No Speak Americano

Recently, one of my roommates was poking fun at me.

"Aww," I said playfully. "You hurt my feelings."

"What does zees mean, 'urt feelings?"

I searched for a moment to see if I could say it in French before Christophe finally dismissed the incident saying, "I don't know what eet mean, zees feelings. It must be somezing only women 'ave."

I posted this conversation as my facebook status, and Ian, who stayed with me briefly this summer, responded right away.

"It must be my fate in life to have smartass roommates," I told him.

"It is also your fate in life to be perpetually cursed by hilarities in foreign language faux-pas," he replied.

Yes. This is definitely true. I spent a good eight hours over the last couple days doing Russian homework, I take six hours of Estonian lessons a week, and I try to speak with Christophe in French when I can, so my head is constantly swimming, and it's pretty common to catch me saying something pretty stupid. (I'd like to think, at least, that it's more common than when I'm speaking English, but I'll let you be the judge on that.)

The rector at Tallinn University is supposedly conversational in almost 20 languages. I really have to hand it to the man. I consider myself to be good with languages- the fact that I've always been a little bit high-strung about grammar in English helps me out a lot, and I think I can pick up an understanding of the language fairly quickly. More and more, however, I find myself at the point where I think I'm being counterproductive. When people speak to me, I may be able to understand them just fine, but when I go to respond, I have no idea what to say. I speak English because I've grown up in America. I speak French because I've studied it since I was a little girl. I picked up some Spanish hearing it all around me in high school and always reading the Spanish version of official documents when I'd finished reading the English one. I picked up some German because my EU program required it. I've been beating my brains trying to learn Russian for a little over a year now, and now I'm trying to learn Estonian because, like any good Fulbrighter, I want to make a good impression on the locals, and that involves saying please and thank you in their language. When someone speaks to me, and it's time for me to respond, I have to run through six languages, and it comes out in some really awkward potpourri of nonsense. My mom told me when I came back from Germany that even my English was suffering- I started sentences with a long "Uhhhhhh...." without even realizing it. I oftentimes think I was more articulate in high school.

I've reached the conclusion that I need to pick a language or two and stick with it. The remaining question, then, is which ones?


This song, which is played without fail in EVERY club in Eastern Europe, was playing in the back of my mind as I wrote this post. I'm not sure what the lyrics actually say, but the title, "We No Speak Americano," is definitely something to which I can relate.