“It's
too easy to swap stories about traveling and the like. A language school
(i.e. in Central America or Mexico) is great, one-on-one and intensive
and even better if you choose to live with a family and be around the
language all the time. The hardest thing is to make people talk to you
in the language you’re trying to learn, and not English,”
Protas said.
Get
Out
When I spent
a semester in London, going to the indoor rock climbing wall at Crystal
Palace Sports Center really helped me meet the locals. In Israel, I
was lucky enough to live on a Kibbutz and make friends with some of
the Israelis—through rock climbing and smoking hookah!
The nice
thing about finding people who enjoy your hobby—or finding a new
one in another country—is that there’s already common ground,
a shared set of ideas. Add to that the daisy-chain effect where by meeting
one person you soon meet many more and before you know it you’ll
be partying with the locals, literally. Although it can be fun to be
a recluse at home, when traveling abroad it’s the people who you’ll
be thinking of and smiling (or crying) about for years.
“You're
always an American, but in the new country, give up your customs—whether
simple, such as how to hold a fork and knife, or more complex, such
as social constructions of relationships, to engage in and learn the
new ones,” Protas said. “Don't worry about the tough times
at first because they are overshadowed once you get to the point of
being competent in a new culture.”
These tough
times can actually be quite funny when they’re not completely
frustrating. Looking for beer in a Japanese supermarket one day, I happened
to ask and learned first-hand how hospitable and customer-oriented Japanese
workers have to be. Once the man led me out of the store to a completely
different store, pointed at the beer, and then ran back to work, I realized
I’d asked very literally “Where is the beer?” not,
“Does your store have beer?”
He might have done
the same no matter what I asked, but, I learned that asking questions
could be as dangerous as making ill-timed statements.
Prepare
for the (Head) Trip
The hard part of
learning another language isn’t all the time and money put into
it (though when it feels like no progress is being made, that can hurt),
but the feeling of being an infant in an adult’s body.
Out of everything,
if you can prepare for this one all the other advice will either fall
into place or won’t be as important. Be preared to feel stupid
and helpless like you probably haven’t felt in a long time.
Very rarely
will a native speaker be anything but supportive of your attempts to
speak (even the notorious French find it charming if you try to break
beyond “Je voudrais”) but as you read this just think about
how much your thoughts live in an English language world. In English,
you probably understand when someone is very busy and doesn’t
really have time to talk even though they stop and say hello out of
politeness.
"You’ll
have regained a kind of wonder with the world around you that most people
never get to experience twice."
In other
words, in most situations you can get a read on things and can get a
lot of information through the subtleties of your native language.
“In
Israel, though I had a professional degree of social worker, when I
was volunteering at a group home for boys, I felt like a 6-year-old
because I'd mess up the simplest errands. I didn't know what kind of
cheese to buy in the store when I was sent for cheese, a problem I'd
never have here,” Protas said.
“I once fed
the goldfish a cup of food rather than a tablespoon because of language
misunderstanding. I know how much fish eat, but lack of language can
translate into lack of self confidence and you make the dumbest mistakes
(luckily I realized my error when the water turned cloudy and was able
to save the fish). In the beginning, there will be tough awful times.
Loss of identity, loss of competence, loss of control take a bigger
toll than you'd think.”
Add to that misunderstandings
that happen in many social situations are amplified—was that guy
a jerk or is that just how the locals kid around? And, you might find
yourself getting even more insecure as your language skills progress
because now you’ve moved from ordering the local fast food into
the complex world of social relationships.
But, keep
going, and there will be those parties where you’ll meet someone
new from the country and you’ll be able to tell they’re
quietly impressed with your ability. Or, a personal favorite—you’ll
start translating your favorite jokes from home into your new language,
which others will find just as funny for the lack of translatability
as for the joke itself.
Once you
get to this stage you’ll realize how much more you have to learn,
but then you’ll get the good side of the child-like state learning
a new language puts you in. Almost every conversation, no matter how
mundane, will sparkle because you’ll learn a new phrase or suddenly
understand more connotations of an old one you thought you knew.
Reading
street signs and billboards on the bus will be thrilling because now
you can understand, a little, what they’re saying. You’ll
have regained a kind of wonder with the world around you that most people
never get to experience twice—just keep that in mind as you’re
slogging through those verb conjugations.
Josh
Krist is the publisher of InsideOut Travel and can make a
fool of himself in a few languages but is still working on how not to
in English.
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