When Life Gives You Lemmas
The BBC ran an interesting article the other day called “How many words do you need to speak a language?” The basic finding was that while native speakers average 15,000–20,000 of the word families (e.g. sit, sat, sitting) also known as “lemmas,” you can get away with knowing only 800–1000 of the most commonly used lemmas in a foreign language and do ok.
I could have told them this because I married someone who believes he is fluent in at least three foreign languages, only one of which he actually studied.
The one he studied is French and, to be fair, he does fine with this one. He grew up close to the Quebec border with New York, where road signs are printed in French and English and the best hockey matches are broadcast in French only. So when, ten years ago, we hosted a wonderful French exchange student named Camille for a summer, it was not a total surprise that the after-dinner activity every night was a little game called, “No, I Don’t Think That’s The Right Word.”
It worked like this. My husband would ask Camille how to say a word in French, let’s say, “dish towel.” Camille would say, “torchon.” My husband would look at her, squint and tilt his head, and say to our native-French-speaking guest, “No, I don’t think that’s the right word.” He always had a theory of what the right word was and the two of them would go straight to the two French dictionaries that ended up living on the dining room table all summer. If my husband was wrong — it happened, believe it or not — he’d invariably say, “Well, that’s how you say it in French Canadian.” Factcheck THAT, Frenchie!
Fast forward to last summer when we binge-watched “Narcos” and now my husband also speaks Spanish. It’s not a very polite Spanish and you definitely wouldn’t want to use it in a public setting. Or a private setting of people whose high regard you’d like to maintain. Or in any setting where getting your meaning across was critical.
Nevertheless, as each episode ended and Pablo Escobar stayed alive a little while longer, my husband would turn to me to reiterate that with two, maybe three weeks of Spanish study, tops, he’d totally be fluent. Instead of arguing this one with Camille, he argues it with our two daughters who have studied Spanish since sixth grade and are, in fact, fluent. They beg to differ with the “two, three weeks tops” estimate. But they do it in Spanish, so he really doesn’t know that’s what they’re doing.
Has my husband ever studied German? No, he has not, although his mother has solid German stock and his dad was a prisoner in a German work camp during WW2 and learned German there. Did that stop him from speaking “German” to our latest exchange student, darling Anneli from Germany? It did not. On the first day of her stay, he confidently told her that it was “sweating” outside, using his vast Yiddish vocabulary which doubles for German in a pinch (see, History). He threw his version of German at her left and right during her stay, including the terms I taught him while driving for “turn left” and “turn right.” Anneli confided to me one day that she wishes the Vine video platform hadn’t closed down because she could have made a compilation of her host dad speaking “German” and become Vine-famous in Deutschland.
In the many years we’ve been together I’ve heard my husband take a run at Flemish, Portuguese, and Mandarin. He is never intimidated by a foreign language, he’s always curious to learn new words, and he genuinely believes he can figure them out. He understands that fluency doesn’t count for anything if you never open your mouth and use those words to connect with someone else. And more often than not he does make himself understood because he knows the one lemma that actually matters:
“Lemma try.”
If you are looking for language partners to improve your foreign language skills you can find it on swaplanguage.com.
