So there I was on the bus in Saint Petersburg a fortnight ago or so, and the bus ‘conductor’ was asking me where I wanted to go. I just couldn’t get the words out. I knew them. I had practiced them in my head, muttered them to myself quietly and even practiced aloud. I wouldn’t say languages come naturally to me, contrary to what many believe about me. Perhaps this was a case and point.
“Uh..Adma…Uh Admeeral…Uh…skalrajootye, pajalsta, Ad..Uh…Адма…Uh…Адми…Uh..скалжуте пажалста, Ад..”I stammered and stumbled through my long forgotten rudimentary Russian.
"Адмиралтеиский Проспект!!!“Admiralteyskiy Prospekt!” she exclaimed in an oh-so-third grade teacher kind of way, completing my awkward sentence as though she was completing an elementary cloze work activity, while she was in Grade 12 having to tutor her little, stupid brother. Clearly, she had heard this before. Be damned though if she would speak English to me. She then went on to explain, as best as I could understand her, that Adm…was a very long street that intersected the bus stop, you stupid American pig dog tourist. Yes she was still clearly harbouring animosity over the Cold War. After she outlined my lack of direction sense and intelligence, I nodded and nodded, da, eta Pravda, it’s true, cpaceeba, thank you, ya paneemayoo, I understand… AND….then I proceeded to get off at the next stop, requiring about another 2 km stroll down Neskee. Oh well, the day was beautiful, I needed to work off some of that British gluttony I ‘suffered’ through anyway….
“네, neh [pronounced deh]” was all I could say to confirm her assertion to me. I pretty much understood 70% of what she was saying to me (boy, who knew I’d remember that much from Russian classes), but I couldn’t even utter the affirmative “Da” without first passing it through Korean – known in the linguistic world as “language interference”. This is an area of linguistics I may very well explore in my Master’s thesis, but keep reading for an interesting peek through an experience I had in St
Petersburg…
The reason I couldn’t talk to her, I believe, is that I couldn’t hear my own voice (alluding of course to The King’s Speech). Before I go on, I feel I must articulate the few ground rules I have about this blog, and they namely include:
1. No public airing of dirty laundry (unless it very directly relates to the topic at hand, and even then no names, no pack drill…)
2. Keep the topics close to focus, writing about language, identity, my experiences with both, and on occasion, socio-historico-political economics if they relate to language somehow, or just tickle my own personal fixation on world history.
Some background may be needed here to shed light on how the events transpired as they did that day. I believe 2 factors were in play, the first one, a universal principle I hold to be true among ALL L2/L3 learners, is what I call the Layer Cake Principle. The other is the latent effects of a break up from a relationship; things you can’t quite quantify, but ruin your apparent efforts to reach sincerity in every day action. The latter I call residual effects or just residuals….
Without getting into a long dissertation (and thus spoiling my thesis), I am of the belief that as we acquire languages subsequent to L1, and even more evident when we get to L4 or L5 (the fourth or fifth language acquired), we tend to make speech production errors in the language most recently learned prior to the language the interlocutor is using, OR said errors are made in the most dominant language in one’s daily, usual environment. This is to say that if you speak, say English, French, Spanish, a smidgen of German, Russian, and one’s current environment is Korean, any interference in the language you are speaking (let’s call it the target language) will be either the dominant environmental language, or the most recently acquired language. I wish I could make a rule for when is which, but that is a discovery I am only too happy to leave to my research.
