“Kann ich weinen?” I asked my girlfriend’s friends, trying to show some willingness to learn German by asking for the wine. “Yes, of course,” They replied. “Of course you can cry, this is a safe space.”
“Da dove viene?” The waitress asked. Confident in his everyday Italian, Eddie passed over his money. She looked confused: she had asked where he was from. Was he buying her silence?
“Ouais, je donne à manger aux petits connards,” Laura said, hoping to show her tender side to her date. If only she had told him that she liked to feed the ducklings in the park, not the little bastards.
Where I lived during my year abroad
Two years ago, I published an article about the everyday language mishaps which dog our steps when we move abroad. Since then, uncomfortably little has changed: I still have the urge to tell everyone I meet that my Italian literature degree is done mostly in English and that knowing obscure grammar forms doesn’t help me with daily slang. I spent most of the last year studying in Bologna. On one of the last days there, I managed both to get nicknamed as “Alex who knows the subjunctive better than Italians” and asked what language I was speaking when I spoke to some Italians in Italian about Italian things. I still nod and smile more than I would like to admit, following the consequences of that even when it means pretending I haven’t seen the film Rogue One for a solid twenty minutes because I thought my friends were discussing Moana. I was very careful to avoid spoilers.
Two years on, many of my closest friends have also been abroad, accumulating their own embarrassing memories. From telling a friend he wasn’t a nice guy (she thought he asked if he was sexy) to being woken up every Sunday in December by a mini steam train filled with children playing “All I Want for Christmas”, we have all gathered an impressive set of stories and faux pas, nodding and smiling our way into everything from being sued to joining Viking drinking societies. There are tears of linguistic frustration behind the laughter and hours of time alone in dark rooms thinking about why we learn languages, but the stories have a life of their own, a humour that somehow validates our studies and our odd dependency on small things like cashiers not speaking in dialect or finding an English speaker at the exact moment when you’re about to give up and book a flight home.
Running away from your mistakes
I can only give you a glimpse into the kaleidoscope world of moving abroad. The only way to really find out what we’re talking about is to go and make these mistakes yourself. Some I wouldn’t mind repeating. The mere thought of others makes me cringe.
Perhaps the worst mistakes are the uncomfortably sexual ones. They take you from an innocent foreigner doing their best to soldier on and learn a new language into a sexual deviant, fresh across the channel and looking for a good time. (Author’s note: deviance is of course okay and you all have my email, but only intentionally.) The classic problem in many Romance languages is a literal translation of “I am hot” or “I am excited”, both of which turn out to mean “I am aroused”. Some of us take these mistakes into new territory. A friend advised me not to say “merci beaucoup” in case people take it as “merci, beau cul”: “thanks, nice arse”. On one of her first days working in Paris, the same friend asked her colleagues if they should all get naked in the lift up to the office (“nu” and “nous”). Often, we only realise these things much later, leading to many an agonising night worrying if someone rejected going hiking or having an affair (“avventura”).
At such times you long for a surreal language mistake, your daily bread and butter. Olivia arrived in Spain and found herself confronted with a landlady waving a wooden stick and yelling about assembling ducks. It turned out she was actually talking about a bed (“pata” and “pato”, Spaniards). Nick was once securing me while I climbed and was approached by an old man, waving a knife and yelling in strongly Tuscan-accented Italian. Understandably threatened, he lowered me to the ground and I worked out that the man wanted to give me a piece of quartz as a gift. Last month, I tried to explain how I found my way around Bologna using the prominent towers in the central street and ended up telling my friend Federica that I used the towers to go sailing. In the same conversation, I told her all about a climber who lives in a solar-powered lightning bolt (it’s Alex Honnold), not a van. I rounded all this off by describing my ambition of climbing Mount Bitch, Mount Kenya’s mispronounced cousin. She still told me my Italian was good.
Then there are the silly mistakes. The time Bridget told her class in Chile not to pick up their pens, but to screw them. The times you confuse “penne” and “pene” (“pens” and “penis”), or buy a size 18 flamenco dress for an eight-year-old because you get a number wrong. The time you try to compliment someone’s earring and instead tell them how great their pasta is (“orecchini” and “orecchiette”). Whole new territory was breached by Catherine, who innocently told a colleague that along with structure in her life she would like some menstruation (“j'aimerais avoir des règles”). These are the mistakes that slide into every important conversation and trip you up when you start to get overconfident. They are the stories you tell with the least embarrassment and maybe even a tinge of nostalgia. Often, they are also the stories that keep you up night, perusing dictionaries to figure out your mistake and doubting your language ability. Maybe you should just have nodded and smiled.
Of course, we are lucky to be able to go abroad and learn languages but are far from unique: we are part of a growing worldwide community of billions of language learners, each with their own language mishap stories to tell. In January, I started to teach English at a language school in Bologna. The first week went by smoothly. Everyone nodded and agreed with everything I was saying, picking up the Present Perfect Simple and Present Perfect Continuous like linguistic sponges. At the end of my first week, I was happy with my progress and a little shocked at how easily I got through my lesson plan. It was only the next week that I realised no one understood me. My accent was too British for the students, nurtured on American English. They had turned my very own tactic of nodding and smiling back on me. I would have to go through everything again. It is, after all, not just us who nod and smile. Maybe one of them will write about their incomprehensible English teacher. If they do, I hope their Present Perfects are, well, perfect.
The real perks of travelling