Living in Another Language

After a short delay because the library computer ate my flash drive, I have my blog back up and running with my first entry from Moldova in 2 years!


One thing that’s always strange to adjust to is living in another language. For a person who appreciates a well-chosen word, it’s initially a bit depressing to go back to struggling to express basic concepts. Today [5/29/12] my vocabulary was quite overmatched by the prospect of describing some ancient artifacts in the National Museum of History. I then got myself in quite the word tangle when I tried to explain that unlike Boston, Chisinau’s mains streets are on the grid system. Of course, five minutes after the conversation occurred I remembered a key adjective (“квадратный! of course!”) that would probably have done the trick.

The other thing that’s hard to shake is the sneaking suspicion that you’re offending everybody. My friend Andrew once told me the story of a student in Japan who attempted to explain to his host family that the air conditioner in his room was broken. Unfortunately, the passive voice in Japanese suggests that the person you are speaking to performed the action, so the host family thought the student was accusing them of maliciously coming into his room and breaking his air conditioner. Stricken by his unwarranted accusation, they apparently ignored him for a week. (This anecdote made me really appreciate the fact that people in the former Soviet Union generally keep it real to a fault.)

While I’ve never experienced anything that bad as far as linguistic mistakes go, I do have a tendency to replay conversations in my head after the fact, asking myself, “Did the use of the perfective imperative make me sound like a jerk?” When in doubt, I try to do something nice on a separate occasion in order to make up for my inadvertent rudeness. This probably makes me seem like I have a split personality, but at least it eases my conscience.

When I’m not worried about coming off like a jerk, I’m irritated by my inability to defend myself when other people are acting like jerks. Russia is the world capital of People in the Service Industry Who Hate You for No Good Reason. In these situations I am  usually so astonished at being yelled at by a total stranger that I am struck dumb with embarrassment and horror. Luckily this behavior is more rare in Moldova than in Russia, but I still haven’t overcome my inability to react in these situations. I find it somewhat comforting to remember the advice of my professor Danko Sipka, who once told us that when a Balkan waiter is rude to you for no reason, console yourself with this fact: Of all the people in world, he hates himself the most, then his boss, and only then you, the customer. You’re only third on his list of people that he hates!

On the other hand, I seem to have no problem reacting verbally when being yelled at by jerks that I actually know, but then I usually end up spitting out words that don’t quite form coherent sentences. I’m not sure if I would be any better off if I were able to craft withering put-downs for such people, but it would probably be more gratifying than the impotent rage that I currently experience.

All in all, the frustration of being unable to express oneself is certainly not too high of a price to pay for having the chance to practice speaking a foreign language. At the very least it keeps you humble and appreciative when you are dealing with non-native speakers of English. I’m continually impressed by many of the foreign students I’ve met at Harvard, not to mention the people I worked with in Kosovo. At the end of the day, you’re never going to be a native speaker, so you just have to give yourself a pat on the back for the successful interactions and vent about the negative ones to your friends.