Lame, Lazy Monolinguist

The adventures of living in a multilingual city

I hold the dubious honor of being the only student that Mrs. Ulrich ever allowed to drop out of her French class. I was in 7th grade. That tells you everything you need to know about my aptitude in learning new languages.

To this day, even living in New York City for nearly 20 years I’m embarrassed to admit that I only speak English (head hanging, face going red).

I’ve written about my great-grandfather, Dominic Salvatore Scalfaro, in other pieces. How he came to the U.S. as a teenager not knowing any English with the requisite $20 in his pocket and went on to be a landowner upstate with vineyards and an orchard. We grew up hearing that he refused to teach his children Italian because they were “Americans” and he didn’t want them handicapped by having an accent (I think the real reason was that he wanted to be able to talk to their mother without them understanding).

When I started college at the tender age of 39, I was monolingual but had hopes of rectifying that sad situation.

Taking the plunge and sinking without a trace

I took two years of Spanish at Cleveland State University. How much Spanish do I understand today? Un poco. Then I transferred to Columbia University and my foreign language credits didn’t follow me. So I took two years of Italian and actually made As and Bs in those four semesters. How much Italian do I understand today? Anche meno (I had to ask the Google about that one).

When I went to Venice for a week after graduating I was completely at sea language-wise. I managed please and thank you and that was about it. Yet on two occasions Italian-speaking tourists (there is such a thing in Venice, go figure) stopped me to ask directions. In Italian. How does one fully express the term “duh” in Italian?

Two years later, I went to Prague on my own and if you want to know how to say anything beyond please, thank you, and not on your life in Czech, you’ll have to ask someone else.

Hell, I met ex-pats in Prague with only a glancing knowledge of the Czech language.

Everyone else is multilingual!

My best friend, Neil, grew up in Quebec City and is bilingual. While his mother was alive they spoke on the phone every evening and he always spoke French with her. Another friend, Yvon, is first-generation French whose parents came over after the Good War (aka WWII). Neil and Yvon have each told me, privately, that the other “can’t speak French”. Figure that one out. I can’t. But then I’m just a lame, lazy monolinguist.

Once Neil told me that a couple of guys in the elevator at work were “speaking French as if it’s a foreign language”.

This is instructive. If you speak a language other than English and you’re in, say, Akron Ohio, chances are that you’ll have complete privacy. You can observe how fat and stupid Americans are while smiling and buying an inferior cup of coffee. But you may want to watch that in New York City.

Over 800 languages are spoken in this city. 49% of New Yorkers speak a language other than English in their home. And the other 51%? Lame-ass monolinguists like me.

My advice is to watch what you’re saying on the subway to your travel companions. Chances are that someone on that car can understand every word.

However, there is an upside to being a tourist in a city where the odds are good that someone speaks your language.

A group of Asian tourists got on the bus going down 5th Avenue one fine spring morning and there was a commotion as they tried to ask the driver something about their destination. Everyone was so grateful that there was someone on that bus who spoke their language and sorted things out quickly enough that we were only stuck sitting there for two cycles of the traffic light.

The monolinguist and foreign films

Many years ago I tired of the same old shit being churned out by Hollywood and discovered there is this huge, magnificent world of cinema that has largely bypassed the old happy ending crap. I love Pedro Almodóvar films and have developed a fondness for the weird-ass movies coming out of Scandinavia (Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson, I’m talking about you). Filmmakers from outside the Hollywood behemoth create movies that are smart, entertaining AF, and don’t adhere to conventional narrative straitjackets. Love that!

I am, however, less thrilled with the stutter-step that my brain has to do dealing with subtitles but it’s an imperfect world.

Neil and I went to see Denis Arcand’s “The Barbarian Invasions” in 2003 and I asked him if those pesky subtitles were a distraction since he could understand the dialogue. He, too, has mastered his own version of that stutter-step in which he can ignore them. I believe that the French Institute Alliance Française screens French films without subtitles which has to be a welcome relief to French-speakers throughout New York.

A friend in Prague was cranky about having to wait for either dubbed versions of films from the U.S. or those with subtitles when the big blockbusters would make it to the Czech Republic. “Avatar” had just come out and I assured him that he could go see that in Czech and not miss anything important.

As a completely arbitrary aside, I thought “Parasite” sucked. It was incredibly predictable, loaded with hoary cliches, and had a stupid gratuitously violent ending. I maintain that if that movie had been in English, it would have gone straight to DVD.

The struggle is real

Every so often I’ll think about signing up for a language class. Then I’ll come to my senses. Why waste the time and money? Clearly my brain is capable of only holding one language at a time and I suppose I’m going to need to hang onto English for the time being.

Last year at this time, AleXander and I were gearing up for our big trip to Spain and Portugal and we made mouth noises about learning Spanish for the trip. That didn’t happen.

My propensity for learning another language seems to be right up there with my unheralded mathematical abilities.

Curiously, I’m way too comfortable in a city where everyone seems to be speaking a different language to even consider moving to monolingual America (if that even exists anymore?). So I’ll lump along, nodding when I don’t understand a word you’re saying and leave it at that. There’s something oddly enjoyable about listening to people chatting away in Dutch, Korean, Creole, Vietnamese, German, one of a dozen different flavors of Spanish, Ukrainian, French, Albanian, Swahili, or Hindi. And I’ll ask you to forgive this ignorant, lazy woman from the U.S. who still only speaks English.

Hasta la vista, amigos!

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