It's now Sunday night here in St. Petersburg. Sorry for the delay in giving you the exciting sequel to the previous story, but things have been quite busy. We moved into our new apartment this past week and somehow writing witty bits about shopping didn't make it to the top of the list.
But permit me to whet your appetite for more juicy tidbits to come with this humorous antidote. Tonight we had our friend Luda over for dinner. Luda speaks impeccable English and is fast becoming a good friend of our family. She has also been a great help when we have language questions and are searching for cultural insight.
Anyway, the subject of learning language came up tonight after dinner and we began to share our funny stories of making complete idiots of ourselves. Just down the road from our new apartment is a store like I described in Shopping in Tongues Part 1 only a good bit larger. I've already been in there a number of times, and each time I go in all of the ladies behind the counter get a "Mona Lisa grin" on their faces. I'm fast becoming a celebrity there I imagine. I can just here them every time they see me coming, "Hey, Lena, here comes that crazy American who always points and mispronounces things, isn't he just the cutest thing?"
I was regaling Luda with my tales of idiocy there tonight when I described to her a situation that had confused me a couple days ago. I was at this little store ordering some juice. I asked for orange juice (appelsinyi), then I asked for some apple juice (yablochni), which caught me some interesting looks and an immediate correction. Well, when I told Luda what I had called the apple juice she nearly had a conniption fit. As it turns out yablochni, putting the emphasis on the emboldened syllable, sounds dangerously close to a very very very bad word in Russian. Luda immediately corrected me informing me that the proper way to say the word is yablochni.
I assume, given all of the other crazy mispronunciations that I've said, that I'll be forgiven for this...ahem...little social error that I made. But these past two weeks have been a profound learning and humbling experience for me thus far. It is frustrating not being able to say what I want to say, and when I do think I'm saying the right thing wind up either nearly cussing out a shop clerk or providing dinner table antidotes when they go home at night.
Well, that's all for now. Part II will be on its way soon. I promise.
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2 comments:
Heehee, I've done that a few times too, accidentally saying (or almost saying) a really bad word by mispronouncing something. We have a French intern at work, and one day she was trying to teach me the word for "book cradle" (something to display an open book) and when I tried to repeat the word, she informed me that I was actually inventing a word that sounded like the worst type of a prostitute.
I also accidentally told her "I'll eat myself when you leave" instead of "I'll miss you when you leave!"
"Hey, Lena, here comes that crazy American who always points and mispronounces things, isn't he just the cutest thing?"
Heeyyy, wait a minute! At first I thought that "he" was a typo, but now I realize - I'm talking to Thomas, not Cristy! *disgruntled at being confused*
In England we had the same "tell the person what you want" shops, especially if I went to the cheaper market stalls instead of the grocery store. But even though I spoke the language, and even though I could point and say "Some of those peppers there, the green ones," I always got so flustered by the man shouting at me (though it was friendly booming, "Whakinae geffer'ee, luv? What else?") and the perceived impatience of him and the people in line behind me, that I nearly always forgot something important. "D'oh! I should have gotten some cucumbers! And I totally forgot to pick out any fruit!" I usually just ended up going to the slightly more expensive shops where I could browse at my leisure, pick up the fruit and examine it, see unexpected things and think, "That looks nice! I haven't had plums in a while!" etc.
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