Getting understood

[pne]

Stella told me last night that she was rather amused by my worries over whether I'd be understood in Graubünden.

She pointed out, quite rightly, that most tourists don't tend to speak with the "locals" an awful lot, and what interactions they do have tend to be rather limited: "Where is the train station, please?", "How much does this cost?", "I'd like a cheeseburger and fries, please.". In which case your chances for being understood are already fairly high simply because there are a limited number of things you'd be expected to say.

And tourists typically don't stop random people on the street and ask them whether they can practice their $LOCAL_LANGUAGE on them.

Ah well. We shall see how much I shall end up speaking (or hearing) :)

Comments

[pthalo]

And tourists typically don't stop random people on the street and ask them whether they can practice their $LOCAL_LANGUAGE on them.

no, they don't, but I'll bet you find some who are tickled pink when you do ask them.

Hungarians get all gushy over my near-perfect Hungarian (i've been living there 7 years, what do you expect?). languages like Romansh or Hungarian or Serbian are different from languages like English. Their speakers know that it's a minority language as far as world languages go and that they are expected to learn English or German to communicate with the world, not the other way around. So where as you get English speakers saying "learn English you stupid foreigner", you get Hungarians and Serbs saying "oh, it's so wonderful you're learning our language! Oh, you're trying so hard, isn't that sweet!" :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'll bet you find some who are tickled pink when you do ask them.

Possibly - though I think I would quickly run out of vocabulary at this stage!

It's true, though - having a foreigner learn a "minority" language sends a good signal, I think: that the language is worthwhile, not a burden or an outmoded tradition that needn't be passed on to one's children.