What makes my heart sing: words and foreign languages

Well, sweet friends of PB (all 91 of you – welcome to the newbies!), I really enjoyed reading your responses to my French post. It seems I have a lot of fellow Francophiles among you. So, now we’ve got the ball rolling, let’s have a chat about another of my passions – words and foreign languages.

An Anglo upbringing

I grew up in a typical Anglo-centric family in 1970s Australia. We only spoke English at home and Hobart had nowhere near the ethnic diversity it does now. Sure, I went to school with a few children from Italian and Greek backgrounds whose families had emigrated to Australia after WWII. There was the occasional child with Chinese heritage and in the early 1980s, Vietnamese refugee families (or the ‘boat people’ as they were called then) started arriving. But all up, it was a pretty Anglo upbringing. I enjoyed learning to write in cord cursive. That was as exciting as it got!

Isn't this pretty?

Falling in love with words

My Grade 6 teacher gave me the glittering key to unlock the mysteries of foreign languages – a solid grounding in English grammar. Once I started learning French and German in Grade 7, the scales fell from my eyes. I was absolutely, dizzyingly enchanted. Whole new worlds lay there to be discovered, shimmering like mirages in the distance. I fell in love with words. Yes, I’m a logophile! I subscribe to Wordsmith’s ‘word a day’ e-mail which delivers me daily delights of fascinating words and their origins. If I could choose my dream job, it could well be as an etymologist, studying the history of words, their origins and how their form and meaning have changed over time. I bet you didn’t guess that one!

The magical grammar key

Learning French

I learnt how the Norman conquest of England by the French transformed the English language, forever entwining the two. I used my grammar key to unlock the door of French, the most delightful of the Romance languages. 

Ooh, I want a staircase like this!

Some features of French are:

• It uses the Roman alphabet with a number of accents on vowels, circumflex (eg forêt), acute (eg école), grave (eg élève), cedilla (eg garçon) and diaeresis (eg Noël);

• It has two grammatical genders, le and la; and

• Its sentence structure is very similar to English.

Learning German

I used the glittering grammar key again to discover German, one of the Indo-European languages. I marvelled at the way two countries could exist side by side but yet have such different roots and traditions to their languages. It’s quite a complicated language to learn.

One of the pixies' favourite books

Some features of German are:

• It uses the Roman alphabet with three extra vowels, namely ä, ö and ü, together with ß;

• Nouns have three genders, der, die and das. Remembering them all is tricky!;

• It is the only major language that capitalises all nouns; and

• Many words are long compounds. The longest German word is ‘Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz’ (or the ‘Cattle marking and beef labelling supervision duties delegation law’). Try saying that in a hurry!

I studied French and German for my HSC and then, school finished and 18 years old, jetted off on a Qantas plane to my grand adventure, living for a year in Münster, Germany as a Rotary Exchange Student.

A year of speaking Deutsch

What a culture shock that was! Fortunately, my host parents spoke fluent English so they gradually eased me into speaking German. It was mentally very taxing as I was translating all the time. The time that took caused me to appear hesitant in my response, as I always worried about making mistakes. I found I didn’t have enough appropriate adjectives or adverbs at my disposal so my conversation sounded very bland, such as “Wie süß!” (or “How sweet!”) instead of what I really wanted to express such as “Wirklich zauberhaft!” (or “Absolutely enchanting”). That in turn meant that people often thought I wasn’t really interested as I was using such banal language. Ooh, the frustration! Sometimes I would burst out into English as I attempted to get my point across more accurately.

Another hindrance was that my teachers had taught me slang from the 1970s which made my fellow school students laugh, it was so dated, like saying things were ‘groovy’ instead of ‘cool’! Everyone spoke so quickly and I was constantly waving at them, pleading “Langsamer, bitte! (“Slow down, please!”). After several months, I awoke in raptures – I had been dreaming in German!

'Be quiet and speak German'

From that moment on, my confidence and vocabulary soared. By the end of the year, I was speaking quickly, using local slang words intuitively, cracking jokes and even fooling some locals into thinking I was a native speaker! I also mastered some local dialect dating back a couple of centuries. My favourite words were ‘Eichhörnchen’ (‘squirrel’) and ‘Schlittschulaufen’ (‘ice skating’).

Learning Indonesian

Upon returning to Hobart, I studied first year Indonesian at Uni. It was fascinating – it uses the Roman alphabet so no tricky characters to learn like Mandarin, Japanese or Korean, the sentence structure is quite flexible and the verbs are not conjugated. Oh, and no worrying about the ’gender’ of words. The 350 years of Dutch rule have left their imprint on the language, not to mention the intriguing influences of Portuguese, Malay, Mandarin, Sanskrit and Arabic. I loved learning funny phrases like ‘jam karet’, translated as ‘rubber time’ to describe time spent waiting patiently or as expected, rather than wasted. I understand that phrase is used often in Indonesia to explain the endemic delays in bureaucracy or transport! If you want to learn an Asian language, this is a great one to start with.

Learning Spanish

I also spent three years learning another pretty Romance language, Spanish, from a Chilean man, the extremely kind and patient Julio Herrera. I learnt the similarities and differences between Chilean Spanish and standard Spanish. I also discovered so many similarities with French that I often confused the two!

Using my languages on Planet Baby

Since arriving on Planet Baby, my opportunity to use my languages has been limited as I’ve had to learn PB’s language (a story for another day!). However, I still maintain close contact with my German host families and other friends made in that year. When I meet them, it takes a while for my rusty brain to crank into gear but after a day or so, German starts pouring out of my mouth as if I speak it every day. I find my brain’s ability miraculous in the way it remembers things long-buried.

I really want to encourage the pixies to learn languages from an early age so they also have the opportunity to experience the delight I feel. 

From one of my favourite childhood books, Richard Scarry's European Word Book

I think I might do an Adult Ed class to brush up on my French as I miss it! I’m also pondering whether to tutor school students in German and maybe even become a German teacher one day. I think Confucius had it right when he said “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”!

This makes me smile

Have you learnt languages, whether at home in a bilingual family, in classes at school, overseas while living there or for work? Maybe you started learning languages early or came to them later in life. Do you want to learn a language but can't choose which one? Do you want your children to learn languages and if so, which ones would you choose? I’d love to hear your stories and favourite words.