Lost in Translation

One of the funny things about living in a country with 11 official languages is that it is so easy to get your panties in a knot when trying to communicate with people. When I got to SA, I was fluent in Spanish, knew a bit of Portuguese, some German and very little English. In fact, all I could really say was, “I don’t speak English”. I will always remember my first day at school here, at Jeppe Preparatory School. We had only been in SA for a few weeks and I was terrified! My teacher held me by the hand, introduced me to my classmates and suddenly I was bombarded with 10 000 different questions from the kids. I didn’t understand what they were saying. I kept on repeating “I don’t speak English!” until I screamed it out loud for one last time, “I DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH!”. That kept them quiet.

Eventually I learnt da Engleesh, but not without the funny episodes where my friends would make me say stuff that I thought meant one thing but actually meant another. I must have told several boys that I loved them when I was 10.

My Portuguese improved quite a bit since some of my friends were Portuguese and I owe them for teaching me English – they played a huge part in that. I started to attend a German Lutheran church as well so I learnt several new German words. My German is still kak but I am learning more and more each day.

Now, just when I thought I had mastered English, in my second year in South Africa, they throw at me the most complicated and horrible language known to man – Afrikaans. I am not trying to offend any Afrikaans speaking people but you have to admit that this language does not sound like music in your ears. I struggled for several years but I think I have gotten the hang of it now. Ek praat baie kak Afrikaans, ne?

Then we started with Zulu, which was quite easy really. All you had to do was add an e- or i- to every English word and you were sorted, ha ha. OK, no, just kidding. The thing with Zulu was that it was usually taught by our Guidance/Bible Ed teacher and most of the time she tended to forget to teach us Zulu. So we didn’t learn much.

Eventually I found I had a knack for languages so I took up French in high school. Since it was similar to Spanish I learnt it very quickly. It’s true what they say; French IS the most romantic language in the world. But now, the trouble with knowing so many languages is that it’s so easy to get confused. For some unknown reason, whenever I wanted to speak in French, all these Afrikaans words would pop in my head and just take over! I still haven’t figured that one out. Afrikaans and French are like oil and water, they don’t even sound the same!

So yeah, it can be to my detriment at most times to speak several languages. I struggle sometimes to say just one sentence, though luckily no one really seems to pick up my mistakes (or maybe they are just too polite to point it out?).

Ay caramba mi culo esta en fuego!!