Languages

Being monolingual is like having a disability. I find myself apologising for not being able to express myself in any other language, as shop keepers and strangers look impatiently at me while I struggle with Charade-like gestures (first word, sounds like...).

I’ve never felt so incompetent, only being able to utter the words I learnt in high school French. I did recall the word for horse though.

It was worse in Belgium, where the Afrikaans from my childhood (spoken above and around but never to us) was dredged to the surface of my brain as I heard people speaking Dutch. At one point I recognised the word “underwear”, but alas, being able to recognise single words, and not being able to make use of any of it, was pure frustration. Slowly the empathy I have for my aphasic patients turned to sympathy, and I found myself doing some of the things I’ve seen them do – shrug shoulders in defeat and slowly retreat into silence as it was easier for our Dutch speaking friends to do the talking.

Of course in Europe nearly every local has some grasp of the English language, even if they say they don’t. But I do feel like the stereotypical tourist, not even attempting to converse in the native language.

This was all fun and games until our last morning in Paris. Kate and I opened our apartment window to find an ambulance below our block. A man had been found bleeding profusely under the bridge, presumably pushed or fallen off the ledge to the cobbled street below.  He certainly hadn’t been there half an hour before, when we headed out for a croissant. As we watched from our window, a police lady noticed us and called us down, as it happened right below us. We ran down the 6 floors (116 stairs) and as she rattled off in French I had to interrupt her mid sentence, with (in French) “I’m really sorry, I don’t speak French.” I felt completely useless even though I hadn’t seen anything, and our English conversation became more and more animated as we tried to sound convincing enough. It was all of a 30 second exchange, but it did make me think about how much we would have been able to convey if we had seen something. I realised with dread that we didn’t even know the emergency number in France. Note to self...