Going Native: how language shapes us

Learning a new language isn’t always much fun, but using it should be

Writing books is a funny old game. One of the recurring themes of these newsletters is that there are no rules about how it should be done. “Nobody,” remarked screenwriter William Goldman, “knows anything.” Even the most experienced folk in the business really haven’t the foggiest idea about what will work, in print as well as on screen. In a previous newsletter about some of the book projects I’ve worked on that never came to fruition I mentioned Going Native. This was the first book I completed, about 20 years ago, and despite various agents and publishers showing interest has never seen the light of day.

But when my friend and fellow writer Mark Diacono read about it, he suggested that this would be the perfect place to finally publish it. Despite 25 years of working online, it had never occurred to me to do so, but it immediately struck me as an excellent idea. And so that’s what I’m going to do. Here’s my original blurb about it (talking about myself in the third person because I thought it added gravitas):

Going Native follows a personal quest to get to grips with Spanish from clueless beginner, through an addiction to cheesy South American soap operas, to the day he realises he could nearly understand what Spaniards were saying on the radio.

As well as essential reading for anybody struggling to learn a second language, this unique journey will satisfy all those interested in Spain who have driven over lemons and want to delve deeper into what really makes the country tick and the words which keep it ticking. From the urban loneliness of losing his language to the dramatic birth of his first child in a Madrid hospital run by nuns, as his Spanish improves and his comfort foods mutate (from Marmite on toast to deep fried batter dipped in thick hot chocolate), he slowly realises that he is becoming an ‘inbetween’ person, one who still tells waiters the food was fine when it was terrible but then swears about it in a different language.

I’ll be carrying on with the usual newsletter which remains free, but Going Native will only be available to people who take out a small regular subscription. I know it’s not a great time to add to your outgoings and I’m obviously a bit biased, but I think it’s stood the test of time and you will find it rewarding. I’m resisting the temptation to edit it so what you read will be exactly what I sent out to agents and publishers all those years ago (the original manuscript, rubber bands and all, now looks quite battered). The only thing I will add is the occasional appropriate illustration to help break up the text.

Without further ado, here’s the introduction. This is of course free, but as a taster of things to come I hope it will encourage you to sign up for the rest of the ride. At the very least we can both know nothing together.

Introduction

We are what we speak. English is as much a physical part of me as my eyes. I went to school in English, I met my wife in English, I talk to my sons in English. I use it during the day at work and I use it at night in my dreams. I use it to complain about my electricity bill and to read my newspaper. I use it to think. I use it to worry. I use it to swear. I use it to watch Scooby Doo. It is my life.

And for many years it was my only life because English was also a well-fortified comfort zone. When I went abroad, it was easy to sit back and rely on the rest of the world’s ability in my native language. I discussed cricket with locals of a tiny village in India, the legitimacy of American diplomacy on a local train in China, the delights of fish and chips with an orange juice seller in Kathmandu. All without straying into a foreign tongue once. Wherever I travelled, English encircled me like a reassuring bubble.

But then my life changed dramatically. I learnt another language.

Like every other powerless teenager in the country I was forced to endure the lifelessness of studying a foreign language at school. And two decades after petulantly burning my last school timetable, those lessons still remind me of what it is like to be genuinely bored. I don’t blame Mr Hawthorne, Mr Taylor, Mr Bowyer, Mr Peach or Mr Wood. They all did their best. It’s simply that the place to learn about another language and another culture was not at a desk trying desperately to remember the gender of a kitchen.

La famille Bertillon from P.J.Downes et al Le français d’aujourd’hui (London, 1966)

Nobody would try to teach football to children who’d never seen a ball before in their lives by spending every lesson in a classroom. Of course there’s a technical element involved: you can’t just hurtle onto the pitch and hope to look slick without knowing how to kick the ball first. You can’t order a glass of wine if you only know the word for beer. But the problem was that learning languages at school seemed to me to be all ecoutez y repetez and no big match day. I learnt to play football by falling over, by making a fool of myself, by learning little tricks, by playing football. Or to put it another way, I have learnt more about the Spanish pluperfect subjunctive from listening to Ricky Martin songs than I ever did from my glossily expensive textbooks, fulsome though they were in the intricacies of saying hello to a postman in Barcelona.

