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guslThere are many many people here who are multilingual, and yet can't speak English at all.
German & Italian and German & Polish seem to be the most common such combinations. Today, one such woman got frustrated trying to communicate with me, and got unpleasant... And I think I even understood what she was saying in the end, including her last sentence, "Nah... You don't understand!" with a dismissive "go away!" gesture.
My problem: I was too polite, and let her say what she had to say in her too-fast-German and way-too-fast-Italian. If I had insisted in dominating the conversation, despite my poor, broken German, then I would have been able to make her say things in a way that I understood them. I would construct sentences slowly, and give her the chance to fill in the missing words.
It's hard enough for me to communicate with such people in languages that I *can* speak, especially if I let them run wild (although I think it's often the case that they often don't understand themselves either). If the goal of the conversation is me coming to understand something, then I should constrain people's expression as much as possible. I have nothing against self-expression, poetry, etc... but only in situations where the goal of language use is to be non-informative.
In related news, I'm thinking about starting to learn Esperanto. It would be yet another "international club" to be a member of, and one whose goal is precisely to overcome language barriers.
German & Italian and German & Polish seem to be the most common such combinations. Today, one such woman got frustrated trying to communicate with me, and got unpleasant... And I think I even understood what she was saying in the end, including her last sentence, "Nah... You don't understand!" with a dismissive "go away!" gesture.
My problem: I was too polite, and let her say what she had to say in her too-fast-German and way-too-fast-Italian. If I had insisted in dominating the conversation, despite my poor, broken German, then I would have been able to make her say things in a way that I understood them. I would construct sentences slowly, and give her the chance to fill in the missing words.
It's hard enough for me to communicate with such people in languages that I *can* speak, especially if I let them run wild (although I think it's often the case that they often don't understand themselves either). If the goal of the conversation is me coming to understand something, then I should constrain people's expression as much as possible. I have nothing against self-expression, poetry, etc... but only in situations where the goal of language use is to be non-informative.
In related news, I'm thinking about starting to learn Esperanto. It would be yet another "international club" to be a member of, and one whose goal is precisely to overcome language barriers.
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Date: 2006-01-19 01:14 pm (UTC)I went through similar experiences when I worked in Luxembourg about 10 years ago. Even though my French was good enough for them to understand me, my co-workers made it a policy to speak with me only in incomprehensible fast local dialect. They thought of themselves as French rather than Luxembourgois I guess, and additionally they hated the boss whom I worked for directly. Eventually the boss transfered me to a quiet warehouse somewhere in the countryside, where everyone was satisfactorily understandable.