Category: Language stuff

Meet my dog, Buddy.  I think he’s pretty cute.  He’s smart too-he can ignore me ifn three different languages when I tell him to come or sit.

Yep, Buddy ignores French, English, and mmm-BELLY-may fluently.  Which language I speak to him depends on who else is around.  If we’re alone or having a personal chat it’s definitely English.  When other people are around, it’s often French, so that they can understand what I’m trying to get him to do.  But, when there’s a new person there, they’re usually terrified, because he’s kind of big.  To reassure them I usually throw his ball a little bit.  Most have never seen a dog play with a ball before, and that gets them laughing.  Then I tell him to come and sit in mmm-BELLY-may, which he does or doesn’t do depending on his mood.  By that time people have usually relaxed enough around him to sit down and talk about whatever they’ve come to see me for.

But, when I’m mad or really serious about him sitting I speak English.  And, I almost always speak English to my cat, Scruffy.  She is not a big fan of Buddy, so she lives in the house.  I do speak French to her when I call her by her title, Madame la Chatte.

So, what does that say about me and language?  Or does it only say that I spend too much time talking to my pets…

There are no books or classes to help a person learn
mmm-BELLY-may.  So, the very first day I pulled out about 12 different
things from around the house and put them on the floor on my front porch.

My language helper said "point to the machete," and she and I both pointed to it
as she repeated until I started to recognize the word and could understand without her
prompting.  We added one object at a time, and things were going
well.  I didn’t have all the words completely down, but I had a general
idea.  For instance, coal was a long word that started with
"d."  It was cool-I was learning using only mmm-BELLY-may, no
French.

But then, halfway through the lesson a new word showed up.  It was short
and started with "a" and seemed to mean "coal."  The
long "d" word was completely gone.  I got more and more confused
until I finally switched into French and asked my language helper what was
going on.  She said that the word for one piece of coal was
"ditakahondi."  But, my coal broke in half partway through the
lesson, and the plural for coal is not "ditakahondis," as one would
hope, but rather "awane."  Which sounds a lot like
ditakahondi-NOT!  I was completely freaked out and promptly decided to
only learn the singular form of words for at least the next oh, ten
years. 

Chatting (whining) about this with someone who’d learned a related language, I
was reassured that it was only the most common words that were that irregular,
and that most of them followed nice rules. 

She was right, but plurals still make me a little nervous.

These were my visual aids for learning how to say big and small.  AL friends-do you recognize the biggest flip flop? 

These chairs are really comfy, really!  Real bent twig chairs-only $2 each at the market!  I got the little one to bring home someday for my niece-isn’t it cute?

This is a picture of a broom.  I don’t think they’re strange though, they work really well.  Read on…

A few days ago, a colleague and I were laughing about how we used to think we were good at learning languages.  That was before we started to learn languages here, though. It was true for Spanish and French!  But, they’re not tone languages like the ones here.  And, even though we say in linguistics that no language is any more difficult to learn than another, that’s just not true. 

See, when I pronounce things wrong in French, people can still usually understand what I’m saying.  But, when I get the pronunciation wrong in mmm-BELLY-may, I’m saying a totally different word.  The only difference between the word for stranger and broom is how high or low my voice is when I say it-that’s tone.  When I first got here I wondered why people talked about brooms all the time when I was around.  Really!

…when a foreign language will come in handy.  My father told me not to take Spanish in high school, he thought other languages would be more useful.  I took Spanish anyway. Years later, while I was working in a job that I got because I could speak Spanish, Dad sent me a clipping about how marketable reading and writing Spanish was.

But, I picked a French speaking country to serve in overseas, so my Spanish has been pretty useless lately.  Until a few days ago, when a colleague bought a brand new cell phone.  The instruction manual was all in, you guessed it, Spanish. 

You just never know when another language will be just what the doctor ordered! 

One of the things that I worked on when I first got back was learning to count to 1000.  After I had that down, then I had to work for another week to be able to get the money right. 

if I go to the market and am told in the language that a pile of tomatoes costs 50 francs, I will hand the woman a 25 franc coin (about 5 cents) and we will both be happy.

Saying something costs 50 francs when all it takes to pay for it is
a 25 franc coin is not, at this point, a bargaining technique. I’ve already greeted and bargained, this is the end of the transaction.

People here have been handling 500 franc (about 1 dollar) bills and calling them "one thousand francs" for as long as any one can remember. Never mind that it has "500" printed on it! A bill that size and that color is simply called "one thousand francs". That ‘s just the way it is! Why?  The explanation that I usually get is that it’s a way to trick outsiders at the market.  Insiders know to divide by two.

This is why it takes me so long to figure out how much my pile of tomatoes or onions is at the market – or (more often) my bottle of Coke.  First I have to understand the numbers, then I have to divide in my head.  When I get it right, everyone is thrilled.