Throughout
my bi-lingual, bi-cultural, bi-national Mexican-American childhood, my two
languages, English and Spanish, have both been equally "second nature" to
me.Like hundreds of millions of kids
straddling such borders the world over, for me and my siblings two languages
have always been like two sides of the same coin.If we were in Spanish mode and encountered an English-only
situation or vice versa, it was just a question of flipping that coin and
picking up where we had left off in the other language.
For
someone with that mechanical approach to language, with an internal toggle
switch that only goes two ways, it's easy to think of language as something
that can be flip-flopped on a dime.Everything is one way or the other, never both, completely binary.It's mechanical.Almost electronic.
My
brother Javier's secret idol as a child was Luke Skywalker's sidekick C3PO, the
galaxy-gallivanting, always polished protocol droid who spoke over six million
languages and dialects.I'd catch
Javier watching the Trilogy and silently mouthing C3PO's incomprehensible lines
in non-existent alien tongues.Javier's
Spanish/English coin-flip dexterity was just as mechanical as mine, but his
linguistic obsession was further exacerbated by the addictive influence of
George Lucas' cinematic opus.
So
as my brother saw me continuing to struggle with perfecting my French, knowing
that I lack that same electronic wiring for this language that I have for
Spanish and English, the birthday gift he gave me last week made perfect
sense.He just knew I was missing
critical circuitry upstairs, a certain special French chip in my brain.So he bought me the next best thing - an
electronic dictionary.If C3PO, a pile
of nothing more than wires and circuits, could master millions of languages in
the distant past, then in 2008 you'd think that the Sharper Image could crack,
say, two languages at a time, right?
The
dumbest gadget he ever bought me.
In
playing with this useless toy, I realized what kind of robot I actually
am.Without thinking, when I switch
from Spanish to English and back, I'm doing far more than copying and pasting
vocabulary.So my 79-euro handheld
robot speaks even worse French than I do.
First,
you've got your insanely subtle French pronunciation distinctions where the
Sharper Image can't hold a candle to C3PO."Cool" isn't "cul" and "Caen" or "quand" definitely isn't "con".Beware.
Second,
even what you would think of as straightforward translation of French vocabulary
is lost on an electronic translator.I
type in "cerf volant" (kite) and it translates it literally, word-for-word, and
gives me "flying deer."Hmm, that's
probably not right.
Third,
context can mean more than the words themselves.True, "bonjour" means "good morning", "hello" and "hi" all
wrapped in one, but if you say it to the same person twice in the same day, you
risk eliciting laughter or worse.I
learned this the hard way, telling a colleague "bonjour" at 9 am and again in
passing her in the office hallway that afternoon at 3 pm and was treated like
an asylum escapee.
