The Zumba Diaries

There are people who can learn languages and those who cannot.  My husband falls into the former.  I both love and sometimes h--- him for that.  When I hear him speak Russian, I become a little like Jamie Lee Curtis's character in "A Fish Called Wanda."  When I hear him speak Spanish, I am proud and envious.  And annoyed with myself and annoyed with my husband for making it seem so easy.  By now you have correctly ascertained that I lag amongst the most lacking in the latter category.  This makes living abroad difficult. 

My husband and friends don't get it.  I am the Reigning Queen of Scrabble in my store.  Even if I don't know the meaning of a word, at least I can fake it well enough to kind of match the dictionary's definition.  Customers compliment me on my writing (I have a rather lengthy FAQ in our menus and a 4-year old blog).  I have editors and writers telling me I should be writing books, not selling them.  I am a voracious reader.  I am inquisitive.  And I suck at learning languages.

I studied French for two years in 7th and 8th grade.  Two years later, I still could not remember "Fermez" means to shut, as in, "Ferme la bouche!"  (I had to look up bouche because I could not remember how to spell it.)  It's not like a bunch of 7th and 8th graders weren't used to hearing this expression roll from our teacher's tongue, and yet two years later, I was still writing "to ferment" next to the verb on tests.

I studied Latin for four years, which was a useless exercise.  I cannot say anything in Latin.  I remember about 7 words.  I wish I had been struggling through Spanish for four years. 

It took a while to learn German, and I use "learn" in the loosest of contexts.  Comprehension is okay, but I cannot remember the gender of the articles or their cases and just forget about trying to figure the verb placement.  At least I could get around when I was in Berlin over the summer.  I sounded like a fool, but at least I was attempting to speak the language.

I fantasize about an idea from "The Matrix" - pop in a tape and 20 minutes later, you are fluent in Mandarin.  I would be willing to sleep with tapes every night if I thought they would work, but it is my destiny to embarrass myself with my basic inability to communicate with the non-English speaking world.

Foreign languages bore me.  I wish I had been forced to learn several at an early age, before my brain rapidly atrophied in the foreign language department.  My reading comprehension is very good.  When it comes to conversation, though, I stutter and stall until I am flustered and then forget whatever it is I was that I was trying to communicate.  I have a hard enough time communicating orally in English.  I tend to think in images and feeling, which I transcribe into English and then must translate into Spanish.  It doesn't work well.

One of my favorite books is "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris.  The title comes from a conversation in the author's French class.  The brilliant writer has almost as much trouble with conversational French as I have with conversational Spanish.  "Look, I am not alone!" I say, showing the book to my friends.

"Isn't that the book with the profanity-laced Rooster rant?" asks one of my friends.

I reply with a string of obscenities that have become a part of my vocabulary since playing with Scrabble with English Literature and Philosophy majors, managing to use the word "persiflage".  According to the folks at Free Translation dot Com, "zumba" is the Spanish translation.  I will never forget that word.  We play bi-lingual Scrabble and I am always looking for good Z words.  I cannot wait to use it.

I won't forget "zumba", and yet I can easily forget everyday words necessary for me to communicate with my Spanish-speaking staff.

I have toyed with the idea of hypnotism.  A friend of mine was a hypnotherapist for a few years.  I want to ask him if he could be put in a hypnotic state conducive to learning languages.  I admit it.  I want the easy way out.  I want to be able to speak other languages fluently, but there are so many other fun ideas competing for my time and attention that doing something I don't want to do becomes even more tedious.

In the meantime, I'll continue pouring over my copy of "The Idiot's Guide to Spanish," feeling like even more like an idiot because it still doesn't come effortlessly.

Comments

yoga is great, but Zumba is so much fun!