learning a new language is difficult but also mind-opening

For the last interview of the year, I invited Aaron, an American from Maine, who now lives in Northern Ireland with his bilingual family. The reason why I chose him as the guest for our year-closing tea party is partly to address the peculiar issue of native speakers, raised after the last interview, and partly to satisfy reader requests of a longer, more analytic discussion. Aaron, before moving to the Great Britain, stayed in Hungary for 7 years, which is how I got to know him. As an instructor at Hungary's leading university, he was a great motivator for me to go deep into matters and to express my thoughts as precisely as possible. Let this discussion be a tribute to the past and an inspiration for the future.

Welcome, Aaron. Thank you for accepting our invitation. Do you ever drink tea or are you still a fan of beer?

Ha ha! Well, I do still enjoy a nice pint once in a while (it’s hard not to in the land of Guinness). But, yes, I drink tea quite a bit. Coffee used to be my morning beverage of choice, but now I generally only drink it in the afternoon, if I’m in a café or something like that.

As stereotypical as it is, I still have to ask: why did you leave your home, a country so many people dream of moving to?

How much time have you got! The short (-ish) answer is that in the late 1990s, I was feeling a bit dissatisfied with life – maybe it was American life, maybe it was life in general. With this much distance, I can’t really say for sure. The late ‘90s was a time of “irrational exuberance” to use a term that was coined at the time, and I had come to feel like rampant consumerism was an aspect of life that I wasn’t incredibly interested in taking part in.

The timing was perfect at the end of the ‘90s – I had an aversion to my current lifestyle, an overwhelming desire to try something new, and a friend to do it with so that we could spur each other on. We spent a year investigating and weighing our options, and by the summer of ’99 had decided on doing a CELTA at International House Budapest. Our idea at the time was that we’d get our CELTA’s and if we didn’t like Budapest, we could then move on somewhere else. As I noted previously, I ended up staying for nearly eight years, so I guess there was something about the place that kept me there!

How did you cope with the fact that whenever you moved, you left a part of your life behind?

That’s a good question. The truth is, I had moved around a lot as a child, first from town to town, then, within my “hometown,” from neighborhood to neighborhood. Although on a much smaller scale than moving to different countries, I think it might have prepared me a bit for the phenomenon you describe. I switched schools several times as a child and also had to get used to making new neighborhood friends. As much as there is a sense of loss that goes with that, there’s also the adventure that comes with finding your way in a new place, making new friends, getting the lay of the land, and so on. 

Having said that, I have dealt with my fair share of homesickness and mopey nostalgia. Living in the electronic age helps. When I was doing my year abroad in Dublin, there was no e-mail, and there was only one pay phone in my residence hall. If I wanted to talk to family or friends at home, I could try and see if they were home, but it was actually more effective to post a letter and inform them in advance of the day and time I’d be calling. Imagine! These days with email and skype, I can talk to anybody I want to at just about any time, so the feeling of being completely isolated from friends and family is somewhat diminished. 

 

 
But, to be honest, I do sometimes miss a sense of being part of a rooted community with a prolonged residence someplace where I’ve known people for years and years. It’s just one of the things I’ve had to sacrifice for this slightly more wandering lifestyle I’ve chosen.

Now let’s turn to the issue of communication. Many claim that for native English speakers much more doors are open in the globalized world. What is your opinion about it?

English is the global language – whether we like it or not. This may change in the future for various reasons, but unless something catastrophic happens, I can’t imagine it changing any time soon. As a result, native-speakers have an advantage in that they don’t have to spend time learning the language. Generally speaking, that is – as with all languages, things like education, geography, social and economic class, etc., contribute to one’s ability to communicate in one’s native language. Some English speakers do have a notion that just being native speakers gives them the ability to teach the language, which is far from true. But for the most part, speaking English does give one opportunities that speaking most other languages likely doesn’t. I don’t mean to imply that this is good or bad, or that it makes English as a language superior to any other language – it’s simply the point in history in which we live.

The flipside is two-fold. First, it affords native-English speakers a sense of entitlement and laziness when it comes to other languages that I think is probably not healthy. Learning a new language is difficult. However, it’s not only incredibly rewarding but also mind-opening. English speakers who choose to rely solely on their English-speaking skills miss out on a lot. They also can come across as arrogant or insular, which is an attitude that much of the world already ascribes to Americans and the British, so we do ourselves and our image no favors when we refuse to open up to other cultures, including linguistically.

