How to Confuse an American

Q: How do you confuse an American?

A: Speak to them in a language other than English.

Before you get angry and start giving me the evil eye, let me explain. Americans are not generally known for being multilingual. In fact, it is commonly assumed that Americans don't learn other languages because at this point in time the primary language of international and intercultural communication is English. We can get by without having to resort to a second or third language.  That being said, I know many Americans who are, if not fluent, at least proficient in another language.  Despite this fact, the stereotype remains, as illustrated by the following joke.

Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up. "Parlez-vous français?" the driver asks them. The two workers just stared. 

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" The two continued to stare at him.

"Fala português?" Neither worker said anything.

"¿Habla español?" Still no response. Finally, the man drives off in disgust. 

One worker turned to the other and said, "Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language..." 

"What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?"

The reason for this post is that I experienced a situation similar to the previous joke a couple of days ago. Despite being a native English speaker, having a decent level of proficiency in Spanish, being in second year Basque, and having briefly studied a few other languages, I found myself in the same position as the highway workers.

I had planned an interesting day trip for myself on Friday (more about the actual trip in a later post) and having just bought my train ticket to Bilbao, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see an older man holding a map and seemingly in need of directions. I said "Hola", as I usually would when someone taps me on the shoulder, and the response I received was "Bilbao?" while pointing to Bilbao on the map. When I didn't receive a response in Spanish, I switched to English and tried to explain how to catch the train. I tried to show him where we were on the map so he could orient himself, but Durango is a small enough city that it wasn't there. After realizing that he didn't speak more than a few words of English, I resorted to pointing to signs and timetables. He seemed to understand, and I went on my way, feeling bad that I wasn't able to speak to him in his own language.

Since I was also going to Bilbao, we ended up on the same train. In fact, we ended up sitting across from each other. It was still morning, and I hadn't been awake for that long, so I was hoping to be left alone with my thoughts or my music for the duration of the train ride.  My new-found friend, on the other hand, had other plans.  As it turns out, he was a bit of a talker.  Our "conversation" began with him asking directions from Bilbao to Santander and then to Gijón. I put conversation in quotation marks because what went on between us wasn't really a conversation, since neither one could understand the other.  It was more like a strange game of charades that allowed talking in snippets of five or six different languages. With these special rules, you were not allowed to say more than four words in one language without switching to another. Not having been born bilingual, I'm not the best at code-switching even when I know both languages.  I tend to get stuck in one of them and have a difficult time following the conversation when words of the other language are thrown in at random. Imagine my confusion when having to follow the code-switching between languages I don't understand.

Despite our lack of a common language, I managed to get lectured about my relative inability to speak neither German nor French.  He was of the opinion that because I could speak English that I should be able to speak German because they are related. He thought the same about Spanish and French, and then proceeded to list all of the romance languages that he thought I should speak. While knowing one language that is closely related to another often makes it easier to learn, it doesn't mean that they are mutually intelligible and that understanding one automatically means you will understand the other.  Not only was I lectured about about languages, but about my exercise habits and my choice of profession as well.  Apparently teachers work a lot and don't make a whole lot of money (that's a shocker) and I would be much better off becoming a doctor or a lawyer. I do not want to be a doctor or a lawyer, I want to be a teacher. Now feeling a little uncomfortable, I got off the train at the first stop in Bilbao leaving him to exit at the second stop, where hopefully he could find someone who had a better sense of direction than I did or could at least speak to him in a language he could understand.

Have you ever played the game of code-switching charades or had difficulties finding a common language to communicate in?