The Guardian – Languages
When people ask me how many languages I speak I say I have forgotten six. That’s the problem with languages. If you don’t get the chance to use them you can use them. But with a little practice they soon come back and you can once again enjoy the magic of communication with other people in their own language and on their own terms.
As human beings we are above all, communicating animals. That’s what we do best and rom the first moments of our lives its what we do first with our brains and most with fellows. Language is, quite literally the stuff of life. And the more you can speak of other people’s languages, the more you can be part of their lives and enrich your own.
Actually I was a disaster at languages at school. I obtained, as I recall, 5 out of 200 in O level French – which is probably an all time record. Badly taught, I could never see the point. But then as a young Royal Marine to Singapore in the early 1960’s (as a batchelor I should stress) that I was told that in Malay there was one word for the phrase “lets take off our clothes and tell dirty stories”. Suddenly I saw the point. I never found the word, by the way. But in the process of looking learnt my first language. When I was sent to fight in the little jungle war in Borneo in the mid-60’s I was the only person in the whole Commando Brigade who could speak the local language. So was sent up to the deep jungle where few white men had been since the Second World War. I was living among the Dayak people. They still had dried human heads hanging from the rafters in the Long Houses in which they lived. I took one look at them and decided I would feel altogether more comfortable, if I knew their language too.
Mandarin Chinese came next. Though this is not a language you can learn in your spare time. I spent two and a half years as full time student, living amongst the Chinese in Hong Kong – and learnt the hazards of thinking you know more of someone else’s language than you actually do. One day, at a banquet with my fellow students and teachers I tried to make small talk with my female Chinese teacher. “Have you ever flown in an aircraft” I asked. Or at least that was what I thought I asked. In fact, muddling my Chinese tones, what came out of my mouth was “Have you by any chance sat upon a flying penis?”. I was utterly perplexed when everyone collapsed in mirth around me. But then I didn’t come to learn that word for another six months.