Urban Diary

On the ol’ bike, innit? His accent is a much as a surprise as his question. Then, again, I probably look a sight. Worn-out Birkenstocks, yellow, hi-vis ankle-slap-bands and helmet under my left arm. So, why not banter a bit? I probably stand out in this very centric, tourist-friendly part of London. He is leaning on his walking stick, just in front of me in the queue. Yes, on the ol’ bike, I answer politely. I tell him that I have just done an inverted L-shaped bike journey from White Hart Lane to Stamford Bridge. He grins. On looking at his white-and-dark-blue shirt, cockerel on the left hand-side, I suddenly realise why. A bit far for a Spurs fan to travel, innit? I challenge him jovially. He adjusts his thick-rimmed glasses. A solitary ray from the mid-afternoon summer sun lights up his receding grey line. I used to go up to good ol' White Hart Lane until a few years ago, though I’ve lived here all my life.

I’ve lived here all my life. Sometimes a neutral-sounding sentence can shake us awake from a long-held, misconceptions. This Sainsbury’s, across Holborn Station in London’s West End, sits almost in the middle of a tourist hub. Souvenir-chasers go through here en route somewhere else. Like me, who has just momentarily stopped to buy a bottle of water – the frozen one I took with me from home this morning having been emptied around Kensington and Chelsea – plenty of visitors navigate through this urban jungle to go to Covent Garden or the British Museum.

I’ve lived here all my life. For some stupid reason I have always seen W1, WC2, SW1 and SE1 as tourist hotspots first and foremost. Hotels, museums, restaurants, cinemas and theatres. You spot the famous landmark and take a selfie in front of it. Places you visit and then come back home. Wherever that home may be. London or abroad. The capital or Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton or another major city. Perhaps a little town. Anything except for “I’ve lived here all my life”. I forget that beyond the wide and populous Southampton Row there are roads on which people live. People who have neighbours. Neighbours who might or might not have children and even grandchildren. Children who go to local schools. In short, despite tourism and rising rents, there is normal life in central London.

Walking-stick man and I joke a bit more. The new season of the English Premier League has just got under way and there is much to look forward to. He praises Chelsea’s manager, Jose Mourinho and I return the favour by bigging up Tottenham Hotspurs’ young and promising Argentinian Mauricio Pochettino. I come out of the supermarket, get on my bike and stop to think for a moment that sometimes all it takes is a neutral-sounding sentence to shakes us up a bit. Even if it means accepting another reality.

Covent Garden: I'm sure that there is normal life beyond these streets

© 2016

Next Post: “Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music… Ad Infinitum”, to be published on Tuesday 1st March at 6pm (GMT)

Living in a Multilingual World (The One About Socially Awkward Linguistic Situations)

Learning a foreign language is not just about skills and dedication; it is also about context. Determining one’s context is as important as decoding complex grammar structures or incomprehensible syntax. I learnt this lesson the hard way as a newly-graduate English language teacher more than twenty years ago. There I was, fresh from uni, talking about phonetics and phonology to my students, when all some of them were interested in was to find out how to say “your rent-car is ready, sir”.

It is this contextual aspect that came to mind recently when I read the now-customary section in The Economist called “Johnson”. This was a regular feature years ago that has made a much-desired come-back.

The phases one goes through foreign-language-learning are not dissimilar to the ones one undergoes when taking the first steps in one’s native tongue. There is much to decipher, digest and interpret. The difference is that when presented with a vessel of new words the foreign-language learner will immediately hang on to primary meanings. They are the equivalent of a life-saving piece of wood in a shipwreck.

It takes a while for second-, third- and multiple-meanings of a word to take hold. I always knew that “baby” was an infant or very young child. But the “baby” who just cares for Nina Simone is of a different variety. Same with the “baby” whom (repeatedly) Robert Plant is gonna leave in Led Zeppelin’s monster hit. That baby had nothing to do with youth (even if she was young).

Thus, from primary-meaning acquisition the learner moves to a nuanced zone where the context defines the meaning of the word. We, those of us who have studied a foreign language, begin to think in that target lingo. It happened tome halfway through uni and it is one of the reasons why I am able to write a blog in English despite the fact I am a native Spanish-speaker. At some point, through hard work and skills-building, I managed to create a personal structure based on the English syntax, semantics and grammar.

I mentioned semantics in that paragraph. Semantics can be misleading sometimes. When we are learning a foreign language we not only adapt to unusual patterns (and make them familiar to us) but also we adopt linguistic tics in the same way a native speaker would. How many times have I not heard a fellow Cuban nowadays start a sentence with the word “like”, just like a US or – come to think of it – a British teenager?

In the same way, we, non-native speakers, sometimes appropriate language we rarely give a second thought to. Some of this language could come across as socially awkward. The Economist’s “Johnson” section had a wide selection of words that describe men and women but that tend to favour mainly the former over the latter. For instance, I am guilty as charged of using the word “chatty” for women whilst for men is, “says a lot”. I used to use the word “bossy” to describe a woman I knew until I realised that I was unconsciously patronising her and boxing her in. It also works the other way around. I have been called “articulate” on a few occasions, which used to bring a smile to my face until I noticed that it was usually accompanied by a look of surprise on my interlocutor’s face. At a higher level, our Prime Minister, David Cameron, used a put-down in Parliament a few years ago that no one has forgotten about. In addressing a female colleague, he told her to “calm down, dear”. Well, at least, I have the excuse of being a foreign-born non-native speaker. Oxford-based Cameron has no such excuse. He knew exactly what he was doing.

Who are you calling bossy?

Which brings me back to the start of this column tonight. Learning a foreign language does not depend on innate skills (believe me, I was not born with an MFL gene), but on hard work and dedication. It also depends on the context the learner decides for themselves. Is it communication they are after? Is it specialist translation they need? Is it the whole shebang? In more than twenty years I still have not found the answer. I’m still learning.

© 2016

Next Post: “Urban Diary”, to be published on Friday 26th February at 6pm (GMT)