Learning to communicate, fluently

What do you do when you’re in a country that doesn’t speak your tongue? Learn their language, or two in my case

I genuinely struggled to imagine, when I first began learning German, a point in the future at which I would arrive at something resembling fluency. Everything about my first few steps and those that followed felt staccato-like and stilted. There were phonetic gestures my tongue felt incapable of making. My partner would often intervene when I mispronounced a word to correct my sound, and I frankly couldn’t tell the difference between what was being emitted from my mouth and from his. The nuances were lost on me. I never doubted that I would eventually get to a point where making a sentence wouldn’t feel like a linguistic and semantic ordeal, I just couldn’t anticipate how long it would take for my brain to be rewired so that basic structures felt habitual and familiar.

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The most difficult part of learning German was understanding, acknowledging, and accepting that a verb could only ever be in certain positions within a sentence. You couldn’t move them around. If one was using a modal verb, like must or want, it appeared in second position while the main verb is fated to appear at the end of the sentence with all other details like time-manner-place fitted in between.However, if one was forming a subordinate clause, both verbs had to appear at the end. This rigidity was hard to swallow, especially for someone who grew up not speaking the Queen’s English but Goan English, which honestly sounds like Konkani spoken in translation. 

Beside these semantic regulations, German, as a language, throws up many other challenges to the native English speaker, most prominently in the form of cases, which have mostly disappeared in English. To say I am taking the train, one would need to rely on accusative, which is tied to movement and motion. To say I am in the train or on it, you would use dative. It was only some months ago when I feel I finally wrapped my head around these distinctions to the point where I felt habituated to the technicalities and they didn’t seem alien.

Being home-schooled by my partner in German and gaining conversational fluency mainly from speaking to my in-laws and using the language daily instead of being formally instructed in a language school has also made it challenging for me to get a sense of my own progress. I think I am somewhere between B1 and B2. Ideally, one way for me to have improved my German would have been to immerse myself completely in it, the way Jhumpa Lahiri has committed herself to inhabiting Italian, using it as her language of self-expression. But I don’t have that luxury. My livelihood is too intricately bound to my ability to think and write and create in English. This definitely interferes with my ability to move between tongues. On some days the switch felt difficult to make, especially after intense hours during which I was either teaching a workshop or giving a lecture, or simply reading. On other days it felt easier for no particular reason.

Now, as I am compelled to once more be vulnerable as I attempt to enter the linguistic domain of Italian, I find myself more at ease in German in certain moments. It doesn’t at all sound or seem logical, what I must attempt, this inhabitation of three languages, each so unique from the other. But I don’t quite have a choice. Since South Tyrol is an autonomous region within Italy, I am expected to speak Italian. In fact, when most people notice the colour of my skin, they correctly assume I am an immigrant, and speak with me in Italian and I am often at a loss, because it takes me a while to comprehend my lack of comprehension. I have to request them to speak in German instead. It is not common for immigrants to learn German first. I can see why. In any other context perhaps learning Italian first would have been the smarter decision. I would have arrived at basic fluency faster, but I was keen to be able to actually communicate with the community in which I find myself, the relational universe of Tramin.

I don’t regret the choice I made, but I have my moments when I wonder if I will ever arrive at fluency between the two. For now, just to respond with a sì instead of Ja requires a re-habituation. Suddenly I find myself using the Italian form of ‘and’, ‘e’ instead of und when I speak German to street vendors. Everything is getting jumbled up and I imagine it will take time for the two languages to sit in different compartments in my brain. I want to say that I am enjoying the process, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. 

I wish I had the luxury of only being able to learn, and not have to do the infinite other things I need to in order to provisionally earn a livelihood until I am re-skilled enough to have something resembling a stable income here. Sometimes I love to take a break from all three languages. I find a person of South Asian origin and simply speak to them in my terrible Hindi. They don’t care about my errors. They only care about the fact that we are able to communicate so far away from our homelands. Sometimes that is enough.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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