Day 284 of 1827: The Benefits and Hazards of Polyglotism

I’ve noticed some curious side effects lately as a result of learning a second language, some good and some bad.

Most notably, I’m losing some of my English vocabulary. I have started to forget a lot of words that I don’t generally… um… that I don’t use very often.

It happens to me every now and then in my conversations, and you can also hear this in Five Years AbroadCAST; I’ll stumble over a word in English from time to time and have to describe what I’m trying to say.

I like to joke with people that my mind is dumping my English to make way for the incoming Spanish. Pretty soon, I won’t be fluent in either language 😛

Another really interesting effect of learning another language is that it has taught me how to communicate with people who don’t speak English very well. I have become very comfortable with frequent grammar mistakes, misspellings, and even when someone uses the wrong word in a sentence.

Some of this comes from having empathy for the difficulties native Spanish speakers have when I am trying to communicate with them. But also, Spanish in particular has quite a few words and concepts that are ambiguous until you know the context.

For example, the phrase su abrigo can mean “his coat”, “her coat”, “its coat” or even “your coat” depending on how you use it.

As a result, I have gotten very good at using contextual clues to determine the meaning of ambiguous or even unknown words… and this ability has improved my English comprehension as well.

I’ve also gotten very good at not being offended when somebody says something really off-putting or even borderline-offensive to me… because they usually don’t realize what they are saying.

That statement works on multiple levels, by the way, but let’s focus on the English-as-a-second-language part.

Here’s an example: In Spanish, the word barato can mean “inexpensive” or “cheap”. As a result, Spanish speakers will use those words interchangeably when they talk in English. And in fact, they will tend to use “cheap” more often than “inexpensive” because the former has fewer syllables and is easier to remember.

But of course, there is a difference between those words. They both describe something with a low price, but “cheap” also implies that the thing is of low quality.

So every now and then, I’m showing somebody something that I bought that I really like, and when I tell them how much it cost, they say, “Wow, that’s really cheap!” And I don’t take it personally because I know they actually meant to say “inexpensive”.

Incidentally, I seem to have picked up a few bad habits like this in Spanish, too.

For example, I’ve gotten in the habit of saying “yo quisiera…” when I want to ask for something, instead of “me gustaría…” or “yo quiero…” Technically, all three variants work, but “yo quisiera…” is an extremely polite and tentative way of asking for something.

I’m trying to switch to “me gustaría” so that I stop sounding quite so (stereotypically) British, but it’s been difficult to make the change.

I apologize to anybody who might have been offended by that last sentence.

Oops; there I go again!