I spent the day at my computer doing the most mind-numbing work on the Nyungwe dictionary. The changes are small but when you have to change 10,000 entries at a time, you have to take care that you don’t mess something up. Early on in the process I wanted to change every place where the dictionary said “See such-and-such” for a cross reference, so I did a simple find and replace and wiped out the word see in all of those places. But in the process I also wiped out every single see in the whole dictionary. See is a pretty important word and so I had a lot of cleaning up to do (about 500 places and I’m still discovering them).
Even though I might be considered a master of the Nyungwe lexicon, after living in the province where Nyungwe is spoken for a total of six years, I still have to struggle to put a sentence together. Portuguese is a piece of cake. I can greet, chat, ask questions, try to convince someone, and even lose my temper in Portuguese. (You know you have mastered a language when you can lose your temper and not find yourself speechless.) Idiomatic expressions still evade me in Portuguese and that is probably the final frontier for my language acquisition.
However in Nyungwe, I can greet, chat, ask most kinds of questions, but after that I’m pretty much stuck. Considering it in a positive light, my Nyungwe neighbors don’t have to worry about me asking too many difficult questions. And I won’t try to convince them of anything, and best of all, they’ll never hear me lose my temper!
My one consolation is that I am an excellent speaker of English. English is a gorgeous language and it’s so easy!
Thanks, I think, for your double edged encouragement about the level of my Russian!
… and I keep reading in thrillers where the hero speaks dozens of languages “fluently”
I wish I was a hero, after ten years I got reasonably fluent in Congolese French (still exhausted by the speed of the Parisian variety) and could more or less do simple things – like introduce an overseas visitor – in Lingala, but fluent, no… Those Babelites have a lot to answer.
An “old-timer” (who shall remain nameless) told me that he had so mastered the local language he was working in the blind often mistook him for a native speaker. Since then, I have had periodic fantasies of myself speaking flawless Nyungwe with unsuspecting blind people.
Perhaps sometime you will be able to speak on your cell phone (with camera turned off) without immediately being recognised as a foreigner. I think I sometimes managed that on the phone in Azerbaijan, helped by the generally poor quality of phone lines. Now I could get away with being a Russian when people saw me but before I opened my mouth, but never I think once I started to speak Russian, although sometimes when I spoke Azerbaijani. Well, I guess people might think you were Portuguese when you were speaking Nyungwe!
I do remember once, years ago when I spoke German resaonably well, being mistaken by some German speaking Swiss for a north German. But my pride in this was soon shattered by my Swiss host who said that the people I had met must have been from Bern, the Swiss equivalent to them being Irish, Polish, Belgian or whatever your local equivalent is.
Funny! In Portugal I used to tell people I was from Iceland and didn’t know how to speak English just so they would speak Portuguese with me and not English. Such a liar!