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oh god, I have to speak Khmer again?
I have one task that lie between me and the sweet, responsibility-free weekend – to find out the mailing address of my health center. It’s 10:45 AM – fifteen minutes before I usually head home for the day, and the patients have finally stopped trickling in. Putting it off till the last possible day I could, I decided to suck it up and walk over to my health center chief’s office to ask him. Being the friendly guy he is (besides occasionally ~jokingly~ yelling at terrified sick children for amusement), he cordially waves me in to sit down. So, I take a seat at his desk, and attempt to ask him about the mailing address. All is going well until about midway through the sentence, when I suddenly realize that I don’t know the words for address. Or mail. So I rephrase my question to work around my gaps in knowledge. He doesn’t understand. Again, I try to word it differently – he still doesn’t understand my question. I pull out my phone and open the Google translate app to figure out the missing words. But the technology fails me - he still doesn’t understand what I’m trying to ask. We call in the pharmacist, who speaks a bit of English. I try to ask him, in both English and Khmer, about the mailing address. He doesn’t understand (surprise!). We then call in the midwife, who speaks substantially more English. She actually somewhat understands, and together with my Google translate app and two different languages, I am finally able to ask my Chief about the mailing address of the health center. Well – after fifteen minutes of this painful ordeal, I found out that the health center doesn’t have one.
Nice.
That fun little story is just a very small taste of what it’s like to have to function in another language of which you have a very basic understanding of.
This is a blog post dedicated to all those who found themselves, for one reason or another, existing in a foreign land, learning and speaking in a non-native tongue in order to live their daily life – some starting with many years of second language education, some without any. The circumstances vary – whether it’s for work, for service, for education, for love, for better opportunities, or because one’s life is in danger.
The experience of each individual is unique in circumstance and in difficulties, but there is one common theme – it’s really fucking hard (excuse my French (pun sort of intended)) to be dropped in a country that speaks a language different than your native tongue. Those that are able to deal with this challenge are resilient and brave, putting themselves out there every day, making mistakes, always learning. Even if you have studied the language before, there are accents, dialects, people speaking really quickly, slang…. There are infinite variations of one language and that differ from the formal way you were taught – if you were taught previously. If not….well, good luck.
Khmer teachers from different provinces means different accents to understand...
There are the beginning stages, generally experienced by those without prior language instruction. Your first mission is to somehow fulfill your most basic needs without knowing the vocabulary to express yourself. How can you ask for the bathroom? A place to stay? How much the food is? Someone’s name or phone number? It’s not just difficult in the way that you somehow have to take care of yourself without being about to communicate – it also mentally wears down on you after a while. As a previously fully-functional human, it is utterly infantilizing to have your independence taken away instantly. Often reduced to signing and charades, interactions are frustrating every single time. It takes significant effort to be able to make your needs heard, and your questions answered.
Slowly but surely, you begin to pick up more of the language (organically or through education). It’s still a struggle to meet your needs – take, for example, ordering food. It’s an ordeal in itself. You have to remember the name of the food, and how to order it. You think about your sentence over and over again in your head, working yourself up until the moment the waitress comes around to take your order. You finally force the words out of your mouth and feel a sweeping sense of relief. And that’s if you have no dietary restrictions or allergies, or need to modify your order. Good luck with trying to make them understand.
Every interaction is difficult. You have to process the multitude of words coming at you quickly and struggle to identify key phrases, and just how the heck the whole sentence fits together, and what the in-between words are, and how this order changes the meaning. And, praying you actually understood the meaning of the sentence, you have to formulate a response with grammar that can be dramatically different than your own native tongue. You have to think of the content, then fit the words into what you hope is the correct grammatical structure. You have to think about which words in your own language that you must omit when translating, and what cannot be directly translated, and what phrase must be used instead.
And don’t forget – your conversational partner is waiting, patiently or not, for you to respond.
More times than not, you end up picking out a few key phrases and crafting the meaning in your head, but end up being sort of wrong and sort of right. So you reply, and they give you a weird look because they asked “When do you go back to America?” and not “When did you leave America?” like you thought they said. Or, they ask “Do you miss your family?” and you reply “Ah, yes, I lived with my parents and my one younger brother.” Oops.
Imagine, just for a minute, having to think that hard about every sentence you say, and every sentence you take in. It’s mentally exhausting.
Honestly - every morning, I emerge from my room to begin my day and someone decides that they really just need to say something to me. Every time, I recoil internally because I forget that I need to live my life in another language. My just-woken-up brain is not ready yet to switch my thoughts over to Khmer.
And even when it becomes easier – when replying to a question becomes automatic, and you don’t have to think so hard about understanding every interaction – there is still a lingering feeling of dissatisfaction. You yearn for the utter ease and simplicity of having a complex discussion in your own native language. You long for the ability to express intelligent thoughts and feelings and opinions – to show that you have more depth than your language ability indicates. To talk about politics, or your favorite book, or why exactly you are passionate about X, Y, and Z. To be able to convey yourself.
Eventually, if you’re lucky, you get to the point where you begin to understand how the language is more than the vocabulary, and more than the grammar and syntax. Perhaps, you can finally begin to understand the culture that lies behind the language, and how it reveals an entirely different way of thinking. This is especially pronounced between Eastern and Western languages. Once you can wrap your head around that, maybe you’ve got a shot at being comfortable with your new country.
Language group - we went from being Khmer infants to Khmer toddlers together.
Hopefully, by now, you are either nodding your head enthusiastically in agreement with your own experience, or you never fully considered or understood until reading this how difficult it is for the millions and millions of people around the world that have to function and live in a second language.
Look around your city – there are many, many people who thrive despite this struggle. Immigrants and refugees – students, employees, professors, business owners, restaurateurs, government workers - doing what you do everyday, but given the added difficulty of working and navigating life in a non-native tongue.
It's a challenge, but it is ultimately extremely rewarding. I won't tell you how, though - that, you have to find out for yourself.
Okay, maybe just a sneak peek of one reward - being able to teach your village kids how to carve jack-o-lanterns.