Second, and as somewhat of an extension of the first, there is an element of hegemony that goes hand-in-hand with English’s dominance that I think a lot of English teachers become uncomfortable with at some point in their career. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it linguistic colonialism, but there is a sense among many (teachers and learners, but also the business community, tourists, etc.) that English’s status as the predominant global language somehow makes it a “better” language or a “more important” language, concepts that carry more than a bit of chauvinism.

I guess I think that nobody should feel bad about being a native speaker of English, because that is what it is, but at the same time, native speakers should be aware of the inordinate amount of privilege that comes with being a native speaker, and should try to remain vigilant about not developing a superior attitude based on what is, let’s face it, an accident of birth.

In your experience, how is language a barrier (in a non-English speaking country like Hungary, or in the English-speaking but dialectal Great Britain)?

Well, I guess it’s different for me as a native-speaker of English than it might be for a speaker of a different language. When I first arrived in Hungary, English use was still not very widespread among the population, but I could make my way. As I struggled to learn Hungarian, having English was definitely helpful. But the language barrier was still there. If I needed to do anything official (like getting my residency sorted) or if there was an emergency (like when I broke my arm once), I had to rely on my Hungarian friends to help me – thankfully, I quickly met many very kind people. 

On the flip side, I occasionally attend events in Northern Ireland organized by the Hungarian community here, and I meet some people who have absolutely no English, and I think the barrier to them is much greater. Nobody in NI who isn’t Hungarian speaks Hungarian. So having no English at all is an incredible difficulty for many people who’ve come here looking for economic opportunity. 

In terms of my own English being different from British English, or, really, Northern Irish English, well, it’s mainly the source of amusement more than anything else. It can very occasionally be frustrating when a vocabulary term comes up that isn’t an example of one of the well-known differences (e.g. lift v. elevator). It took me a while to discover that what I call a “spatula” is a “fish slice” over here, which makes absolutely no sense to me! Ha! But that’s really nothing more than a minor inconvenience when compared to the situation of somebody whose very livelihood is affected by language barriers.

Do you have any memorable or funny incident related to language use?

When I first arrived in Budapest with my friend, we were in a small pub near Moszkva tér. We had heard about this great Hungarian drink called pálinka, and we knew that szilva (plum) was meant to be the best. So we asked the bartender for két szilvapálinka (two plum pálinkas). He didn’t understand us at all. It seemed strange to me that he wouldn’t, as we were in a pub, and what other “plum” item might we be asking for. 

Well, it had to do with our (very bad) pronunciation. We were pronouncing PÁlinka something like paLINKa, and he just didn’t get it. After a few minutes of this, a Hungarian guy we’d met once or twice before at the same pub came in and we got him to help us out. He told the bartender what we wanted, the bartender said something back, and they both started laughing. Turns out the bartender was hearing us say “szilvapelenka” and he was very confused about why these two foreigners would be asking for two plum nappies!

Finally, what advice would you give to someone considering living abroad?

My first advice would: Do It! Even if it’s only for a few months, there’s nothing that’s quite as personally enriching or mind-opening as living in and experiencing a new culture, even if it’s only as far as the country next door.

Second, I would advise going for at least a year, if possible. In my experience, roughly the first three months are taken up by wonder – wow, they do it THAT way here? Oh my, this food is incredible! And so on. Then, after about three months, the homesickness kicks in – the things that seemed quirky and interesting become annoying or, worse, alienating. That can be a very hard thing to experience, but it’s getting on the other side of that misery – which can take a few weeks or a few months – when the experience begins to blossom into something really rewarding. After six months or so, one starts to feel a part of a place. You know the lay of the land, how the busses work, where the best pubs, restaurants, shops are, how to open a bank account, use the postal service, and so on. And with all of those comforts under your belt, you can really begin to experience a place as something like a local. It’s when you start to feel like you live in a place and aren’t just visiting that you really begin to internalize the experience, and that sense of identification is an incredibly valuable reward.

Thank you for your thoughts. Next time you will be my guest for some szilvapálinka.

Thank you, and Happy New Year!