On Not Speaking the Language, in a Big Way

We’ll admit that we have, in the past, been confident about our language abilities. Perhaps even cocky. Knowing Latin comes in handy throughout Europe, and we both had to pass exams in German, Italian, and French (in addition to Greek and Latin). These are all part of the Indo-European language family, but there are lots of other language groupings. Laurel in particular loves languages, and has had a go at over a dozen – including Hebrew, Chinese, and Russian – with varying degrees of success and joy. But we always knew a day would come when it all went to hell. 

And friends, that day has come, sooner than we expected. We’ve mentioned that we find Duolingo a helpful way to learn the basics of a language. We felt pretty good about our progress in Norwegian (we’d started studying before we left). We could order food and read street signs, and we even got some of the ads and newspaper headlines. The grammatical structure of Norwegian is delightfully easy, though pronunciation is tricky. But the vast majority of people in Norway speak English in any case. When we got to Sweden, it was similar enough to Norwegian that we could bumble along. Here again, everyone spoke English, though not as fluidly in our experience. Still – no troubles. [Nerd alert: those two languages are what we linguists call ‘mutually intelligible’ in both oral and written form.]

Then we went to Finland. Most people think of those three countries as interchangeable, but they are not (here are some differences we found). One big difference is language. Finnish is a Uralic language (= from the Ural mountains, i.e., not Indo-European). So our guesses there were wrong, always. Finnish is also a language that allows for compounds (= ‘agglutinative’ in nerd-speak); each part of a word can have a separate function, like showing time, or number, or how confident you are about the statement. This tends to make them very hard to learn.

And then there are the double vowels, as in lakkalikööri, the cloudberry liqueur we mentioned in an earlier post. Not hard, just off-putting. And many Finnish words are loong (see what we did there?). But even the short ones are complex, like söisinköhän (‘I am wondering if I ought to have something to eat’.) All of this makes Finnish a tricky language to learn in two weeks. Luckily, Swedish is also an official language in Finland, and it appears on every street sign and lots of other places. So we were able to pick up about 5% of what’s going on in the words we see around us. Things got to such a pass that we were satisfied with that.

Then we arrived in Turkey. Guess what other language is agglutinative? Turkish, from the Turkic language family (also not Indo-European)! We have been studying Turkish on Duolingo for a couple of months. We love the way that green owl throws grammar at us – case endings and enclitics and everything! But, actually, more vocab would have been useful – we’ve only just reached numbers. And, aside from loan-words like sandviç, nothing is intuitive here either. We’ve invested in a misnamed Easy Turkish Grammar but are still lost most of the time. Our favourite thing about Turkish so far is the ‘equative’ case, used for similarities (like the English childish). And we like the way adjectives inflect, e.g. there is aç, hungry, but also açim ‘I am hungry’. Still, we can barely put together a sentence, even when it is just the single word ‘I am hungry’.

We expected to be at sea once we got to Japan, but it seems we underestimated the tricksiness of moving out of our linguistic comfort zone. We will continue our efforts – we’ve stepped up to Turkish lessons morning and evening, and we are considering language classes. But we suspect that for the next few months at least, we’ll be misunderstanding more than we understand. But at least we won’t starve: we knew a little something about Turkish food before we arrived!