New Yorker here. I speak American English. I have traveled extensively for work, much of it internationally, which has exposed me to a wide range of languages and cultures. While I’ve always struggled to learn languages other than English, I make an effort to pick up a little wherever I go, even if it’s only “hello” and “thank you”. These days, that may start with me using a common language learning app, like Duolingo, or watching YouTube videos in the new-to-me language to pick up the sounds of the language. But those options didn’t always exist.
My old approach to getting comfortable in a new place was to grab a phrase book, you know, back when books were always on paper, and turn on the TV as soon as I arrived in my hotel room. The idea, much like my later YouTube strategy, was to tune my ear to the sounds of the language. I find foreign languages spoken near me to be quite jarring until I get used to the sounds produced in that language.
I’ll never forget my first trip to South America. Three of us Americans — Judy Gorman, Dottie Blanchard, and I, met up in Buenos Aires to teach some classes. I wasn’t particularly worried since I’d taken a few semesters of Spanish in high school and college. I even had a girlfriend in high school that spoke Spanish at home, so I had to use it when I was with her.
Apparently, none of that stuck.
I landed in Buenos Aires — my luggage hadn’t. With a wild mix of English, broken Spanish, and interpretive hand gestures, I tried to explain the situation to anyone that would listen. A few words came rushing back. Mostly nouns. “Maleta!” I said — over and over, like some kind of suitcase-themed parrot.
I must have looked like a nutcase as I kept repeating the word without any accompanying descriptors, like “lost” or “missing”. (As a public service for anyone in the same situation, that would be “perdido” and “falta”.) And I learned when I had vouchers from the airline to shop for necessities while I waited for them to find my bags, that I never learned the Spanish words for “underwear” or “contact lens solution”. (“Ropa interior” and “solución para lentes de contacto”) I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let this happen again in the future.
That brings us back to the TV in my hotel room. Wanting to improve my recognition of Spanish words, I looked for a show that I could watch. Bingo! Back to the Future was on. I’d seen it so many times I could follow the plot with my eyes closed — or my ears full of unfamiliar syllables.
Was the dubbed voice a match for Michael J. Fox? Not even close. But I was entertained and learning. Win-win.
Then things got weird.
A few days later, in Rio de Janeiro, I turned on the hotel TV and found… Back to the Future Part II, dubbed in Portuguese. I didn’t speak a word of Portuguese, but the movie made it fun to listen anyway.
And yes — I kid you not — Back to the Future Part III was waiting for me in Germany. I watched the entire trilogy across three countries in three languages. In order. Beat that, time travel.
Enjoying the foreign language television I watched on those trips, I continued the practice. While there were no more Back to the Future movies, Tokyo brought another surprise. I was there for a television appearance myself. I was preparing to lead a team of Japanese celebrities in building a massive (at the time) balloon sculpture. Flipping through channels on my first night there, I heard English speech. A British woman was teaching English to her Japanese television audience. I was, of course, trying to work it in the opposite direction and hoped to learn a few Japanese words.
The surprise came a few weeks later. Back in the US, I was participating in the first ever international balloon twisting convention, T Jam, in Austin Texas. Gathering around the hotel pool, I was approached by a woman, Diane, that asked if we had ever met before since I looked very familiar to her. Upon hearing her voice, I agreed that she also seemed familiar. It was only after quite a while talking that we made the discovery that we had seen each other on TV on the opposite side of the planet.
All of that helped me get comfortable with the various languages spoken around me, but it hardly makes a difference when it comes to addressing a classroom full of professional artists and entertainers hoping to learn from me. To get around this, as you’d expect, there’s usually a translator in my non-English speaking classrooms. But, as with most specialties, my field uses a lot of jargon that doesn’t always translate well. That often leaves me improvising—finding ways to communicate directly with students.
One experience of lacking a translator stands out above the rest. I was in Scotland. Scotland! Scotland? Why on earth would I need a translator in Scotland? At a clown convention in Glasgow, I set out to teach a room of English speakers the tricks of my trade. As I taught, I watched my students take notes, saw their smiles, heard their laughter. I asked questions to gauge understanding. I got enthusiastic head nods and thumbs up. Everything seemed great.
Then they started asking questions.
The first person spoke. I stared blankly, utterly lost. I asked her to repeat it. Twice. Maybe three times. Eventually, I pieced together enough to respond. She nodded. More understanding. Great! Next question. Same problem. A barrage of sounds that, theoretically, were English but may as well have been Martian. Somehow, they understood me perfectly. But I was drowning.
I finally broke. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I feel so stupid. I’ve been talking this whole time, and all of you seem to understand me perfectly. But I can’t understand any of you.”
“It’s not your fault,” one of them finally said, very slowly and carefully, articulating every syllable. “Here in Scotland, we get a lot of American television. We’ve had plenty of exposure to your accents.”
He paused, grinning.
“On the other hand… here in Scotland, we don’t understand each other.”