"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." Nelson Mandela
My teacher has just asked me a question, and I can’t even start to put together an answer. I can guess at the gist of the question based on the topic we’re studying, and the two words I actually understood. My brain is whirring with words, sounds, and the spaghetti letters of this language, but I can’t make sense of any of it. I’m staring at a page in my workbook, but I know it doesn’t hold the answer. I repeat the question back to her in English, take a deep breath, clench my fists, and start to formulate an answer. In a few minutes we’ve moved on to exercises in the workbook, which is a relief. Here, I know what I’m doing. Conjugating verbs on paper is a lot easier than fitting them into sentences.
Learning this language is like being a first grader again, possibly even a toddler. As I read, I have to sound out each letter before I can put the word together. I still append the wrong suffixes and use the wrong verb tenses. Although I have no problem conjugating a verb by itself, I’m still liable to say something like “I goes market”, or “the weather beautiful”. And then there are mistakes that are not even replicable in English because we don’t have nominative or dative, or any other cases for that matter*. My teacher says I’m making progress, but I feel like a three-year old. I guess that’s just how it’s going to be for a while. There is some hope though! A German woman I met here told me that this language is more logical and has fewer exceptions than German. So that’s a plus.
For my language class I meet my teacher in a café/book store. The other day we were browsing the books and I saw “The Voyage of The Dawn Treader” by C.S. Lewis in English. Then as I was looking at the local language books, the cover of one jumped out at me. I couldn’t read the title, but I could read the author’s name – also C.S. Lewis. It was “The Horse and His Boy”. This is my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia, so I purchased it. Although I’m nowhere close to being able to read it yet (as I mentioned, I could barely decipher the title), I now have a definite goal ahead of me. And that helps.
Maybe you are wondering why learning the local language is so important. Lots of young people do speak English, our team has local contacts who are fluent, and Google Translate is readily available. Here’s the deal though – even when you speak a language fluently, if it’s not your mother tongue, you will always miss out on something. Although I’m fluent in German, and my primary education was all conducted in German, when it comes to truly expressing myself and my heart, 9 times out of 10 I’ll want to use English. It is still more comfortable.
By learning the local language, I give that gift, the ability to speak freely if you will, to the people I interact with. By speaking their language, I am not forcing them into the foreign territory of my language. This is the primary motivator, the primary reason, for investing time, energy, and lots of brain cells into learning the local language.
*For non-linguists – cases dictate the different forms of nouns. Put another way, depending on the position of a noun in a sentence, be it subject or object, it will require a specific case ending.