One of my all-time favorite jokes goes a little something like this:

Person: So how many languages do you speak?
Me: Just a few words or fluently?
Person: Fluently.

-pause-

Me: None! :P

I got to thinking about this after some experiences I’ve had lately, and after reading this snarky asshole article from the Financial Times. Since they’re hyper-vigilant about their content, I’ll paste the relevant passages:

If you don’t speak perfect English, you can still triumph in certain havens. You can make it in the Chinese Communist Party. You can become a Russian oligarch. You can succeed inside a German machine-tool company, because Germans seem to be so good at making machine tools that they don’t need much foreign help. But most people who speak Globish – the simplified, dull, idiom-free version of English with a small vocabulary – can triumph only inside their own countries.

Globish is no longer enough. When you speak Globish, your IQ as perceived by others drops approximately 30 points. In Globish, it’s hard to say anything subtle, funny or surprising.

The term Globish comes from a combination of “Global” plus “English” and is definitely one of the languages I speak. I also am quite fluent in “Romglish”, which is the kind of English spoken in Romania, which features a great deal of pronoun mangling (yesterday I went AT the mall) and a complete lack of short vowel sounds (I had fan on the schoolbas).

The most common language I speak on a daily basis is romglezeste, which is basically Globish with a great deal of Romanian words added to it. On occasion I get a chance to speak romaniola, which is the Spanish that Romanians “learn” from watching telenovelas :P

Strangely enough, I haven’t spoken “real” English in over four years. It’s been so long that I distinctly remember the last occasion – I was sitting in Malpenso airport in Milano, Italy, waiting for a flight. I overheard two men conversing near me and I sidled up to them and introduced myself, precisely because I knew it would probably be my last opportunity for years. That’s because where I come from in America, I learned a Deep South version that involves a great deal of drawn-out vowel sounds and cadences and phrasings that comes from how Baptism sermons are delivered. It is nearly unintelligible to Americans from other regions and certainly impossible for anyone else to understand so sadly, it remains dormant in my daily repertoire.

I’ve noticed that when it comes to English, however that’s “defined”, that Romanians tend to fall in a handful of categories.

Don’t Speak English – Simple enough, they just don’t speak English. Which is exactly why I learned Romanian, so I can jabber on at length as much as I like ;)

Only A Leedle – What’s always interesting is that universally they tend to feel ashamed that they don’t speak it better. No matter what you say or do to try to convince them that they’re doing a great job and that it’s pretty amazing they learned a difficult language, they remain shy and feel guilty that they don’t speak it better.

Think They’re Fluent – Obviously if you’re dealing with Romanians and you don’t speak Romanian, these are the people you’re going to associate with but personally I wince when I encounter one of these. Why? For several reasons, but primarily because they will refuse to speak Romanian to you.

It’s this overweening pride that I detest, and nobody is more careful at guarding the mysteries of the Romanian language than a Romanian who believes they’re fluent in English. Even if you beg them to practice with you, or you want to try out a few halting phrases with them, they’ll never return the favor and respond in Romanian. No. They’ll insist on speaking English to you under all circumstances and on every occasion.

Furthermore, they get locked into a kind of arrogance about their command of your language, and refuse to believe you when you tell them that they’ve made a mistake. And yet they are unceasingly critical when it comes to your own attempts to learn Romanian, swiftly correcting your tiniest error in pronunciation or if you stress the wrong syllable in a word.

Quite simply put, the best way to learn Romanian is from the first category, that is to say from Romanians who don’t speak English at all. That seems counterintuitive at first because you’d think someone who can assist you in English would be the most useful. But axiomatically the more fluent a Romanian is in English, the less likely it is they are going to be helpful to you. All they want is to speak English to you and will severely bruise your ego when you try to learn their language.

Interestingly enough, these past few weeks I’ve met no less than four people who are non-Romanians and yet who speak Romanian. Two of them are Germans, one is Tunisian and the last one, surprisingly, is a former monolingual American. There simply are not adequate words for me to use to describe my delight in hearing them regularly speak Romanian (at various skill levels) even when they are in situations where they could speak English (as they all do).

The American, however, impressed me the most because he is literally the first native English speaker that I’ve ever met in my life who learned Romanian. I remember the former British Ambassador (to Romania) speaking it but this American was the first person I’ve met in the flesh who could do it and it was simply astounding. My German and Tunisian friends are all polyglots, speaking multiple languages, and so while their addition of Romanian to their repertoire is admirable, it’s one more “notch on the belt” so to speak.

But for a former monolingual English speaker to actually learn Romanian, including all of the incredibly difficult grammar bits, is amazing. His accent is atrocious but it’s simply mind-blowing that he has mastered all the clitics, weak and strong pronouns, pluralizations and gender matching that is required to form any sentence more sophisticated than “another beer please”, which is about the highest level most native English speakers ever master.

If for some unfathomable reason you are a (mostly) monolingual speaker of English and you want to learn Romanian, a couple pieces of advice. The first piece of advice is the simplest – avoid all Romanians who speak English “fluently”. They’ll just ridicule you and be of no help.

The second piece of advice however is a little odd sounding at first. Practice doing “funny voices” or “impersonations” of other people. If you’re telling an anecdote, use different “voices” when recounting what other people said. If the person in your story had a deep, rumbly voice then try imitating that when recounting their “lines”.

Why? Over the years I’ve noticed that the people who are most successful in learning new languages are those with the most mental flexibility in doing “voices”, such as in when telling an anecdote. Each language is far more than just different vocabulary or verbs but is, in essence, another “voice”.

Whenever I am talking (exclusively) in Romanian, I will tell the exact same story about something in a much different way than if I were doing it in English. This is because I have a Romanian “voice” and it goes beyond grammar – it just has a different “feeling” and tone than English does. It has a different flow, a different rhythm, the words have differing shades of meaning and certainly some expressions or utterances have no counterpart (see my Words of the Day for many such examples) in English.

Years ago I was in Brasov at a sort of informal business meeting with some British and Irish investors (who didn’t speak Romanian beyond the “one more beer please” level). And the first half of the evening was dominated by English, especially (of course) the kind of English spoken in their part of the world. But then some of their Romanian associates showed up and I switched to Romanian to speak to them and I noted immediately there was a different tone, a different “feel”, a different rhythm to how the conversation was flowing. It’s hard to really describe unless you’ve been in a similar situation but it was definitely remarkable how distinctive the rhythm of the conversations was between the two different groups.

And my last piece of advice? Drink some alcohol. Really. One of the hardest parts of learning a language is that you have to be mentally “flexible” and sometimes complete sobriety leaves you too rigid to be able to spontaneously create a sentence that is (to you) in a much different word order than your native language. Drinking a glass or two of your favorite adult beverage can help you not be so anxious about making mistakes and allow you to speak without “overthinking” as much.

Which reminds me of another one of my favorite jokes.

Person: Hey, your Romanian is pretty good.
Me: Thanks. After I drink two beers I speak it much better. In fact, if you buy me another beer, I can speak it perfectly fluently just like a native.
Person: What happens if you drink four beers?
Me: I speak fluent Chinese!

:P

PS – If you’re new to this blog, I also recommend this post on Code Switching for more stuff about linguistics. And if you’re interesting in learning slang and euphemisms in Romanian, you can review all of my Words of the Day.