Word of the day
Welcome to London — Episode 16
London. Wednesday. 12.30 am. “Mind your language, Nicky. Where is that coming from?” Charlie plays shocked.
I am queuing in the supermarket for my classic 3-Meal-Deal, my colleagues Charlie and Tony right behind me with their selection of tasteless sandwiches in hand.
“What do you think, where I learn that. I am spending to much time with Tony, he is rubbing off!”
Tony bursts into laughter and Charlie bits his tongue to not join in.
“What?” I feel my cheeks becoming hot and try to make eye contact.
But the two guys just look at each other with a smirk and reply unison: “Nothing”
I hate when they are doing that. I know that joke is on me, but I don’t understand it.
I cross my arms. “What did I say this time?”
Now it’s Charlie to blush and he avoids to answer.
Tony recovers from his laughter and grasps for air. “Nothing. Just — don’t google it,” he continues giggling.
I am pretty sure I didn’t say anything stupid, but I can’t be sure. It dawns on me what they were laughing about. My thoughts were completely innocent! Initially.
I try to convince them to explain what was wrong, but they refuse.
“Please post rubbing off as your word of the day!” Tony almost chokes on his joke and blocks the whole queue when he misses his turn for the self-checkout.
Laugh as much as you want. I would like to see you, living your life in the German language — I bet there are quite a lot of booby traps there.
And in fairness, my English improved so much since I am here. What I am missing is all those little details, slang, idioms … I can explain technical details about my job without hesitation, but Melvin had quite a hard time to explain to me what a shrubbery is and I laughed my head off about the word gondola. And ‘asparagus’ is definitely a spell from Harry Potter!
Sometimes the boys don’t understand how I know one phrase, but another perfectly normal word is completely unknown to me.
Well, for a start you have a specific word for actually everything. In German you can combine things — there are rules, obviously — but when you hear the word you can understand what it means. While in English, if you don’t know it, you don’t know it. For example mammal. It took a lot of examples for me to understand, that this is quite a specific category. We call them breast-feeding-animals, case solved, no?
And although you like to have a particular word you don’t hesitate to reuse it in a completely different context again and just give it a different meaning, as if you were only allowed a limited vocabulary.
Charlie really had a roll on the word ‘plane’. He came up with at least ten different meanings: like an aeroplane, the planes in the Desert Sahara, a geometrical plane, plain oatmeal, being plain like in boring, and then you can use it as a verb. The usage is endless.
Then you have the ambiguity of your spelling and pronunciation. Sometimes it seems to be completely random, just to confuse foreigners. I almost missed my stop on the tube, when I had to get off at Southwark — to be honest, I still don’t know how to say it. I just hope I’ll never have to ask for the way, ever!
Particularly names of cities and places can be tricky. I’ve learned no one knows how to say it, though, besides the locals and even a native speaker will have to learn it.
However, there are plenty of words which seem to have just a random spelling so that you can’t either pronounce it nor write it if you’ve never seen it before.
Alone the syllable ‘ough’ can be pronounced in so many ways, that my head is spinning: rough, dough, thought, through … it’s a nightmare.
Besides the fact that there are no rules what so ever how to spell things. Like double letters. God bless word suggestions and auto-correction when I am typing. The word necessary — are there two C, two S? Why do I use apostrophe S in ‘London’s mayor’ but ‘its mayor’ it magically becomes one word?
That are only a few examples where you seem to make everybody’s life this little bit more miserable. But there are even more for foreigners.
I am lucky to master the ‘th’ sound meantime. You don’t understand how horrible your first attempts to speak English are when your teacher does exercises with you in front of the entire class and you know your future will depend on you not pronouncing it as a Z.
To be honest, I was never good at English at school. My teacher lost patience with me. I was just a lazy bean. I didn’t see a reason to invest any time into it.
Well, tell your 14-year old self that languages are opening every door — of course, I didn’t believe any of it. I thought it was boring and useless and so ridiculously hard to learn, that I’d rather sneaked through thirteen bloody years of English classes, almost failing twice in a row, than to put some effort in it.
Who would have thought, that I would end up in England? Sometimes I think about ringing up my old English teacher, just to rub it in his face.
Meantime it is often me to teach the others about their own language. Not that my speech is perfect by now, but I do know rules, they’ve never heard of and ask silly questions they never thought about.
When Tony explained me the difference between horrific and terrific he came across horrendous and terrible — one of them doesn’t belong here!
We then often end up in a discussion how words are how they are — they seem to make no sense and the guys start to question their own words, what I find hilarious.
Since I live here I really learned to love the language. It became so natural to me to speak English that I start to think in English. Although sometimes German words are sneaking into my sentences, especially when I am talking fast, get distracted or it is a very complicated topic. As if my brain uses up more processor capacity for the content and has nothing left for the translation.
On the other hand, when I am then back home I start to use English grammar in my sentences and I end up in a corner with my German sentence where there is no way out but to use the English word because I don’t have an equivalent in my language to make it work.
But as much people consider speaking English is very cool — I don’t want to be that guy who comes home, living her fancy live abroad and is too cool to speak her mother tongue properly any more. So sometimes I have to bend and stretch a lot to only use German when I talk to my friends at home and wonder where all my words went.
But when I talk about a certain topic only in English it is even harder for me to talk in my own language. When I moved I had quite a hard time to translate words like “landlord” or “council tax” just because I don’t use them as regular.
“Come on, mate, you are holding up the entire queue!”
I shove Tony towards the tilts and his laughter calms eventually.
“OK, ‘mate’,” he replies with a final grin.
“I think we are really rubbing off on you. You start to sound very British,” Charlie confirms when we step out of Tesco into the busy street.
I smile, flattered. They don’t realise how much this means to me, hearing it from a native speaker.
Obviously, I will always be a foreigner — as soon as I open my mouth. In this case, being ordinary, being like everyone else, is all I want. And I get there ever so slightly.
To S. — Who philosophises with me about languages for a sport.
Leave a clap for me, if you liked it :)
