Being Understood

There’s a phenomenon I’ve observed as a language-learner. I’d like to talk about it today by way of some experiences in my own life.

I grew up in a city with a healthy mix of humans from many parts of the world. That gave me access to lots of people whose first language differed from mine. Inevitably that makes for some fun - like all the kids in my gradeschool learning how to swear in Italian complete with expressive gestures. We weren’t trying to build bridges across cultures or really do anything of value. Just filling time at recess and dividing ourselves among available social groups. Later on we grow up into higher functioning people. People who talk about where we came from and get to know bits and pieces about where other families came from. Somehow I’d never heard of a bok choy until a friend of mine in high school called me that. He thought it was funny, I was nonplussed and he had to explain it’s this vegetable he sees every day. I guess I looked particularly like a white cabbage that day. Anyhow, if I were to say bok choy to him after that then he’d know what I meant by this exotic term, no matter how vaguely my enunciation matched his. And this is a little part of the phenomenon I’ll get around to explaining soon.

Here’s a more direct example of how it plays out. When I was in college I worked at an engineering design company. There were large immigrant contingents from Poland and Romania working there as designers, engineers, and programmers. A couple of my Polish friends taught me some phrases we found amusing like “Pracuj dobrze” (work good) followed by something like “bo bezrobocie” (or unemployment).

I have good memories but not a good memory. Playing around with translation tools now twenty-something years on I think they were trying to teach me to say something like “Pracuj dobrze bo inaczej bezrobot” (work well or unemployment). One thing I do acurately remember is hearing daily phone calls where my neighbour would always open with the question “Śpisz?” Which he explained was interrogating whether the person on the other end had been sleeping. So if I showed up my neighbour’s cubicle and asked “Shpeesh?” He’d get the idea even if I didn’t sound like an authentic Pole.

So at some point I felt like I’d learned a few phrases - the ones I’ve mentioned and some others I no longer recall. I mix and match words together so we have fun goofing around at work. I get a smile or a chuckle or maybe some new phrases to try out. It’s a good time. But here’s a critical little observation that gets to my larger point today: If I try to say something one Polish speaker taught me to another Polish speaker I’d get a quizical look. Some strained processing came next. Followed by a friendly question about just what I thought those syllables would mean when combined. Here’s what was happening: the teacher figures out what I’m trying to say when I make noises close to what they said. They know I only have a few words so it has to be some combination of them. Another native speaker doesn’t know what set of words I have so, no matter how much they’d like to make sense of my strange contorted speech, it’s just not communication.

Skip ahead a long time. And fill in the detail that any student from the same place as me had some minimal required classes titled “French”. I went on a trip to France 10 years ago to give a technical talk at a conference. The talk was in English. But while in Paris I thought I should be able to at least perform some menial tasks such as ordering coffee or buying baguette in French. After all, I’m Canadian. We have French on every cereal box.

As it turns out, while the person in front of me orders coffee they’re thinking about coffee. When I order coffee, on the other hand, I’m thinking about how to conjugate “vouloir”. And counting out sixty-five eurocents for bread was just far easier than counting out soixante-cinq eurocents. I would ask questions in French and get answers in English.

I simply could not make myself understood. Even in the few cases where the context should clarify intent and I knew the exact words I needed to use. There are lots of specific items I needed to address. I’ve been working through some of them over the past couple weeks as I take yet another run at becoming marginally closer to bilingual.

Back to the phenomenon that motivated my writing today though. As I build up connections between written symbols and sounds that eminate from unknown nasal and glottal resesses a mental model appeared to me. The crux of it is that I, the speaker, make words into noises which you, the listener, will map back to words that make some kind of sense. As a beginner, I only have a small set of words. As a fluent speaker you have a lifetime of words. For me, anything that sounds kind of close to one of those words can only be one of those words. I just don’t have anything else it could be. If those words exist as points in space then each word has a powerful gravitational attraction for any sounds I hear that come close by. So when I try to say some word then the sound could come out as anything in the vacinity around that word. There’s a large empty area around each word from my perception of the language. The space of language as you perceive it is far more crowded. When you hear the sounds I make they don’t match any of the many words and phrases you know. There are many tiny points in the space of the language as you speak it and each point has very little gravity to pull unusual sounds toward it.

Words are points in space. Communication is mapping between spaces.

It’s just one way of looking at things but I find it makes a compelling visual for me. And when I’m trying to improve my spoken words it helps me think about how I’m developing my perception of this new and unique space.