Those times when you have real trouble reading the room
Ihave grown accustomed to feeling like the stupidest person in the room.
Letting my face set into a blank glaze as conversations I don’t understand go on around me.
Waiting for the moment that the words floating around me switch back to English and I can finally understand what is going on.
Feeling the guilt as people have to abandon speaking in their native tongue to accommodate me.
Knowing that I should have tried harder when learning languages back in my school days.
But unfortunately because English is the ‘de facto language of business’ and has spread so widely around the globe as a second tongue, it has let us grow arrogant and lazy.
You know that generally speaking if you go on holiday, people will speak English.
So learning to speak French or Spanish or German isn’t an absolute necessity. Sure it looks good on your UCAS application or a CV, but you can get by without picking up a second language.
And for years I did manage without one, sure I got a C in French at GCSE but I couldn’t really speak it.
But then last summer I travelled with my girlfriend to meet her family in Spain and suddenly it did matter that I could only speak English.
Her parents, grandparents and extended family could only speak bits and pieces of our language and I knew ‘uno, dos, tres’ and ‘por favor’.
Meaning I was left relying on her as a translator or else letting conversations pass me by without being involved at all.
Similar has happened since she moved to Norway for her master’s degree. Obviously Norwegian is a less common language than Spanish or French or German.
But It feels like a tragedy that we are so content being monolingual (as a wider society, obviously there are many, many people who can speak multiple languages here).
Especially since learning one of, say, the Romance languages French, Spanish, etc - puts you in a strong position to understand more.
Hopefully one day a government will make learning modern foreign languages a priority in schools.
But right now, I doubt it.