Four-Course Meal, Four-Language Dinner (1/2)
May 1, 2008 – 8:02 pmHave you ever needed to switch among four languages during dinner?
I have.
It was loads of fun.
I am not being sarcastic.
Photo from http://www.thw.coventry.sch.uk/MFL/MFL.gif
To date, I have yet to have a more multilingual dinner. And this dinner was back in summer 2004, my very first study abroad trip. We were in Shanghai. It’s almost strange to imagine that I haven’t had a similar experience in the almost past four years. Guess that just goes to show some things can’t be planned.
Okay, so this dinner was planned. I still remember sitting then standing then sitting again in the lobby with my two Brazilian and Belgian friends, both of whom were male, waiting for the girls to come down. The Brazilian said in English (for, as is typical, that was the one common language among us all), “The guys always wait for the girls.”
After I don’t know how long, the two German girls and one Japanese girl came over from their dorms, and the two French girls came down from upstairs. Finally, everyone was there.
Before I go on, let’s get everyone’s linguistic bios straight (forgive the numbers, but I haven’t asked anyone’s permission to use their real names yet):
Me: (at the time) Cantonese, English, Mandarin, Spanish
Brazilian guy: English, Portuguese, Spanish (languages listed in alphabetical order)
Belgian guy: English, French, Mandarin, Shanghainese
French girl #1: Cantonese, English, French, Mandarin
French girl #2: English, French, Mandarin
German girl #1: English, German, Mandarin
German girl #2: English, German, Mandarin
Japanese girl: English, Japanese, Mandarin
You’ll notice that English is unsurprisingly the one common language among us all, with Mandarin, the local language, taking a close second. So why didn’t we all just speak English? For one thing, only the Brazilian and I spoke it with any fluency. The others could somewhat communicate in the language, but I much preferred speaking to the rest of them in Mandarin. You’d more than understand if you read this.
Then there was one French girl who also spoke my native dialect of Chinese, Cantonese, so switching over to Cantonese with her was amusing, as was switching over to Spanish occasionally with the Brazilian. Too bad I didn’t speak Japanese at that point yet (I visited that Japanese girl more than a year later when I was studying in Japan and met one of her friends, to whom she commented in Japanese, “When I first met Terry, he didn’t speak a word of Japanese, but look at him now!”).
As you might’ve observed, the four languages alluded to in the title are the four that I spoke at the time. It would be pretty crazy if any one of us spoke all the languages in the group. I have a gift, not godhood, with languages.
