Underthecurrent

French lives deep in a part of my brain.  Hearing conversations in it is like sliding into a warm bath, relaxing and a bit comforting, and I like to eavesdrop when I hear a French speaking tour group pass by or parents chattering away to their children.

There’s no real reason that I should speak French, but somehow it’s sort of in there, the foundations laid through government mandated elementary school classes, the repetitions of pronunciation, vocabulary and verbs.  The liaisons are engraved somewhere beside a childhood phone number and the colours of the rainbow.  Sometimes I think I don’t really speak French but under pressure it will suddenly surface and I find myself explaining the nuances of a customs form to a French woman at a border crossing, or realizing that I apparently know how to say that a bag has been left on a bus and we need to retrieve it when the bus returns.  When trying to understand a new language, the French speaking part of my brain flickers on and off, spitting out phrases and vocabulary, involuntarily offering up the wrong solution to the problem.

This has been an obstacle to Spanish fluency.  While the structure of the words can be similar – bienvenue, bienvenidos, por que, pourqoui – so many other things are different, one seems to interfere with the other.

“I like the way you say ‘bien’,” the Mexican bartender commented as we worked our way through the mezcal menu.  “Uno mas, primo,” I responded.  

At least there was that. 

Spanish is a fun language to speak because, like English, it’s spoken in so many regions with a number of different accents, and (like English) you can more or less chop and change aspects of it and get a basic point across, grammar damned.

I taught him to ask “quanto questa?” at the shops but he only ever got the first part, theatrically exclaiming “QUANTO!” at the till, making the cashier giggle uncontrollably.

I’ve started to understand one African language but I can’t speak it – my tongue is too flat and flaccid, too resolutely English.  If he’s been away from it too long, LG will say his tongue feels fat, further proof of moving parts missing from mine.  The words are spoken quickly and have meaning based in context, the same word shifting depending on what is being said around it.  During the holidays, the conversations more or less make sense to me but much of the news still doesn’t.  I understand just enough that it’s confusing for people trying to gauge when they should explain, sometimes translating what I clearly understand, at other times rattling off a paragraph that is a complete miss as though it makes sense to me.  Maybe someday it will.

I envy the sounds my own language is missing that I hear across languages here, these things my tongue won’t cooperate to imitate.

How many languages do you speak? One really, though my deep brain has another one and sometimes it mutates into a third, and on a good day even more than that.