In my case, English and French were pretty much simultaneous for me, then I learned Mandarin, then Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian, and now I currently live in Korea. For the purposes of this article, let’s consider Japanese, Mandarin, German, and Russian to be ‘dormant’ – I haven’t used them to any great frequency lately. So, when I attempt Korean, the interference I get is obviously English (my most dominant language), but when I am really trying to speak Korean, the unconscious words that leak into my Korean are…Spanish-my most recent actively used language. When I was in Russia, you’d think that Spanish again would interfere, based on my presumption above. However, it was Korean that interfered! Why? I believe it is because Korean is the most dominant language (other than English) in my present environment. When I was in Japan in February, could I remember domo arigato gozaimasu? No, I kept saying Kam sa ham nida. The Japanese for thank-you is something I learned as a kid, before Spanish, Mandarin even. Thanks to my mother (I give her endless praise for my languages acquisition), I learned both Japanese and Russian formalities at an early age. Then in Russia, did I say спасиба? No, I said, “Kam sa ham nida.” In the words of my robot friend CNR-109-8763dvT, “Does not compute.” So clearly the layer cake has a sort of crust that envelopes the cake. Maybe it’s a layer pie then…Every time you gouge your fork into the pie, you get crust – the dominant language…
My own solipsism would have me believe that this phenomenon only occurs to me; however I had the great, fortuitous fortune of meeting a very lovely and enthralling woman in St Petersburg who shares the same kind of experience. ‘Esmeralda’ has a linguistic story that would make Rod Ellis’ head spin. Of Turkish decent, she grew up in Germany, spent some time in Spain, speaks French, her most recent language learned being Italian, and her she was in St Petersburg learning Russian. According to her, she is either a Common European Framework level C1 or C2 in Turkish, German, French, English, Spanish, and maybe Italian. Bottom line: she’s functional and fluent in 6 languages. And now, onto Russian. She had started taking Russian classes sometime around the turn of the year, and here we were, in a café, with her, her Russian boyfriend, conversing in Russian. OK, THEY were conversing. I was just trying to catch the odd word. Esmeralda was conversant at just 4 months of study! Good thing I don’t have an allergy to envy or jealousy. Now before you say, “Ah, it’s because she has a Russian boyfriend!” she had only been with him for a few weeks. Anyway, she’s just finished juggling Italian, and here we are at a coffee house in St Petersburg. What words are creeping into her Russian? Italian. “Como…e…per…bene…” Back channeling and filler words. Her boyfriend didn’t notice it, she didn’t notice it. But I did. Thanks to French and Spanish, I am familiar with Italian, and can identify the stray Italian word in a Russian conversation. I don’t think there is a drug in the world that could approximate that linguistic surrealism. 10 languages at that table that April night. My closest approximation would be to go to St Petersburg, FLORIDA, drop a tab of acid, go to the Dali Museum and stare at the Persistence of Memory until it spoke to you. Yup, that’s about the same tripiness I felt in the elder St Pete’s.
This digression should have illustrated to you the peculiarity of language acquisition, and in particular, the interference that other languages cause in speech production. Beyond language interference, I feel that our personal experiences can interfere with our language production. I call this residuals.
When I learn a language, and particularly when I speak it, I love to have fun with it. Act it out, spoof it, ham it up. Richard III the hell out of it in front of a mirror. I speak my best Japanese when I act like a samurai. In fact, it’s the same with Korean. One has to be culturally sensitive of course, but I feel I really nail the accent. In fact, in class the other day, I was trying to explain to my students “Can, can’t, have to, don’t have to.” I drew a parallel with them using the Korean sentence, “Son dae ji ma seyo,” Which means, “Don’t touch.” You see this in elevators. This point is to emphasize “Don’t” and “Can’t”. I have 7 classes of 35 students. In 4 of them, I explained to them the expression, even writing the Korean words on the board. Meh. That’s the reaction I got. Then…in the other 3 classes….I put my hair into a samurai ponytail, wrote the words on the board, and spoke the words like the best Sho Kosugi ninja I know how to be. The first reaction. “Arayo!!!” Along with some roaring laughter. “I understand!!!”
Rewind two months. In St Petersburg, trying to tell the bus conductor where I want to go, but I can’t get the words out. Part of that is the linguistic interference mentioned above. The other part is the reticence I felt to take a risk, to step out of the box and put forth my best, boldest Russian with my best ‘komrade’ accent. Why couldn’t do it? Residuals. In my most recent past relationship, my other half really got cheesed off when I would do the samurai, or the komrade, or the Mein Kommandante. OK, the latter may not have been to culturally sensitive, but it helps me speak better German. When I speak French, I do my very best to sound Parisian (I fail), when I speak Spanish, I try to sound Madrilleňo. Did you know that The Edge for U2 is actually from Wales? I didn’t think so. To fit in, he changed his accent when he moved to Dublin. For more on this, what The Departed when Mark Walhberg’s character dissects Dicaprio’s.
There I was, on this bus, and I could spit out the words. My affect learning had seized. I stopped having fun learning and speaking all because for so long, I was more or less forbidden to do what I did best – imitate. OK, maybe I am not a good imitator, but I sure love doing impressions… I’ve had Scots say, “Why do you wear a kilt? You’re not Scottish.” Well, actually, I am. Maybe only a small part (1/8), but it counts. Why should I be forbidden from celebrating a key part of my heritage because I wasn’t born in Scotland? Am I any less a Scot (or Irish for that matter) than someone born there? Am I American? No, but I know a heck of a lot more about the US than most Americans. Why is that? I am not American….What does it all matter? To quote a line from U2, “It’s not where you were born, but where you belong.” That’s what counts, and you can’t put that in a box, or deny that identity.
Language is about how you feel, whether you are a banana, coconut, oreo, or whatever you are called to make you feel bad about the way you act toward a language or culture. How well you feel is your affect and let yours be what you want it to be. And enjoy a piece of my humble layered-language pie.
Пака!
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