I don't like my mind right now...
Heavy - Chester Bennington (RIP) for Linkin Park
My LinkedIn bio goes..." Something, something.... blah, blah, something, aspiring polyglot..."
Languages have always been a part of me...so much so that I'm now a fluent speaker of two and an avid learner of one, well on my way to becoming a polyglot (this is on my bucket list) – it sort of started as a trifling interest, a hobby... but in the past few years I've become more intentional about it.
What kindled my learning, what really got me going, was the fact that I already had one European language in my repertoire, Russian, which I picked up from living in Eastern Europe for the first 10 years of my life, and still speak reasonably fluently...considering that I've barely spoken it in 19 years.
Language learning now comes fairly easy to me and I've picked up a few along the way; I had always wanted to learn German and I started with it 9 years ago – I've done pretty well with learning German considering that I never got any formal training nor did I enrol in Goethe, and I'm currently at the point on my learning curve where I'd only make significant strides by speaking with natives or folks who studied it formally.
Then there's French – so with French it's like I've always known it but never really known it; I was quite good at it in secondary school but never really gave it that push that's needed to achieve anything worthwhile – I gave German that push...mais jamais Francais (but never French).
Several times over the course of my life I've used my knowledge of languages to break the ice in conversations or dispel erroneous notions about who black people are – it always works, like magic; it worked on multiple occasions during my time in Russia where people would meet me at the store, in the park, on the Metro (subway) with my family, and expect the worst because of a certain pre-conceived notion they had, but then there'd be an abrupt, noticeable change in attitude, once I'd speak their language...and they'd stop, and be forced to re-evaluate all they'd been inundated with – they were, inundated with a lot of inane stuff.
Proof of that is one time in Moscow, at the church we attended (it had several branches, but this particular one was an all-black church), my siblings and I were playing in the corridor (it was a very long corridor, the building used to be an officer's mess) with this Russian boy and at the point where we had to go in, he turned to me, having had a good time with genuinely cool unpretentious people, asked me, in slight bewilderment..." Pochyemoo anyee tibya nye milee..." That translates roughly to 'Why weren't you washed' (when you were born – which was the unsaid, implied part).
For the life of me I can't remember what I said to him, but such was the level of ignorance that existed at that time in those parts...this was maybe 1997 or 1998.
Quite random – making friends and influencing people
TL: DR
Once upon a time I was in a youth hostel in New Jersey with an interesting mix of people, having dinner in the common room – there were 3 Ukrainian guys, a Pole, a Persian, an Asian Canadian, a dude from Hong Kong (or was it Taiwan? I know it wasn't mainland China) and a Frenchman at the table (there was also this Peruvian duo who kept offering me alcohol seating a meter or two behind us, stringing their guitars);
Long story short, I was the only person at that table who connected with everyone else, even though we all spoke English – the Ukrainians spoke Russian so we did that (they would later ask if I wanted to come with them to a Ukrainian restaurant in Connecticut), the Polish guy schooled or worked in Germany and was really impressed with my knowledge of German (he sent me a LinkedIn request at some point in the conversation), the Persian guy liked how I corrected someone at the table who said ISIS are his people (apparently because he thought the guy was an Arab) – I explained to the guy who said it that ISIS came out of Iraq and Syria (the name is literally an abbreviation of that) and not Iran, plus Iranians don't speak Arabic but Farsi (It felt super cool explaining that).
