Being
an English speaker among English-speaking natives, I had never
imagined the fun of being with non-English speakers. I was in
Switzerland for an official conference, when I started experiencing
the effects of lingual change. Let me tell you some of the legendary
moments I can still giggle on.
I
decided to delight myself in a French restaurant. The menu card in
French looked like a crossword puzzle. But, somehow I managed to make
noodles out of Nouilles due to a small graphic after the name. The
French serveur, who was almost on skateboard all the while, stood by
me for at least 10 minutes to absorb the details of my order. I
explained him the whole procedure of making noodles to escape any
kind of bad experiences. With my loud actions and mimes, I was able
to tell him that I do not want non-vegetarian touch in my Nouilles.
After a while I was served with delicious looking noodles to raise my
temptations, which brewed away as soon as I sniffed. It was cooked in
FISH OIL!
Next
morning, I had to reach a conference via public transport. I googled
about the route options that would be available to me. I had to take
a train to Paradeplatz,
for which I had to hire a taxi to reach the station. I had to hurl
from one taxi to another with one word on my tongue Paradeplatz.
I asked to
every taxi but all I was getting was a perplexed look. I showed the
spelling I had jotted down last night to a driver who pronounced it
differently with some silent consonants and different vowel sound. Pa
-ra -da - pla - z (with T silent) or t(with Z silent) Huh! I should
have known that!
When
people around you, suddenly start talking in their native language
while looking at you, certainly they ought to be discussing you,
suspense
reaches the climax. You try hard to recall all your kinesics’
lessons to make out what their body language is saying. Soon I
realized that it is far more difficult to understand the language of
whole body without the language of tongue. And, I kept running my
thoughts to try and catch some context. That is a very awkward
position to be in, believe me.
Next
day, I happened to meet a native speaker in the strange land who,
like an angel, ebbed all my hitches with single sway of LingoDiction.
With LingoDiction, an offline app for iOS, I got to know all the
frequently used words with their audio pronunciation. Then, I faced
the same bunch of foreign language speakers with my armours ready to
their attacks. I pretended that I cannot understand like before but I
could atleast make out the context of their conversation which, to my
embarrassment, wasn’t related to me at all.
One
more thing I and that angel native did. We reversed the trick on
non-English speakers. We make them suspect our topic of conversation,
which made them self-conscious. We had a furious laugh before and
after the act. Cheers to LingoDiction!
