Tag Archives: language

Language barrier

When we lived in China we lived in ‘a small city of 6 million’, Dalian, on a peninsula on the east coast. It was not unusual for my family to hear no English spoken by anyone except us from the time we left our Canadian curriculum foreign national school on Friday until we went back to school on Monday. We couldn’t go to a restaurant unless the menu had pictures. And if you were in a store and didn’t see what you were looking for, a game of charades ensued with hand gestures and singular Chinese words coming from us rather than sentences.

Google Translate was fairly new and most Asian languages were not well translated, especially Chinese. I remember going to a grocery store to buy baking soda for my wife. I put the 2 words into Google Translate and got two Chinese characters. But on the shelf were 6 or 7 different items with some having the first character and some having something very similar to the second character, and none having both.

I asked for help and the employee couldn’t help me. She asked a coworker, and she couldn’t help me either. I was stuck. I finally bought a plastic back with a white powder that looked like baking soda and on my way home I realized that the cost of this item was less than 50 cents Canadian, and had I bought all 5 of the most likely items, it would have cost me under $3. That would have saved me 30 minutes and a lot of frustration.

Now things have changed significantly. Language translation is so much easier. People can have full-on conversations with Google or an app translating voice to text and/or voice almost instantaneously. These tools will even correct themselves when the context of the sentence is recognized. For instance, I think ‘baking’ and ‘soda’ were two words that were translated for me independently, and so the words were loosely translated to ‘cooking in the oven’ and ‘bubbly drink’. Now translators know that these words next to each other mean something different than when the words are used in a different context.

All this to say that the days of language being a major barrier to basic communication are over. I can think of a lot of frustrating conversations and miscommunications I had in my 2 years of living in China that would not have happened if we went now rather than over a decade ago. I think of the conversations I wanted to have but couldn’t. I think of the questions I had that were just left unanswered.

Sure there were a few magical moments where we overcame the language barrier and made special connections, but these moments pale in comparison to what we could have said and done with the tools available today. While I hold some nostalgia about the way things were for us back then, I think I’d still prefer it if we had the language conversion tools of today back then.

Pronouncing words ‘well’

I drew up in Barbados and came to Canada at 9, just before the start of Grade 5. It was challenging because no one understood my accent, and questioned even if I was speaking English. My sister had the same issue, and after 2 notices home, my mom had to go to the school to tell them that she didn’t belong in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes because she only spoke English.

I struggled a lot to be understood, having a ‘I’m not in Kansas’ moment happening in October, after I was moved in a seating plan. I was placed next to the only black kid in the class. This was comforting for me, coming from the Caribbean where most my classmates were black. On the first day sitting together, something happened that I was excited about so I turned to him and blurted out what I wanted to say in my full Bajan accent. He looked back at me, deadpan expression, and said, “I don’t know what the f*** you just said,” and turned to talk to someone else.

I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Oh man, even my brother doesn’t get me. I’m in big trouble!’

That was a big moment, I worked diligently to break my accent after that. I chose a horrible strategy of saying ‘STOP’ in my head after each word I spoke, to prevent me from linking and slurring words together. This did help me say things more clearly, and made it much easier for Canadians to understand me, but it left me in a catatonic state for seconds at a time. My conversation would be so much slower than my mind, that I would literally get lost telling a story.

My mouth would fall 5,6, even 7 sentences behind my mind, behind my regular speech pace, and I’d get lost. I would be saying a sentence and the next sentence in my brain would be 7 sentences later, and I’d forget how I got there, and even why the story was relevant. I’d freeze, on the outside, but inside I was a hot mess as I scrambled to figure out what to say next. I would literally block out everything in this panicked internal state, leaving the external interaction I was having. I can remember my mom saying to me, after a comatose moment, in her Bajan-Trinidadian accent, “Boy, wass-a-matta wit-chu? You on drugs?”

I still sometimes struggle to find words, decades later, and I know it stems from me trying to talk in a way that was completely alien to me. I joke that I am ESL and my second language is also English.

That said, while my parents tell me that my transition to Canada was really challenging and that I struggled a lot. Beyond that not in Kansas moment, my memories of that grade are almost all positive. That’s a testament to the resilience of kids.

Many aren’t as fortunate as me though, and I was not in a situation where I had to try to learn a whole new language. I have so much respect for people who move to another country and have to fully immerse themselves in a language foreign to them, and often they aren’t given the opportunity to engage with many people who are native speakers because those native speakers don’t make half the effort to converse with them that they have to make.

