On The Road

My previous post reminded me of all of the times that I have totally screwed up my threads of communication in another language. Easy to do when the second (or third or fourth) language is learned later in life when sponge like absorption of vocabulary, grammar and syntax is not so sponge like.

There are words in English that are really hard for non-native English speakers to keep track of. Two that come to mind are kitchen and chicken. For an English speaker this is a no-brainer because, well a kitchen is a place where we cook, or sit around the table with cups of coffee and chat, and a chicken is well, an animal that lays eggs and tastes like everything. How can those two words be confused? Easy. Pretend you don’t know their meaning and say them one after the other …

Another pair is hungry and angry. Both are usually preceded by the phrase I am or Are you. My friend K., a native French speaker, always confuses these two. I always have to ask her if she wants to eat or is she mad. She is usually hungry.

My big twist is making up my own words. My brain uses its twisted logic to complete sentences when my dictionary isn’t handy. Like in French. For twenty odd years I used the word assiette for seat. Like a seat on a train or plane. Assiette is the French word for plate, but it made sense that it could also mean seat because the command to sit down is assier-toi. The word in French for seat is siege (two syllables not one).

The wonderful thing about this is that it can lead to great and confusing conversations and bouts of belly laughter. There’s nothing more fun, and more ice-breaking, than making an ass out myself in a place I know nothing about. Or even in places that I’ve known intimately for twenty years - a place so polite that the folks don’t even correct me.