These chickens have nothing to do with language
It’s a funny thing starting an expat/travel blog sixteen years after you started travelling/living elsewhere and failed to do anything else with your adult life except, well, travel and be an expat.
For one, you’re not as freshly enthusiastic as those who are venturing out on their first big trip or landing in their first (or even third) foreign country. Sometimes I can be downright jaded and cranky.
My rose coloured glasses cracked sometime around 1997 in London and were thoroughly smashed over the course of 6 years in Turkey (a country I love very much but which didn’t always love me back). I don’t wear glasses at all anymore.
This is not to say that I’m beyond the point of wonder and fascination, no, no. You may have noticed that this blog is almost neurotically drawn to the quirks of the utterly mundane in Faraway Lands (or rather, as I’m in Shanghai, the Immediate Vicinity). I like exploring places very much, thank you.
Sometimes, however, there is burnout.
About a month ago, I posted a piece about my fast-travel burnout, how I just couldn’t take any more bam*bam*bam backpacking, dashing from crappy bus to slow train to trishaw to scary shared taxi to back-of-scooter. I’m reaching a similar point in language acquisition.
I have no idea what this says
A little background here:
I grew up bilingual in French and English, having been sent through a French immersion program from kindergarten to grade 12. That’s one spare language.
Then, in my London years, I was surrounded by, working with, working for, dating (just one) and living with an impossible number of South Africans. At the end of all that, I ended up living in Cape Town for 6 months. At one point, I was stage manager in a wholly Afrikaans speaking theatre company, taking all tech cues in Afrikaans. That was three years of Afrikaans immersion. I can still recite dirty poetry and demand cups of tea, fluently.
After South Africa, I moved to Turkey and spent six years trying desperately to grasp Turkish so I wouldn’t feel horribly embarrassed when my students would say, “You’ve been living in Turkey this long and you still aren’t totally fluent? Are you stupid?” Their English skills (usually after a dozen years spent studying English) were generally no better and no worse than my Turkish skills but I still felt horribly ashamed. I spent most of 2005 (year 4) loathing the language, resenting it, feeling like it just wouldn’t sink into my brain, feeling utterly stupid. That year passed and more Turkish was absorbed and I stopped resenting it. I left Turkey as a solid Intermediate (still not fluent, but very good at what I needed to be good at).
Before I left Turkey, I started studying Spanish, as we were tentatively planning to move to Mexico or Colombia or maybe Ecuador (we are flexible that way). For six months I ploughed my way through Live Mocha levels and tried to separate my Turkish intake from my Spanish (because I was also taking Turkish classes at the time). By the time we made it to Mexico, I could easily read Spanish but my speaking was hesitant and my listening was just tired.
Between 1994 and now, I also travelled in countries that required German, Flemish, Portuguese, Twee, Bulgarian, Romanian, Burmese, Indonesian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Arabic. I learned between a little and a lot of each of these.
Could it be Walmart?
Now, after a year and a half in Shanghai, I’ve just started taking Mandarin lessons. It’s a 4 week intensive course and I’m ashamed to admit that although it’s just a basic beginner course, I’ve learned more in the past 3 weeks than I had in the past 18 months. That’s actually quite embarrassing.
Why hadn’t I learned more than just the basics I needed to get by? I knew my Thank Yous and How Muches and Hellos and whatnot but I had a huge mental block against learning Chinese. I bought book after book of the Learn Chinese in 2 Days sort, hoping that I’d learn by osmosis. They mostly stayed shut, gathering dust on my bedside table or on my desk at work. I tried listening to people speaking and tried to pick up bits and pieces but usually failed (though I became fluent in metro announcements due to my long commute). I was functionally illiterate due to the character system so my old learning style of constantly reading signs and billboards and newspapers failed me. I mostly just felt tired and wished I could still use one of the other languages I’d worked so hard for, which were fading away in my brain already from disuse.
I have met a lot of foreigners who were fluent in Chinese: they had Chinese spouses or they’d come here out of a singular passion for Chinese culture and language or they were super keen first time travellers with brains open to anything new. I felt like a big, thick, stubbornly ignorant old doofus because my Linguistic Firewall had slammed shut and I was almost willfully refusing to learn one more freaking language. I was here for work, and we were in China mainly because when we left Turkey in 2008 during the autumn height of the Big Fun Financial Crisis, it was the only place that would take us and pay us a non-laughable wage. I wasn’t here out of a love for China (though I do have a big soft spot for it now). Part of me resented China for making me learn one more freaking language. I was tired, damnit. Just leave me alone.
Ironically (in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way, perhaps) I’m a long-time career language teacher whose job it is to motivate students to learn and to help them develop independent learning skills. I know exactly what I’ve been doing wrong but, damn it, I’m tired.
I’m studying now, studying harder than I have since my early years in Turkey, trying to keep up with my course. Sometimes my brain just feels full; sometimes Turkish vocabulary pops into my sentences when I try to say something in Chinese; sometimes I just want to bang my head against the table because I have way, way too much conflicting linguistic knowledge battling for space in my brain. I’m glad I enrolled, as I can now deal with shop keepers and waiters without feeling like a complete imperialistic jerk but it’s hard.
Is there a sell-by date for travellers and their ability/willingness to add one more language?
