Languages I've learnt based on their speakers' reaction to my speaking them
Humiliation and joy
I am becoming a true European; I speak four languages fluently and badly. Not a new European, who speaks their national language with their compatriots and slangy American English with everyone else, but an old school European, who knows a bit of every major language (plus a few minor ones) and secretly thinks everybody should speak French.
My adult life has been spent acquiring foreign languages. And this at a time when that is arguably both easier and less important than ever for a native English speaker. It has involved an enormous amount of bloody-mindedness and occasional outright dust-ups to get to the competencies I have. But it’s also clear that the reaction has been very different, and often internally varied, depending on the language I tried to learn, and it’s this that I want to offer you a tour through today.
FRENCH
Realistically, French is the most useful foreign language I’ve learnt. It’s a global language, the French are happy to assert it in international environments, and it even got me round a very distant country when I visited Senegal. It was the first language I started, due to my Francophile Mum; I can still just about remember the old Europe, the old Belgium, when people reached for it with foreigners as the first foreign language of choice and how self-conscious I felt not to know it. It’s also the language I do my everyday life in in Brussels, and there’s a sort of bouncy energy to doing basic admin in French which I can only enjoy.
What is true, and has always been true, about trying to speak French, is that the French correct you. Don’t take it personally. The French also correct each other. It feels like French natives, whether interacting with each other or foreigners, are always working towards a standard of ‘good French’ which you may or may not be meeting at any given moment.
What’s annoying about our new world where the French speak or at least do something with English is that they show none of the same care; they’ll be correcting a foreigner on saying accu-eil instead of acc-ueil but at the same time talking about President Doo-nal Tram. Indeed, one of the most unappealing habits of French learners is to adopt exactly this snobbery about other learners of French, become plus royaliste que le roi as it were.
This is the unique combination French offers you – a language which is genuinely useful, formidable in its precision and cultural reach, but also an experience which can be very tough on a learner due to its speakers exacting standards for use. It’s rare to combine an international language with expectations of it being used perfectly, but somehow the French have got there; I wonder sometimes, and this is ironic for a langue Républicaine, if to truly love the French language you don’t have to somewhere in you have something of the snob.
I remember one of my French teachers ending a course we had done together by going round the group offering feedback; his for me was ‘James speaks good French with an English accent. He speaks German too, perhaps with an English accent too.’ What a perfect essay in disdain. When I have got good feedback on my French, it’s invariably been from other foreigners; many of them have emerged as great fans of the language and not such great fans of all those who speak it.
GERMAN
I’ve always viewed the languages I’ve learnt as to some extent the members of my family. In this analogy, your native language is like the friendly uncle you see now and then who requires relatively little maintenance, and my aforementioned French would be the difficult but beloved teenage child. German, though, would almost certainly be my wife; loyal, an enduring love, someone I met young and stayed with through various ups and down. The first cut which cut deepest.
My German is better than my other languages, simply because I lived there when young and committed to it, which involved a certain amount of German whispering in face of Germans keen to practice their (often proficient and generally charmless) English. Germany is a big country, at least population wise, and I’ve met Germans with all kinds of attitudes to their language; ones who asked why on earth they should speak German with Americans and Brits and others who were proud of the language and subtly delighted when others tried to learn it. Some Germans are more into German than others. While on one hand I experienced a German comedian tell me in English ‘In my country, it’s my choice what language I speak’ – up there with the most contemptuous things anyone has ever said to me – I’ve also had people tell me that I spoke the best (specifically ‘cleanest’) German they’ve heard from a foreigner. It just suits me, German, it’s very intellectual but also capable of visceral directness, qualities I enjoy tapping into.
A question I’ve often asked myself is if it is really possible to have friendships with people across languages. Like if there isn’t some essential part of themselves people hold back in reserve in their native tongue, if my foreign-language friends aren’t always getting a kind of diluted version of me or I them.
