Puzzled

People often ask me how many languages I speak. To my own surprise, this question still surprises me and I struggle to give a realistic answer. What am I overthinking in here? To speak a language feels binary to me – you either speak it or don’t. If that’s so, how do you determine the threshold of speaking vs. non-speaking? Is it when you feel confident to speak or when you are actually able to have small talk? Is it when locals understand your words? The list of questions then continues to explode in my head.

The most satisfying answer that I came up with is a mix of confidence and fluency. I speak the language when the communication feels effortless. Doesn’t necessarily mean that I speak it correctly, it means that I am able to correctly pass the message. Speaking a foreign language in the early stages is always a frustrating and humbling experience.

Here’s my advice on how to get over it with minimal collateral damage to your neurons – turn any dialogue into a telephone game. What’s the worst case that can happen? You won’t manage to share any information. Just do it with a smile and believe in the miracles down the line.

The telephone line was broken many times for me. Thinking back of my longest conversations, I need to express my eternal gratitude to Latin American women working in Elha beauty centers in Barcelona. Once per month I found myself lying naked on a table in the spotlight of a red diode pulsed laser. Since the women were enjoying their job, we spent an hour talking about everything and nothing. The best distraction from pain is a good laugh.

Speaking a new language is painful when I take myself too seriously. My BPM rises when I try to create a sentence out of thin air, assembling pieces of text from my memory. At that moment, it feels like an exam where I came unprepared. When I miss a piece, I lose patience with myself and switch to panic mode. An interminable second later, I usually calm myself down and open a dictionary from the nearest useful language in my head. Then I somehow work it out.

The conflict of interest remains – I focus on the holes, the person next to me tries to see the big picture.

I’m battling my perfectionism with every new language, new person and situation. I’ve managed to learn how to celebrate little victories. Remember people, I accept compliments for trying!

To give myself more confidence, I often rehearse the full sentences in my head. When I need to make a phone call in French or Spanish, I prefer scripting the dialogue(s) beforehand on a piece of paper. Even accounting for plan B and C doesn’t always save me from confusion. Since my calls usually involve making appointments, I also need to understand the cultural understanding of time. A morning in Spain could be an early lunchtime in Slovakia. A Dutch dinner time could be considered a late lunch in Greece. Telling time in different languages is something that I tend to forget very fast.

In the end, speaking is all about the point of view – are your sentences half full, or half empty?

Think about how you say 7:30 in your language. Is it half past seven or half before eight? I grew up with “half of the eighth”, which makes me focus on the empty part of the hour-glass. When someone tells me that it’s half before eight, I think about the future full hour and plan what to do before it happens. Nowadays I use the English half past seven more often, which rather makes me think: “Ah great, only half an hour has passed since seven. There is still some time left until eight.” Does speaking English / Spanish / Franch / Italian make me feel more optimistic about time? Kinda. Foreign languages have opened my mind to the full potential of time – half past, half future and a blink of present. In the end, what I want to get across is seven thirty.

Communication in any language can be seen as solving a puzzle. Solving puzzles stimulates the reward centers of my brain. Sooo… Let me quickly tell a short story about the beginning of my language addiction. I have never been much into video games except for logic puzzles. Still, I have never created a sustainable long-term habit even for logic games. “I need to solve them all” is a pretty exhausting mindset.

Some time during my bachelor’s degree I discovered that languages could supply my daily dose of puzzles.

I started learning Italian as an idea to mentally escape from the Faculty of science. Wonderful times with a lovely professor and dreamy Italian songs. I decided to keep the Italian spirit alive also in the following semester. However, life presented me with a very handsome PhD student. I needed a plan to see him more often. Easy, this man was giving classes of Spanish. Mixing Italian and Spanish seemed like a bad idea, but I wasn’t willing to compromise and drop any of the classes. The Spanish teacher’s smile and the Italian teacher’s enthusiasm awaked the joy of learning new languages for the first time in my life. Since the languages are very similar, I won’t lie, I confused them all time. Nevertheless, on my own, I unraveled certain patterns and learned how languages relate to each other. Overall, that semester was an inspiring exercise how to combine Italian and Spanish into a Mediterranean word dance. As it was coming to an end, I realized that I wasn’t the only one playing this game. My Italian and Spanish teachers started dating!

If you want to dive deep into language waters, I can recommend reading as soon as possible. Choose a book that you have already read before. In the beginning, it feels like cracking an ancient code. The sheer number of letter combinations is honestly overwhelming. Then you can slowly identify the sentence structure and which words are relevant to translate. Notice repeating words. Understand subject and verb, they help you move forward in the story. Don’t translate adjectives. Get frustrated and come back… People say that the devil is in the details. He’s sometimes hiding the missing piece of the puzzle. Well, try not to look for it, it will find you in the end.

My mama used to say: “Koľko jazykov vieš, toľkokrát si človekom.” You are human as many times as the number of languages that you speak. I still believe it – different languages highlight different aspects of personality.

Italian makes me enjoy life more, Spanish makes me more social, English is for feeling open to new cultures. One of my dreams is to make small talk with every European nation in their native language. If I learn a new language every few years, I will grow old and happily forget them all!

As I was looking at German study materials in front of me, a curious question appeared. Why do I struggle with German? I wrote this blog post as an internal review of my current language learning methods because they are not so effective for German. Unfortunately, I don’t need to figure out the language logic by myself, every German teacher serves it to me since day 1. So what’s my new approach? Perhaps I need to embrace how it makes me feel – organized, disciplined. It needs repetition, a habit. Maybe creativity comes later with inventing my own words. Until then … Forza Sandora, forza!

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Here’s the list of languages that I have attempted to learn so far:

• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Spanish