MY LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Throughout grammar school and college, I struggled to learn any language, especially foreign ones. From the get-go, I was a lousy speller, even in English. I’ll always remember, much to my chagrin, when my friend Leon, a first-rate English professor, was helping me write a scholarly philosophy paper. He said, as politely as possible, “I don’t think the word ‘metaphor’ ends in an ‘e’.”
In high school, I took two years of Spanish and barely passed. In college, I took two years of New Testament Greek and, although I found it fascinating, barely passed. Then, when I took New Testament Greek in seminary, things went much better, but only after the second time through. Also, while in seminary, I took a year of Hebrew, which was a lot of fun but did not in any way become something I could use, either in reading or in speaking.
Finally, after several years of extended stays in Greece, I gained a basic familiarity with the language, but I am nowhere near fluent. I can still do word studies and look up specific expressions in the dictionary, but I am hardly a real Greek reader or speaker. I can stumble through the menu at my favorite Greek restaurant. I’ll admit, things went better during the months I lived there, but I am nowhere near being a Greek speaker.
In graduate school, after a couple of months of study with a Berlitz teacher, I managed to pass a simple French test that involved translating an essay about Madame Curie and “radioactividad.” Several years later, while working on my doctorate, I had to retake French again, and this time things went better, but I still cannot speak or write French at all. I studied German for two years while teaching at a college, and some of it has stuck with me, but the most lasting benefit is the ability to read and order from the menu at German restaurants. I managed to pass the German test while studying for my doctoral degree at Duke.
Then, worst of all, I met my wonderful wife, who is from Finland and speaks and reads several of the languages listed above. Over our many years together, which have included more than twenty trips to Finland, I have worked at and managed to gain a minimal grasp of Finnish. I can’t maintain an ongoing conversation, but I can handle simple questions and answers. I should explain to the reader that Finnish is nothing like the languages English speakers are used to. It’s fun, and I love it, but it is extremely complex.
To make matters worse, Mari is essentially functional in both French and German and managed to acquire a basic, rough grasp of simple Greek while we were living there. While we were there, she could ask for directions and then translate the Greek person’s reply. My only measure of respect comes from my ability to read and write the beautiful language a little. Even here, she does better with the accent than I ever will.
I shall conclude with a brief mention of our year in China, when neither of us had much sense of what was being said and almost no ability to participate in conversations. I was teaching English to college students at an intermediate level. I asked a young woman in my class to help me with my Mandarin Chinese, and we met twice a week for the entire first semester. As usual, I never really got good at it, but Mari picked up a lot of useful, short expressions that served us well when we traveled and shopped.
What confounded me most was the way my students wrote Mandarin Chinese. Not only were the figures more complex than anything I had ever seen, except perhaps in Hebrew, but they often included tiny dots and marks that were almost imperceptible. When the students wrote in Mandarin Chinese on the class whiteboard, I could hardly tell which figure was which. I was mystified as to how they could ever have learned the differences between them. Unsurprisingly, they were mystified by my failure to recognize the differences.
The obvious solution was for them to pick English-type names like Jane, Bob, and Mark. Some got more creative, choosing names like “Sky,” “Sweetie,” and “Power.” All of this did nothing to ease my insecurity about being a complete ignoramus when it comes to Mandarin Chinese, but as I got to know these young folks throughout the year, I came to realize that, despite our linguistic differences, we could come to know and understand each other by struggling with each other’s languages. It was a wonderful year, despite my inability to truly learn Mandarin Chinese. I do remember that the wonderful noodle soup was called “mien tiao.”
The Mandarin characters for “Mein Tiao” (Noodle Soup)