The trilingual's dilemma, part 2

I spent last weekend in Granada, an ancient Andaluz city that's famous for its mazelike ancient neighborhoods and rollicking nightlife, all watched over by a thousand-year old military/palace complex (the world-famous Alhambra.) I went with my good friend, Hannah, and besides the obligatory overwhelmingly gorgeous Alhambra visit, we spent the weekend exploring the old city's nooks and crannies and taking advantage of Granada's tapas bars, which rival Linares in their scope, diversity, and low prices.

On Saturday night, we were walking along yet another narrow cobblestone alley, from one bar to another, and Hannah asked me a question. I'm not sure what the question was, and really in this context it's unimportant; the important thing is that I didn't know the answer. So, my answer to her was: "Not an idea."

Of course, "Not an idea" is a phrase that could conceivably occur somewhere in the English language. Any given object-- be it table, computer, sneaker, or apple-- is, in fact, "not an idea." One might even use it to say that something is a foolish prospect. "Try to drive on Storrow Drive between 5:30 PM and 6? That is totally not an idea." But as an answer to a question someone asked you? It hardly makes sense.

In Spanish, however, "ni idea" (which actually translates to "not even one idea") is a perfectly acceptable answer to a question you don't know the answer-- and herein lies my current trilingual problem. As I mark 1.5 years living abroad in Spain, I find my languages mixing and melding in an entirely unexpected way. I speak English and Spanish about 40% to 60%, respectively, in my daily life (varying depending on who I'm meeting for tapas, which classes I'm teaching, how many hours I'm at school that day, etc.) But I am finding that after prolonged exposure to Spanish on an every-day basis, my English is altering. I'm not sure if I want to call it thinking in Spanish because I still am aware of English words in my thoughts, but it certainly appears that my mother tongue conversation is being filtered in some way through a Spaniard neighborhood in my brain.

The incident in the Granada alleyway was far from the first time something like this has happen: I've caught myself saying "I hope we have luck tonight!" (which translates directly from the Spanish "tener suerte") or using the phrase "to put yourself in contact with [someone]" (which sounds almost right in English but is still just the tiniest bit off.) And I'm not the only one. I've heard Hannah do it a few times, and about a month ago during a visit to Madrid, my American friend Thomas referred to some future visitors as "coming in car." This is clearly a common, if little-noticed, side effect of linguistic immersion.

Long time readers of this blog have followed my progress in Chinese and my Spanish beginnings. In 2010, I wrote about starting to identify as a "trilingual" as I struggled to rescusitate my middle-school level Spanish skills during six weeks in Guadalajara, Mexico. Last fall, I wrote about the balancing act between the two and the decision I made to put Chinese aside and focus on Spanish. And almost six (!!) years ago I wrote here about the strange melange of Chinese and English our study abroad group developed together, using the word that came to us first, regardless of language-- "Pass me the kuaizi [chopsticks]," for example.

 That last phenomenon of language-mixing comes close to what I'm talking about now, but it's never developed this far before. I've code switched (I wrote here about the first time I couldn't remember the English word for "ski lift," only the Chinese-- lan che), but I've never noticed my mother tongue being filtered by some other force. It feels the strangest because it doesn't feel like anything at all. Only suddenly, I find my words and phrasings (which, as a writer, are not small parts of me) strangely altered-- speaking the way I've always spoken and the way I've never spoken all at once.

It makes me wonder what else is being reconfigured. I've written here before that in anthropology circles, it's a widely accepted idea that culture is language. If the language making my basic linguistic decisions right now is Spanish-- a language that has 10 words for various cuts of pig and types of pork-- what does that say about me as a Jew? Does my power of idiom and wordplay stay the same, and if not why not? Do I have the same sense of humor? Will I write the same way if I don't speak the same way? Basically: does my changed grammar change me?

The (language of) rain in Spain-- Fun with Spanish, 2

(This entry is the second in an occasional series on fun/interesting discoveries I've made while blundering my way through Castilian Spanish.)

The school year is over, and I'm taking advantage of a block of free time before my flight home to do some traveling through northern Spain. This area--which includes the provinces of Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, and Basque Country (Pais Vasco)-- is famous for its beautiful, wild coast; fantastic seafood; rich regional cultures; and spectacular, spectacularly green mountainous scenery.

Emphasis on the green and on the way it gets that way. Much like its Celtic and British cousins, northern Spain is impossibly green, thanks to copious amounts of rain.

It follows, then, that there is plenty of wordplay in the language when it comes to wet weather.

1) Pouring
As a language nerd, I always love to teach my students English idioms. I think idioms in general are pretty fascinating. One that has always been popular with my classes is "It's raining cats and dogs." I guess I can't blame them for enjoying it-- it's a pretty silly image.

The Spanish equivalent is "Está lloviendo a cántaros," which means literally, "It's raining vases" (the closest translation in this case would be, I guess, "It's raining buckets.")  In this case a cántaro is a large clay vase or pot, usually terra cotta and with two handles. In years past cántaros were used to collect drinking water, which makes the meaning of the phrase clear and gives it an optimistic tone ("Hooray, we'll have water to drink!") that's absent in any of our commentary about pets.

2) The silliest rain
Legend has it that the Inuit have 200 words for snow; it follows that the perpetually moist Asturians would have a number of words for rain. My favorite so far (which applies here in Asturias but which I have heard used in other parts of the country, as well) is mojabobos.

To understand this term, we need to split it into two parts. The first, moja, comes from the verb mojarse, which means "to get wet." The word bobo is a slang term that means something like "foolish person," "idiot," or (to reach for a term in yet another language) schlemiel.

