Language Barrier

There is really nothing quite as frustrating and entertaining as a language barrier between two people. It’s not something that the average person who stays close to home thinks about, but to a traveler it is an almost daily occurrence.

When I was 14 years old, my mother decided on a whim to move me to China with her and teach English at a university. Since I obviously know the English language better than someone who is not a native speaker, I was asked to teach at the middle school for the children of the university professors. I walked in with great ideas about how much I would enrich these kids’ lives. They would walk out of the classroom thanking the world for providing them with a teacher of my caliber!

Imagine my surprise when I walked into the classroom on the first day and realized that most of the kids knew English better than their teachers because they spent so much time memorizing Hollywood movies. They knew so many different phrases, yet couldn’t really grasp what each one meant in a complex way. They were using swear words without finesse, and I felt it was my duty as a 14 year old American kid to be a diplomat for my culture and provide knowledge from across the ocean.

“Teacher Brian, Teacher Brian! Are you talking to me, you shit bitching cock? Fucking you asshole!” One happy little knowledge seeker said, after politely raising his hand.

I smiled, and asked the teacher for the chalk and approached the chalk board. Now it may seem difficult for someone who is accustomed to speaking English and grew up with it, but it’s an unbelievably difficult language to explain in any meaningful way. With most languages, there is a base that may have changed only slightly over time, but is still reasonably stable. Latin obviously went on to create and shape many languages. Chinese, Japanese and Korean all came from the same root language, and have very specific linguistic rules. Russian was made up by Greek priests to bring some civilized order to Siberia. English, on the other hand, is a strange mixture of Latin, French and whatever else happened to be lying around. We have grammatical rules that are impenetrably stupid, and seem to change every few centuries.

Try to explain, if you will, the reason why “-ough” is different sounding in “Rough” and “Bought.” If you answered “I’m really not sure. It just does,” then you have some sense of how it was to teach English grammar and words to people who have a language not even slightly based in Latin.

“Students. You cannot just use profane words in any way you like.” I calmly explained. “There are rules and explanations that you have to take into account.”

I then showed them on the chalkboard what each word I could think of actually meant and how to correctly use it. There is really no way to express how exhilarating it is to be 14 years old, standing next to a real teacher facing a classroom full of students, and writing “You can be a bitch or a mother fucker, but you cannot be a fuck you” in foot tall letters on a chalkboard.