But going back to the idea of English being my first and second language, many people pronounce words ‘wrong’ or ‘not well’ because that’s the way they learned the words. I still have word choices and phrases that I use, that Canadians don’t use. A simple example, I struggle to use the word ‘beer’ without sounding like I’m saying ‘bear’. It makes for a strange offering when a friend comes over.

While that example is just a wrong pronunciation, when an entire group of people say a word a certain way… it’s not wrong. It’s not miss pronounced, it’s an example of how words evolve over time.


We shouldn’t be too quick to make judgements about how different groups use words in different ways than we do. A perfect example would be, imagine going to the southern states and every time someone said, “Y’all” instead of “You all”, you corrected them and told them they were saying it wrong?

There are many words and phrases used today that we should be far more accepting of. Less judgmental of. The words are being pronounced well, just not the way you/we pronounce them.

I don’t like the decorations

Before we moved to China, I spent 7 days there meeting the previous principal of the school. One of my tasks was to find an apartment for my family. My future secretary, whose English was pretty good, toured me around 8 or 9 apartments, over 2 days, before we found one that I thought my wife would approve of.

Walking through a few of these places, my secretary remarked, “I don’t like the decorations.”

I thought this was an odd statement, since we would be moving in with our own ‘decorations’. I didn’t understand what she meant until months later. As it turns out, when you buy an apartment in China, the structural walls are the only thing in place. Nothing else. A drain in the kitchen area, and one drain in the bathroom areas.

Almost every apartment I went into in China had a step up to hide the fact that the plumbing for the sink, toilet, and shower all had to be put in after purchase, and had to be directed to a single drain pipe. In fact, there could often be odour issues in bathrooms, with little room for the bathtub drain to have a water trap to protect against gases (and smell) coming up the pipe. When we went on holidays, I’d leave water in our tub and sink to protect against this.

When my secretary talked about not liking the decorations, she was literally talking about the design of the apartment, where the walls and doors were, how the apartment was laid out. You could go into two apartments side-by-side, or even one floor above, in a building and the layout could be completely different.

One apartment we went to had a completely enclosed kitchen with two doors on either end to get to the living room and dining room. Another apartment had a bathroom with access only from the kitchen. I thought I was opening a pantry when I opened the bathroom door. Both of these were places where my secretary didn’t like the decorations. And I didn’t like the layout. Same thing, except what I didn’t know was that the layout was a design (or decoration) feature that the first owner chose, not something the builder did. In this way, the word ‘decorations’ made a lot more sense.

—

Related post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog: Slowly by Slowly.

Fun with words

I remember going shopping for a fishing rod with two friends, when I was in my early teens. My buddy Dino picked a rod up, shook it in his wrist and said, “I like this one, it has good grippage. We instantly knew what he meant. It was years later, when I used this word at university that another friend said, ‘That’s not a word.’ We argued about this, and I was so convinced, I recall that there was a wager made. I lost the bet, but it wasn’t until days later when we found a big enough dictionary that I was satisfied that I had lost. (We can sometime forget that Google wasn’t always there to help us.)

Last night, after responding to a comment by Aaron Davis on my blog post We need a new word: Memidemic, (where I was having fun creating a new word), I was on Twitter and came across this post:

Which shared the following 4 words:

I retweeted this with the comment:

Dr. Kay Oddone quickly responded:

To which I responded:

While I think that internest is rather punny, I don’t think of it as having much utility. However, I love when new words make it easy to say something precise and poignant, needing little explanation. My attempt with memidemic is to express something spreading virally, without the negative connotation of a virus or an epidemic… good things can be spread too, why can’t we have a word that expresses that?

Textrovert, cellfish, and nonversation are brilliant! They need little explanation, and they say in a single word what would normally take at least a sentence. I could use all of these tomorrow and, with a little context, people whom have never heard the words before would understand what I was trying to get across. I think in their own way, these words have grippage, and they are probably going to stick around for a while… I’m pretty sure I’ll be using them!

 

Subject-Verb Agreement

2010-12-02_09

I think posters like this… student generated, are great!

There is something to be said about it being a hand-crafted project as well… It is easy enough to share it digitally after-the-fact, as I have.

I shared this: http://pairadimes.davidtruss.com/great-things-in-the-classroom/ which has all kinds of student work posted. I think much of it can be then shared with each other and with the world after-the-fact… after putting ‘pencil to paper’.

We need to stop seeing technology as an either/or thing and start seeing it as useful tools on a spectrum of tools that includes pencil & paper, Skype, blogs and wikis, and everything in between!