Still, to the extent that I’ve managed cross-linguistic friendships, it’s definitely been in German, in long complex chats about Gott und die Welt (you can work out what that means) with German friends, where we’ve really got into it. Georg Kammerer, Johannes Blank, Maite von Waldenfels; fabulous people I had lovely German-speaking friendships with. Incidentally, many of these chats have occurred in South Germany, where I’ve found people more open to talking German or indeed any other language with foreigners. Baden-Wurttemberg, Bayern and Austria are are all etched upon my heart.
Professionally, the language has been of great use but perhaps still not as much use as it should have been. For the most spoken language in Europe, German maintains a relatively modest presence on the international stage and Germans can be very shy to speak it even when they have the option to. I understand the reasons for that, the historical German fear of asserting the slightest twinge nationalism, but it does sometimes seem a logic to me that ‘Because of WWII, I as a German have to speak bad American.’
Yet anybody who knows German culture knows the Germans have always been in thrall to some other culture and its perceived sophistication; earlier it was French, for the German Romantics Italy, now it is the Anglophone world. And that’s the great singularity in my view of Germany; it’s the biggest country I know which is also outward-looking, as the amount from other languages translated into German testifies to. The German-speaking world is intellectually wide, in line with Goethe’s old concept of the Germans needing to cultivate Innerlichkeit, interiority.
The language will always be my first love, and I’m glad that I insisted on learning it. I did often have to ask, though, which directness was at least excellent training in German communication norms.
DUTCH
This one has just been fun. To continue the family analogy, a bratty, boisterous child, young, full of energy and surprises, and growing up fast.
Learning Dutch it has finally decoupled the idea for me that the languages you choose to learn, beyond English, have anything really to do with their usefulness. I’ve picked up Dutch, having German and English already of course, to a pretty advanced level within a couple of years and so far it’s been both enormously enriching and professionally useless. Indeed, I wrote an ode to how positive an experience it’s been here; it’s made me feel closer to my family, of which there is a whole Antwerp, Dutch-speaking side, too.
I do, though, also live in Belgium, where the politics of speaking Dutch have long been contested and where learning Dutch has a special level of support and subsidy behind it. Here in Brussels, there is a happy coincidence of me (who wants to acquire as many foreign languages as I can) and a population desperate to assert the status of their own language in their own country. There are Dutch language centres, Dutch language days and Dutch language book groups in Brussels, in part to give Dutch natives the chance to use their own language in Belgian’s largely Francophone capital but also open for foreigners along for the ride.
I might well have had a less positive experience in Holland, albeit I had a pleasant time speaking Dutch on a recent trip to Rotterdam; so far, I’ve had nothing but encouragement to use and improve my Dutch.
I’ll give you a small example of how this positivity plays out in Brussels. I went into town to do some business recently, and in true Belgian style picked up a portion of chips. At the chippy, I ordered in French without problems and with an accent, and then the Francophone server switched to English with ‘Do you want a ticket?’ (This meaning receipt in English, Brussels variety). I felt belittled.
Then I went to the Dutch-speaking bookshop and paid for my items, with the lady at the till seeing my customer loyalty card which says on it James Harris, hardly the most Flemish of names. Yet she stayed in Dutch throughout the interaction, stayed polite and friendly and encouraging. Although my Dutch is still worse than my French, I have more positive interactions in the smaller language which creates a virtuous feedback loop.
Like all my other languages I’ve also had more sobering experiences. A woman I was working with recently who I asked to speak Dutch with me who just wouldn’t and replied to my every Dutch sentence in English for an hour. Dutch speakers who explain their language to me in English as if I didn’t know the first thing about it. A lady at a Dutch-language meetup who took exception to the German influence on my Dutch, hard corrected every single sentence I spoke, and almost left me in tears by the end of the evening. In part, I think she behaved like that because she came from a language where there isn’t such a big culture of foreigners learning it and she relished the chance to be hard on one for a change. Still, at least she was there trying to help outsiders learn, just with far too much strictness.
Yet above all the third-biggest Germanic language has been a positive and quick learn and has left me with the central realisation that what’s really decisive in acquiring a language is the experience you have doing so; indeed, you could even say that speakers of smaller languages are more likely, these days, to encourage foreigners in learning them, aware as many of them are of the need to maintain their language in a world of bigger and more dominant tongues. That's the optimistic view, anyway.
