Unasema Kiingereza?

I’m learning Swahili. Or at least trying too. In preparation for my trip to Tanzania at the beginning of August, I have been given a list of key phrases that I can use there over the course of 7 weeks. So far I’ve learnt how to say ‘thank you very much’ and ‘chicken’. Which I’m sure will become very handy considering I’m a vegetarian and ornithophobic. Still it’s a start.

Apparently the older you get the lower you’re capacity to understand new languages and although I have yet to turn twenty, I already feel like its harder to learn Swahili than it was to learn French when I was 11 despite Swahili being a comparatively simpler language. Of course I’m not forced to stick in a room learning Swahili with a teacher breathing down my neck forcing me to concentrate. Not that, that particular tactic my teachers employed worked during my GCSE French lessons though.

I got an A though so all’s well as that ends well I guess.

I have always loved languages though, even though I always hated double French on a Monday morning. To me they’re part of the mysticism of other cultures that always seem so much more interesting than the boring Anglophone world. They say you can’t truly understand a culture till you speak its language; it’s like some sort of code that once you break it, a whole world is unlocked and you can see things from the perspective of people who were previously alien to you. I’ve always been interested in other people’s cultures because they were so much outside the normal English world that I was stuck in. Maybe its part of the fact that I’m one of those people that spends their life wanting to be somewhere else; the grass is always greener after all.

Whatever the reason, I have always tried to buck the stereotype of British people abroad that we believe everyone can speak English- just at a few decibels higher than typical conversation. It is not an urban myth by any stretch of the imagination; I have seen it right in front of my own eyes and subsequently developed a slightly lower opinion of England as a whole. I speak passable French and Italian and a little bit of Japanese from studying it this past year but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a linguistic expert. Nevertheless, I have always tried to learn as much of a language as I possibly can before I visit a new place because I think not only is it rude not to, you miss out on the culture of a place a little bit by not being able to experience it through the eyes of the people who created it. Of course this is easier said than done and despite my best efforts its not going in. Maybe its because the nice weather has distracted me, maybe I’m just lazy but I can’t quite bring myself to sit down and wait for the words to go into my brain.

Not that necessarily they would go in. I remember in around Year 9, several of my friends went to Poland on a Music trip and they were given a one hour crash course in conversational Polish in which all any of them managed to pick up was ‘I like dancing’.

Lubię tańca, in case you were wondering.

Similarly I ‘studied’ Mandarin for a grand total of six hours during my Easter 2008 trip to China and apart from a few isolated phrases for greeting people, saying please and thank you etc, etc I can now only really say ‘I love you’ (Wo ai ni). That brings the number of languages I can say that in up to eight.
Of course, if I concentrate I will be able to master the sheet of useful phrases I’ve been given before I get to Tanzania but considering how tongue tied I get trying to speak foreign languages I’ll probably still get laughed at.

Either way, I’m screwed.

(The title means ‘Do you speak English?’ in Swahili by the way).