Mojabobos is a fine rain, really a mist-- the sort that foolish people think doesn't call for an umbrella or a jacket. The way a friend described it to me, the bobo gets ready to go out to a bar, sees it's raining ever so slightly, and decides he can't feel the rain enough for it to merit any kind of protective gear. So he walks down the street, whistling or humming a tune... but by the time he reaches the bar, he has paid the mojabobos price and is completely soaked. Silly bobo, next time bring an umbrella.

The trilingual's dilemma

Learning a new language is a unique thrill. For me there's nothing quite like putting together a chaotic bundle of new sounds, ambiguous rules, and a generous helping of guesswork in order to connect to a new set of potentially millions of people on a level you never could have before. Anthropological conventional wisdom holds that you cannot learn a language without learning a culture as well, and I tend to agree. So I find a deep satisfaction in the process, something special and different and incredibly rewarding.

Learning Chinese brought me amazing places and allowed me to see and do wonderful things, and I'll always be grateful for that (for the curious, details of those adventures can be found in the initial years of this blog.) And, frankly, being a Chinese speaker has become a point of pride and identity for me. Not very many Americans speak Chinese, and I think some part of me likes that this ability shows I am willing to work hard, take my own path, and try new things. But part of coming to Spain was deciding to put Chinese on the back burner for a little bit.

I originally abandoned Spanish at age 13, jumping ship in high school for the more exotic (and verb conjugation-free) Chinese. For the next ten years, my Spanish language acquisition was pretty spotty. My knowledge of the language amounted to a bizarre mix of three years of middle school basics (Where is the library? The library is in the center of the city...), Rosetta Stone, podcasts, six weeks worth of mornings-and-nights (with creamy English-teacher-training-class centers) in Mexico, and a handful of weeks in Spain. It was only once I hit my 20s and spent the aforementioned time in Spanish-speaking countries that I realized I was ready to face the grammar challenges my 13-year-old self so loathed.

When I started meeting with a language partner in Boston prior to my departure for Spain, I was painfully aware of my inability to, say, speak in the past tense or express in any way my opinions on a topic. I also suffered from frequent code-switches (when the brain reaches for a word in one language and comes back with it in another)-- often I wanted to speak Spanish and found Chinese on my lips instead. It was incredibly frustrating, but with some practice I got to a place where I could access the two brain folders marked "foreign language" separately. I wrote about the beginnings of my trilingualism in this blog during my stay in Mexico, and I came to Spain feeling optimistic.

It took me a few weeks to banish errant Chinese from my brain, but after a month of immersion here in Palencia I felt I had succeeded. Around that time I started my Spanish classes at the Escuela de Idiomas (90 euros for an entire year's worth of courses, 2 or 3 times a week! Gotta love socialized education.) Although part of me balked at being put in the "Basico 2" level, in the end it was the right choice. Yes, I could express myself at a more intermediate level, but there were a huge number of grammatical holes in my language base that no amount of podcasts, Spanish soap operas, or Colombian pop songs could have ever filled.

Instead, with the help of my classes, I started to feel more solid in my linguistic footing. I could finally confidently speak in past tense, I was able to express myself generally in social situations, and I could go to bank and the grocery store, could generally Get Things Done. But the proverbial sword is double edged, of course. I wrote here in my last entry about visiting Valladolid, but there's one part that I left out:

During our program's orientation in Madrid, I met the only Chinese language assistant in Castilla y Leon. Her English name is Lydia, and I was very excited to introduce myself and get her contact information. Lydia and I met for lunch during my visit to Valladolid... and try as I might, I could not get my Chinese to come out and play. It was the opposite feeling of my time in Boston, as I struggled to express myself and failed. My sentences were a garbled mix of Chinese and Spanish, and there were points when I literally had no idea which language I was speaking and only recognized I had sprinkled random Spanish adjectives into a sentence after the fact. It was like I had lost control of my language center altogether. I felt bad for Lydia, who was confused and trying to help, but I felt even worse for myself. I couldn't remember a time when I wasn't proud of my six years of Chinese and when being a Chinese speaker wasn't part of who I was. It was horrifying to think I had lost so much hard work in less than a month.

Luckily, since that lunch I've gained a little bit of optimism. A few weeks afterward, I spent an hour trying to help my Spanish teacher communicate with a brand new arrival from Zhejiang. It was the closest to an aneurysm I hope I will ever experience, switching back and forth between Spanish and Chinese-- at some points I could barely find words in English. But in the course of my efforts I discovered that switching between Spanish and English, then English and Chinese, made it a lot easier. Something about the relationship between my two foreign tongues was causing dissonance. But I have found that cutting out that dynamic (or doing something to ease the transition, like practicing writing or listening to Chinese language music) seems to help some of what I've lost come back to me. And that, in turn, helps me feel all that work, and that linguistic and cultural world in general, is not lost to me.

Life in Palencia is still chaotic, but as things settle down I have big plans, and one of them is to spend more time nursing my Chinese back to health (along with pitching to English-language magazines in Madrid, joining a gym, going to the market more often, and on and on...). Chinese is not totally absent from everyday Spanish life, after all: there is an entire genre of stores (the kind that sell cheap electronics and everyday necessities) that are referred to as "Chinos" after the most common ethnic identity of their owners.

I could speak with the owners of these stores, practice with Lydia, and devote myself to trilingualism, yes. But I have to remember as well that things may never be the same as they were when I was writing my thesis in Yunnan, or even when I was just using the language to keep in touch with my friends and write articles for an immigrant newspaper in Boston. In gaining this gift of direct linguistic access to the world of Garcia Marquez, bullfights, tapas, tango, and Neruda, I have to lose something, too. But wasn't that always the way it was going to be, leaving Boston for something new?