Technically, and I’ve got the dubious paper qualifications to prove it, I should be able to buy a pair of shoes in a French shoe shop. This is how it should work. I ask a question. The nice lady gives me the answer. I ask another question, she gives me another answer, and the process continues until the shoes are successfully bought and I can then go off and ask directions to the nearest railway station. The trouble is that foreigners are unaccountably contrary. When I went to France just after my O levels I discovered that they didn’t take turns in the conversation, the swines. Sometimes they even interrupted and one Parisian policeman even accused me of being Belgian and then laughed, quite nastily, right in my face. There were more remarkable discoveries. Foreigners spoke fast, used words that weren’t in the back of the book and, most disconcerting of all, did the whole thing in a strong foreign accent.

The unfortunate truth is that like learning the piano or mastering watercolours, the real barrier to learning a language is that it takes a lot of time. Worse, you have to become a baby again, helpless and ridiculous, frustratingly unable to order fruit or tell a joke. Yet it can also be an exciting journey. Mastering a language affects your core identity rather more than a similar mastery over baking cakes. Language shapes us, who we are, and how we see ourselves. You must learn to feel and think differently to truly come to grips with a new tongue. To speak French, you need to try and think like a Frenchman or woman, and to do that you need to understand France. Learning a new language and learning a new culture go hand-in-hand which means that you can reinvent yourself, or at least redefine yourself, an opportunity that rarely occurs away from the hairdresser. It is a reminder that identity is not set in stone at birth, it is accumulated throughout your life. New foods, new words, a new you: stripping away the gathered layers of habit and prejudice can be invigorating.

But after seven years of French I felt that my layers of habit and prejudice were still very much intact and by the time I left school I had virtually given up. It just felt so pointless. It’s not that I wanted to get to grips with the latest savvy street slang, but on the other hand it didn’t seem likely that chatting up French girls was going to be easy with only the benefit of chunks of Flaubert and the ability to explain in great detail precisely what my parents did for a living. And none of them seemed very impressed with my prose translations either.

Flaubert: fascinating to read, less useful in nightclubs

My first realisation that there was more to learning another language came a couple of years after school when I spent a summer in Morocco during which I learnt more useful Arabic phrases than in all my endless hours of muffled French. And I never discovered how to ask for directions to the train station. Luckily, it never came up in conversation. Of course my Arabic was shamefully restricted – I couldn’t buy a pair of shoes in Arabic to save my life – but the results were immediate (not least the fact that a few well chosen words amused the ‘guides’ so much that they left me alone in search of other, less amusing, prey). Part of the reason was simply that I was starting to realise that while learning a language isn’t much fun, using it is. I felt freer and more confident with my 50 words of Arabic than I’d ever been with my extensive  knowledge of irregular French verbs. I smiled when I spoke. I relaxed.

The 19th century English traveller George Borrow, a heady mixture of Errol Flynn and Billy Graham who roamed extensively around Spain, argued that the English are the worst linguists in the world because, “when they attempt to speak Spanish, the most sonorous tongue in existence, they scarcely open their lips, and putting their hands in their pockets, fumble lazily, instead of applying them to the indispensable office of gesticulation.” Morocco taught me that it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it.

At around the same time I met a girl and fell in love. Half English, half German, she had been born and brought up in Spain and was completely trilingual. Listening to her talk on the telephone to her family was a revelation. She would switch between all three languages without hesitating, swapping in and out to use exactly the right word or phrase to convey her meaning, sometimes even fusing words together spontaneously to get across just the right sense. Meeting her family was similarly daunting as they would happily chat to me in English, but also tell each other jokes in Spanish before giving the punchline in German. They were all very kind, including me as much as possible, translating simultaneously when we went out with their non-Englishspeaking friends, but nevertheless I felt sadly inadequate.

Over the next few years I made several feeble efforts to learn some Spanish with very little success, my annually optimistic I Wish I Could Speak A Foreign Language resolution on New Year’s Eve being muted each time by my basic idleness. And that’s undoubtedly the position I’d still be in now if my wife (yes, dear reader, I married her) had not been transferred from her office in London to a new office in Madrid.

I went with her and it changed my life.

Next week: Chapter 1 - The One-eyed Teacher