A little learning
Gaining confidence with a new language is important. It’s something I try to instill in my students. But I found out how over-confidence can make for a bit of trouble.
Martha and I were going to prepare some food in the hostel. We needed butter. No, problem, I could skip out to the store and pick some up. It was an “everything behind the counter” type shop, which is hell when you don’t have the language to ask for things. Not for me though. No, I had most of the food words I needed down cold.
The lady asked if she could help me.
I said yes and asked for what I thought was butter. The word I used doesn’t actually exist. It was close to the word for butter, but it also sounded a lot like ‘town.’
The nice lady thought she didn’t hear me correctly. She asked if she heard me say ‘meat,’ which was a perfectly reasonable guess considering the garble that came out of my mouth. The odds were good the I hadn’t come to her small shop to buy the town or any town for that matter.
But no, I wasn’t there to buy meat; I was there to buy ‘buh-DDER’. That’s what I had said. So I repeated my new nonsense word slowly, enunciating very clearly and a bit patronisingly with a tone of “what are you Byelorussian or something? It’s Polish I’m speaking here.”
The nice lady, ignoring my unjust condescension, took a second to think about just what the heck I was trying to say. Then her eyes brightened.
“Ah, butter!”
Hearing her say the word properly hit me with instant humility and sheepishness. I then wrapped up the interaction as quickly and politely as I could and walked out while muttering the proper pronunciation of ‘butter.’