Multi Tasking With A Multi Pass

I'm two weeks into the new job. I've made a huge transition: from a work-at-home, two deadline a day gig to a one hour commute to a job with a random pace and many mini-deadlines.

The first week was hell. I was stunned; rolling out of bed, putting on my power suit and wandering through the halls of this massive organization, meeting scores of people and not remembering any of their names.

Week two was better. I'm starting to make associations, I'm starting to understand how it all works and that's good because that's a major part of my job. I'm almost used to walking in heels again.

The commute isn't bad, either, because I had a plan: I'm going to finally learn to speak other languages well. I can stutter in French and Italian, just a little. But I couldn't be considered bi-lingual by anyone who knows what that really means.

So midway through week one my first CDs for "Spanish for Idiots" or something like that arrived. Every morning the unnamed English-speaking host and Luis, my Spanish speaking guide, teach me new expressions. I learned the days of the week, months of the year, infinitives, and how to say "I want", "I like" and "I'm going to." Put that together with the infinitives and you can say quite a lot.

There's a woman on these CDs too and I hate her. Luis speaks clearly, enunciates, and makes sure every syllable is understandable. Then this woman butts in with her mouth way too close to the microphone and zips through something that I can't understand at all. "How do you say, 'Please help me I'm having a seizure?' the host asks. "Mmmmnphhhhgrrrrabbblppppph!" she says.

Fortunately, she doesn't talk much.

Then there's the adventure of the new computerized toll pass. It's a little plastic box into which the information of how many tolls I've prepaid is programmed. "Convenient!" the state proclaims. "Cheaper, too!"

It comes in a plastic sleeve with a warning that it must be kept in there if you don't want it to be read by the scanners. So that must mean that even though they tell you to stick it to your windshield, the scanner might be able to read it anywhere in the car, right?

Well we had to try, didn't we?

We held it up to the windshield for our first pass through a toll both and voila! We were in.

So for our exit, we tried holding it down lower. Like cup-holder level. It didn't work. And we got a note on the toll machine that said to call the state.

I freaked out. I hadn't had this thing more than half an hour and I already had a violation?

"Don't worry," my guy assured me. "I'll make the calls and handle it. If there's a fine, I'll pay it."

He felt responsible since he'd had the brilliant idea of testing the pass's range.

He called the next day and said he got a harried state worker who was not at all amused by the story, but told us they'd let us slide this time.

"Stick it on the windshield!" he advised.

But now we're wondering. Could it read it through a doughnut held against the windshield? How about a piece of tinfoil? What if you held your hand between the pass and the scanner? Could it read it?

Don't you want to know? Quiero aprender.

The Year I Really Learn Another Language

I grew up knowing people who were multi-lingual. My father could speak English, read Latin, and could speak a bit of French and learned Serbo-Croation before he learned his native English. His mother spoke English, Serbo-Croation, French and Italian. After she retired, she went to breakfast every morning at a nearby diner where the staff was teaching her Greek.

I always wanted to speak another language. I had a great ear for it. Yet I was bored senseless in school; French was a drag, Spanish was stupid. The languages were great, but we were never really taught to converse. We learned isolated sentences, we learned to write. I wanted to speak.

But I must accept some of the blame as well. As soon as it got difficult, as soon as we got into the weird tenses and strange conjugations, I tuned out. So I never got anywhere.

It was different when I knew I was going to Italy. It was my son's eighteenth birthday. It was our big blowout, probably the last trip he'd take with his mother. We spent a week in Italy with one night in Paris. I didn't bother brushing up on my French; I figured I knew enough to get by and so did he.

But I borrowed Italian CDs from the library and I listened to them faithfully every day. I practiced. I learned the basics necessary for travel. And to my great surprise, it worked.

We arrived in Rome and were instantly plunged under a torrent of Italian. I heard no English at all. My son had even less Italian than I did, so it fell to me to make sense of the babble around us, to arrange the car rental, to read the signs on the highways. And I blessed those library tapes for a solid week.

I asked directions and understood what I was told. I went into a village grocery and managed to say, "I'm sorry, my Italian is terrible but I want to buy some eggs." Well, actually, I didn't know the word for "egg". But I mimed the size and shape and the lovely people in the grocery said, "Ah! Uovo!" "Si! Grazie! Uovo!"
I strolled down that beautiful little village's street with a sense of having conquered the world. I'd overcome my own self-consciousness, I'd attained a working knowledge of a language I'd known absolutely nothing about.

From there, it wasn't a big step to the purchase of train tickets to Rome ("biglietti di andata e ritorno") and shopping at the local supermarket. There were plenty of mistakes (including the midnight conversation on the security speaker at the Villa Borghese, when my Italian suddenly deserted me as I tried to explain that our car was locked in after hours) but overall, I did it!

So this year, I want to finally learn a language so well that I can even dream in it.
My first love is Italian. My second choice would be the language of my father's family; Serbo-Croation. But I am determined to learn this time and I know that the only way for me to learn is to have people I can speak with. I do not learn languages from books. I don't know anyone who speaks Italian. My few remaining relatives who speak Serbo-Croation acknowledge it's become a family dialect after all these years. They call it Nashki - ours - and they admit if they tried to teach me, there's a good chance I wouldn't be learning the language now spoken in the former Yugoslavia.

But I do know a lot of people who speak German. And that makes my choice simple: I'm going to learn to speak German.

My girlfriend, who learned it during a year she spent in Germany with her two young children, is very enthusiastic. She's even thinking of putting together a dinner with all her German speaking friends where I can just sit and soak it in.

KB's mother is a native German speaker. She's willing to help me when I get confused.

My brain's not firing on all cylinders right now, but that's no excuse not to begin.
Nein?

I'll keep you posted.


(Just for fun, I may still try to pick up a little Nashki, too. What the heck. I still remember how to say "kiss me" thanks to my grandmother. Poljubi mej (spelling may be wrong but I'm certain of the pronunciation). And "this is a pencil." Ovo je lapis. I could do better, don't you think?)