Imagine yourself living in your own town, carrying on with your life, and suddenly someone tries to talk to you, but you don’t understand a single word of what they are saying. Then, they get frustrated and leave. She doesn’t even say “sorry” or “thank you”. How rude! But now, more people are showing up in your town with the same sort of behaviour. A few can say a few words, but still, they don’t comply with the cultural aspects of your language, like saying kind words for example. It starts to get confusing, people can’t understand each other. Sometimes even irritating. And then you bump into someone that speaks to you in a nice way, doesn’t speak perfectly, but says “thank you”, “excuse me”, “sorry” and “welcome”. Finally! Someone here is making an effort!
Well, that’s the situation locals have to live daily. Get UAE, for example, where I live now. Around 90% of the population is a foreigner. Ok, there is a huge amount of this percentage who speaks Arabic. But there is another percentage who speaks any other language like French, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Tagalog, Hindi, Urdu, etc I could fill the page with many other languages, but let’s stop here. In the UAE we still have an option. We don’t need to learn Arabic in the beginning, instead, we can communicate in English, which is a much easier language. Phew! But even though many people are still afraid of learning another language.
I spoke about how a local might feel when expats are in their home town living, working and etc but do not communicate with them. Now, let’s talk about you. Imagine you being a foreigner. Imagine you trying to communicate with the bank, you need to open a bank account, but they don’t understand you. You get frustrated and go back home without your bank account. You want to buy flour, only white flour. I have some stories: My sister in law went to live in China, she spent a very long time trying to buy plain white flour. She would buy anything but flour. How frustrating! Also, she went for a massage, and the lady kept telling her to wash, she didn’t want to. They couldn’t understand each other, the situation got a bit tense, and the lady grabbed her by the arm and started pulling her. Apparently it is customary to wash before a massage in China and she did not know that. With me, something similar happened. My husband and I went to Slovakia and we spent the whole trip having to drink sparkling water, which we don’t like, simply because we could never find the still one. Oh, and at that time there were no smartphones and easy internet around.
Ok, these are mild things. You can live your life drinking sparkling water for a while, it’s ok. But if you need to take a cab? How will you tell the driver where to go? Oh, now it’s easy, show on your phone. Fine. If you are in a car crash? How do you communicate? Web translators? Oh no! They don’t always do the work. They get so many words wrong. And at the hospital? At your kids’ school? It is so frustrating to not be able to express yourself the way you want to and always having to rely on someone else’s assistance! Let me tell you a more serious story. A friend didn’t understand the doctor’s instructions, nor the pharmacy’s. She also couldn’t read in English. She gave her son medicine to lower his temperature. The doctor had said, “if necessary”. But he didn’t need it. He ended up in the hospital again.
But these are only stories to illustrate a bit of the life of expatriates and locals.
To be honest with you I think, and I always tell people, when you speak the local language life is easier. You don’t get homesick so often. You can talk to people, learn about new cultures. You are able to go around town, go to your kid’s school meetings, presentations, chat with other parents, make new friends. Live your life the way you should. You don’t get that horrible frustrating feeling.
Learning a new language might seem very hard and sometimes even impossible. But it’s not. And it doesn’t matter how old you are. Obviously it is a lot easier to learn when you are a kid, but even after ’40s or ’50s, even ’60s we can learn something new. Even a new language. With dedication, you will be speaking it in no time!