I’ve had serious goes at two others. CHINESE was the language of my ex-wife and both her and her family were seriously encouraging of my efforts; unfortunately, the end of the marriage brought the end of any interest on her part in encouraging me further. Fair enough and I accept that I’ve missed my chance to learn one of the few truly essential languages in the world today. I dearly miss having this fantastic language in my life.
RUSSIAN is the other, a language and literature I’ve long been obsessed with, and where Russians were endlessly encouraging, adoptive even, of people having a go at their complex but splendid tongue. And Russian is definitely the other language, hanging out with Georgians or Armenians, which has sometimes served as a lingua franca beyond English for me. It remains a big ambition of mine to go back and finish the job, tho the language’s image has suffered even in my eyes, those of a lifelong incorrigible Russophile. (It’s the snow, the vodka and the women). I’ve also managed to acquire basic conversational SPANISH and ITALIAN just by going to countries where they're spoken, and I’ve found in particular Italians exceptionally encouraging in face of any attempt at their almost extravagantly beautiful language.
Finally, based on two recent trips to the country, ROMANIANS are winningly delighted with your production of the merest word. I even had someone apologise for not speaking Romanian to me, a first for me as a learner.
It’s impossible for me to tell you that all this language learning has been good or not because, as I hope the piece above shows, it has been all manner of things; moments of huge joy and excitement and also humiliation and a feeling of being cut down to size. A lot of people thinking I’m stupid even as my own compatriots found me very clever. Languages have given me a living, but not a particularly lucrative one, and one threatened by the dominance of my native tongue which I am in some sense always trying to escape.
It’s certainly taken an awful lot of oglio di gomito to get, in adult life, to the shonky but fluent repertoire I currently draw upon. Four wonderful languages, four opened-up worlds. In all of them I’ve faced embarassement after embarrassment about my mistakes which I’ve felt no shame about whatsoever - the only shameful person to be is the person who has lived in a country for years and doesn’t know the local language.
Utility, then, is not the core of this; I’m not sure that for English speakers there is much use in foreign languages these days beyond Spanish, Chinese and perhaps French. Given that learning a language is primarily a personal asset, enriching above all in terms of public development, the thing to do is learn the language that you want to, be it big or small.
In beginning to do so, and this applies to pretty much all European languages by now, if you in the early stages want to avoid that sobering switch to English, you’re probably going to have to tell them not to do it as you’re learning their language. Because people want to practice their English. I understand that and would feel the same if English wasn’t my own native tongue. Still, the simple fact is that if I’d have helped out every single person who wanted to speak English with me, I’d never have learnt much German, French or Dutch at all.
By now I’m done with the gate-keeping attitude of a lot of Europeans to their native languages, the idea that they can mangle English to their hearts’ content but the slightest error in their own language registers it beyond incomprehensible and initiates an instant switch to English. Tired of the double standards. Personally, I think we should always be generous to people reaching out to learn another language and get out of their comfort zone, particularly if that person is living abroad with all the attendant risks of that. I'd never insist on using German with a German in the UK, for example, although ironically the Germans I've met there are happy to have a break from English.
The hope has to be is that in a world where soon enough most people will know English to a greater or lesser extent people will be, aware that they command the auxiliary language, more willing to speak their native tongue. That’s one possible future, but in the meantime, there are still enough non-English speakers out there to get truly fluent in pretty much anything; you just need to move to the provinces and change your name to something less Anglo-Saxon than ‘James Harris’. As for my next step, I’m considering learning Welsh. For as I’ve learnt, whether a language has 400 million speakers or 400,000, you can only talk to one person at a time.
Don't let a lack of family to encourage you prevent you from pursuing your Chinese learning. Go on any language exchange app and you'll be overwhelmed by the number of people who want to talk to you. In my experience, the vast majority are earnest people who want to learn about your culture and warmly encourage your interest in their language, whatever your level.
I've made several long standing friends that way, some of whom embarrassed me with their hospitality when I visited them in China.