I added together all of the years and blood, sweat, tears and failed exam papers into just one language, I’d probably be quite handy in it (especially if it led to cool things such as understanding all the best bits of the Internet, song lyrics, movies and the best books, etc.). However, as it is, I can’t hold a conversation in any of them, and so all of that time spent learning has been pretty much a total waste of time.
Since then, I have again switched countries – this time to a country that doesn’t even use proper letters at all – just a bunch of squiggles that looks like a print out of a major earthquake on a seismic graph or else an annoying kid frigging around with an Etch-A-Sketch for the first time (does Etch-A-Sketch still exist? If so, I have no idea why because, if I had the choice between an Etch-A-Sketch and a Nintendo DS when I was a kid, the piece of crap Etch-A-Sketch would have gone straight in the bin).
So I haven’t even pretended to even try to learn any Arabic at all.
Forget it.
No chance.
In Hell.
Even my bay-bee, who is fluent in three languages and who picks up other languages usually in a matter of weeks didn’t get very far when she tried it, so I know darned well that I would have no fucking chance.
However, my need to understand foreign languages diminishes over the years as I have continued to hone my skills at getting around communication problems, which can usually be easily achieved through a combination of two much easier to learn skills.
The first is by learning to speak English verrrry … slloooowwwlllyyyy … and … clearly. Most English speakers try and converse with Johnny Foreigner by SHOUTING AT THEM VERY LOUDLY.
This doesn’t work.
The problem when someone is speaking a foreign language to you that you don’t understand very well is that it’s very hard to tell where one word stops and the next one starts. So you might think you are speaking normally butthepersonyou’respeakingtoisjustlisteningtoyouspeaklikethiswhichmakesitveryhardtounderstanddoesn’tit?
So I am constantly listening to how good the other person is at speaking English and moderating my speed accordingly. And I also avoid using any complicated words if they’re not that good at it as well.
The second element of communicating with foreigners is through the frequent use of mime. This has the downside of making you look like a complete pillock, but usually gets you what you want.
For example, on my first day in Latvia I needed some milk powder. This was achieved by walking up to the nearest shop assistant, placing my outstretched fingers from my head in the approximation of horns, mooing loudly and then blowing some imaginary dust from my hand.
This actually worked. It also has the added advantage that, if I find myself in a position where I am unable to find alternative employment (which is looking increasingly likely as the world economy continues to slide into OH MY FUCKING JESUS H. CHRIST WE ARE FUCKED, FUCKED TOTALLY OH SO FUCKING WELL FUCKED mode) then all I need to do is slap a bit of white emulsion on my face and pretend I am trying to find my way out of an invisible box and people should give me money.
