The Best of Me(69)
Now for the traveling American there’s less of a need for phrase books. Not only do we expect everyone to speak our language; we expect everyone to be fluent. I rarely hear an American vacationer say to a waiter or shopkeeper in Europe, “Your English is so good.” Rather, we act as if it were part of his job, like carrying a tray or making change. In this respect, the phrase books and audio programs are an almost charming throwback, a suggestion that the traveler put himself out there, that he open himself to criticism and not the person who’s just trying to scrape by selling meatballs in Bumfucchio, Italy.
One of the things I like about Tokyo is the constant reinforcement one gets for trying. “You are very skilled at Japanese,” everyone keeps telling me. I know people are just being polite, but it spurs me on, just as I hoped to be spurred on in Germany. To this end, I’ve added a second audio program, one by a man named Michel Thomas, who works with a couple of students, a male and a female. At the start, he explains that German and English are closely related and thus have a lot in common. In one language, the verb is “to come,” and in the other it’s “kommen.” English “to give” is German “geben.” Boston’s “That is good” is Berlin’s “Das ist gut.” It’s an excellent way to start and leaves the listener thinking, Hey, Ich kann do dis.
Unlike the nameless instructor in Pimsleur, Herr Thomas explains things—the fact, for example, that if there are two verbs in a German sentence, one of them comes at the end. He doesn’t give you phrases to memorize. In fact, he actively discourages study. “How would you say, ‘Give it to me’?” he asks the female student. She and I correctly answer, and then he turns to the male. “Now try ‘I would like for you to give it to me.’”
Ten minutes later, we’ve graduated to “I can’t give it to you today, because I cannot find it.” To people who speak nothing but English, this might seem easy enough, but anyone else will appreciate how difficult it is: negatives, multiple uses of “it,” and the hell that breaks loose following the German “because.” The thrill is that you’re actually figuring it out on your own. You’re engaging with another language, not just parroting it.
Walking through the grocery store with Pimsleur und Thomas on my iPod, I picture myself pulling up to my Munich hotel with my friend Ulrike, who’s only ever known me to say “cesarean section” and “the person I am with until someone better comes along.”
“Bleiben wir hier heute Abend?” I plan to say. “Wieviele N?chte? Zwei? Das ist teuer, nicht wahr?”
She’s a wonderful woman, Ulrike, and if that’s all I get out of this—seeing the shock register on her face as I natter on—it’ll be well worth my month of study.
Perhaps that evening after dinner, I’ll turn on the TV in my hotel room. And maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll understand one out of every two hundred words. The trick, ultimately, is to not let that discourage me, to think, Oh well. That’s more than I understood the last time I watched TV in Germany. That was a few years back, in Stuttgart. There was a television mounted on a perch in my room, and I turned it on to find a couple having sex. This wasn’t on pay-per-view but just regular Sunday night TV. And I mean these two were really going at it. If I’d had the Lonely Planet guide to German, I might have recognized “Please don’t stop!” “That was amazing/weird.” With Herr Thomas, I could understand “I just gave it to you” and, with Pimsleur, “I would like to come now.”
I watched this couple for a minute or two, and then I advanced to the next channel, which was snowed out unless you paid for it. What could they possibly be doing here that they weren’t doing for free on the other station? I asked myself. Turning each other inside out?
And isn’t that the joy of foreign travel—there’s always something to scratch your head over. You don’t have to be fluent in order to wonder. Rather, you can sit there with your mouth open, not exactly dumb, just speechless.
Laugh, Kookaburra
I’ve been to Australia twice so far, but according to my father, I’ve never actually seen it. He made this observation at the home of my cousin Joan, whom he and I visited just before Christmas one year, and it came on the heels of an equally aggressive comment. “Well,” he said, “David’s a better reader than he is a writer.” This from someone who hasn’t opened a book since Dave Stockton’s Putt to Win, in 1996. He’s never been to Australia either. Never even come close.
“No matter,” he told me. “In order to see the country, you have to see the countryside, and you’ve only been to Sydney.”
“And Melbourne. And Brisbane,” I said. “And I have too gone into the country.”
“Like hell you have.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get Hugh on the phone. He’ll tell you. He’ll even send you pictures.”
Joan and her family live in Binghamton, New York. They don’t see my father and me that often, so it was pretty lousy to sit at their table, he and I bickering like an old married couple. Ashamed by the bad impression we were making, I dropped the countryside business, and as my dad moved on to other people’s shortcomings, I thought back to the previous summer and my daylong flight from London to Sydney. I was in Australia on business, and because someone else was paying for the ticket and it would be possible to stop in Japan on the way home, Hugh joined me. This is not to put Australia down, but we’d already gone once before. Then too, spend that much time on a plane, and you’re entitled to a whole new world when you step off at the other end—the planet Mercury, say, or at the very least Mexico City. For an American, though, Australia seems pretty familiar: same wide streets, same office towers. It’s Canada in a thong, or that’s the initial impression.