LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
LET ME COUNT THE WAYS
By Andrew Paul Grell
I was a child of the Jet Age, born just months after the first commercial flight of the 707. At five, I knew traveling was for me. We went to the Montreal Expo and in the motel, I was glued to the TV watching cartoons in French! Another language there could be cartoons in, twice as many cartoons! Looking back now, I recall that I didn’t know any of the words but I understood the French cartoons perfectly; perhaps some pedagogue would work that into an early language acquisition model. Probably not. They’re cartoons.
My first flights were domestic, Grandparents in Florida. It wasn’t until I was 13 that I became a real jet-setter, going intercontinental. I picked up a word here, a word there, wherever I went. A cruise on a Russian boat, the Alexander Pushkin, when I was 15 was an eye-opener. On American boats, passengers party all day and all night. On a Russian boat, daytime was for classes. Imagine that, going on a cruise and having to learn stuff. I shudder to think what Beavis and Butthead would have made of that. I took Balalaika for class one and Intro to Russian Language for class two. That was where I learned it. Ya tibya liublu. I love You. That’s what started me off.
Finally I was off, parentless, a summer in a kibbutz on Israel’s Mediterranean shore. But before we got there, Sabena had gone on strike and we were stuck in Greece for a few days. Three big, fatty lamb chops, fries, and a bottle of Retsina came to about $2.00 American. And I learned Sagapo, I love you in Greek. Greek, the mother of modern languages. But the minute we touched down at Ben Gurion, my Hebrew ramped up, I was actually almost speaking bits and pieces conversationally. ‘I love you’ in Hebrew was a little awkward, though. Ani ohaiv otcha is literal, but the idiomatic is “Motzait chain b’anai,” You find favor in my eyes. My second trip to Israel, a summer semester at the Weitzman in field ecology and computer science, opened the floodgates. A Swedish girl taught me ‘Ya elskar deg’ but it was Sarah Leslie, my first almost-grownup affair, daughter of a soldier of the British Empire, who gifted me with a prize possession, “Eck het yo leif,” I have your love in Afrikans. A night with a German tourist taught me Ich liebe dich, but I much preferred Sarah’s African version of Dutchified German.
Friend by friend, chance meeting by chance meeting, I kept picking up potentially useful tidbits. Back in New York, Spanish practically jumped in your lap and begged to be learned. Te Amo, the sign on every candy store in the city; I finally knew what it meant. Scans much better than Garcia Y Vega, I can tell you that. Including what my father, an MP in Tokyo at the end of World War II, taught me of Japanese, I could make utterances in and detect people speaking about a dozen languages. Detecting is the fun part. You can try this at home. Wait until you are in an elevator with people speaking Russian. When you get out or they get out, just say “Spakonye noche,” have a safe evening. Then look at the shock on their faces when they realize you might know what they are saying. No race is as paranoid as the Rus.
The even more fun part is putting this to use. Still in my teens, “Vous ete une ange descende sur terre,” “You are an angel descended to earth” worked wonders. But of course you need an ejection seat if you get busted as not being a francophone. “Je parle Francais comme une vache Espagnole,” “I speak French like a Spanish cow” at least gets a laugh every time. It’s my experience that the more you know linguistically, sufficiently enough to never order a boiled tractor and a cup of dog sweat for lunch, the more you can network, and the more you can network, the more, well, you know. And the easier it is to communicate with each other, mistakes, gaffes, warts, and all, the sooner we might all be able to get along.
