Funny sightings and pulling out the languages
Wrote a quickie piece for ESPN.com Page 2 that includes the top 8 random sports memorabilia sightings I’ve encountered on our trip to Prague, Vienna and now Budapest. You can find it by clicking on Page 2, then scrolling down to bottom left of the page.
Also fun has been an opportunity to break out my entire battery of linguistic skills, really one of the very, very few things I’m remotely good at (including not ending sentences with prepositions). Thanks to my family–especially my generous Hungarian grandparents–I went to a school that taught 3 hours each of English, French and Hebrew subjects every day, for 11 years. While neither my French nor my Hebrew is as sharp as it once was, it comes back to me when I need it. While I never learned much Hungarian directly from my grandparents or my Hungary-born dad, I did glean the names of all the major foods, how to count to 10, and how to say key phrases like hello, how are you, thank you, yes and no. In the 24 hours we’ve been in Budapest, I’ve moderated a conversation between Hebrew-speaking colleagues of Angele and some fellow English speakers, translated our afternoon tour guide’s words into Hebrew for an older couple who shared a hop-on/hop-off bus with us, and doled out just enough Hungarian to get various service people to smile and be extra nice to us.
My favorite language-related scam on this trip is actually a trick I’ve pulled before. When we were in Slovenia last year, we went to these really cool underground caves with a tour group. When we got there, there were many, many other tours already there, most of them English-speaking. Realizing we’d be 1 of 700 people straining to hear our English guide in the caves if we went with the English guide, we instead veered off to the French guide, who had exactly two people other than us on the tour (a couple from Montreal, no less). We understood everything perfectly, got to ask as many questions as we liked, and were able to pace our walk through any way we liked. Today in Budapest we pulled the same caper, dodging dozens and dozens of loud, annoying Yanks in favor of two quiet Parisian couples and a young, French-speaking guide who took us through the Budapest Opera House (an amazing place, by the way).
So score one for all those endless conjugation exercises I had to do as a kid. And if you’ve got young children of your own or are thinking about it, my unsolicited advice is to chuck as many languages on them as you can, preferably before age 5, when the brain best absorbs this stuff. You never know when you’ll need to pull off the rare English to Hebrew to Hungarian to Hebrew to English to French to English transition. (Alas, no Spaniards to be found)
First of all, you are solidifying your place as Mr. White Guy with your mention of multilingual children (cf. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/28/78-multilingual-children/ ).
Second of all, it’s incorrect that I understood everything the geologist said in Postnoya Caves in Slovenia. In 13 years of French education none of my teachers ever covered the word for limestone.
Third of all, tomorrow we are having dinner with four colleagues from Spain, so you’ll get plenty of Spanish practice soon enough. The aforementioned Israelis and several Anglophones will also be there, but the Francophone just told me she can’t make it. Too bad; you almost got the chance to speak 5 languages at the same time!