As most of you know, I visited France last week for a Bethesda event. This was only my second foreign trip in my lifetime and my first trip to a country where English wasn’t the native language. I know the basics like ‘merci’, ‘s’il vous plaît’, ‘fromage’, and of course, ‘voulez vous coucher avec moi’. Unless I was politely asking a cheese maker to sleep with me, I was going to struggle if placed in any situation where I needed to communicate.
The Bethesda event was attended by various other nationalities such as German and Spanish. There were a couple of occasions whereby neither myself nor the person I was approaching/being approached by understood each other and we reverted to international sign language – asking for a lighter for example…just hold out your fist and wiggle your thumb up and down whilst having a cigarette dangling from your mouth. But non-English speaking foreigners were few and far between and this has always made me feel a little ashamed.
I hated French lessons when I was in school and I hated German. I used to take the arrogant stance of “when am I ever going to need it?” and dismissed the classes as boring and unimportant. In hindsight, not learning another language is something I deeply regret.
This is a European website and the nationalities of our community members are diverse and yet it still amazes me that you can all read and speak English, perfectly.
When I first joined TSA, before I became staff, I was an active Killzone 2 player and even made the clan. It was a clan made up of people from England, Germany, Norway, Denmark and more. Chatting to members such as Vandix, Yogh_Wayne, Radboud and pOOpInFlames was easy because they all spoke English. Poop even apologised for his English on several occasions and this is something that a lot of foreign people do.
I don’t know about anyone else but I feel extremely embarrassed when people apologise for something like their ability to speak multiple languages. Your English is 100x better than my German, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Dutch or any other language on this planet. If anyone needs to apologise, it’s me!
Learning another language, especially when you don’t visit its native country on a regular basis (or ever), is an impressive and enviable skill. It can take years of dedication to master.
Our very own Kovacs is a bilingual fella’. With over 5 years “off and on” of learning Japanese under his belt, he can now speak and understand the language of the Land of the Rising Sun (although if you ask him he’ll be very modest about it). 5 years! That’s some serious determination on his or anyone’s part that decides to take on another tongue.
I’m slightly worried that the majority of the ‘Western World’ have accepted the fact that English has become one of, if not the, most widely spoken languages in the world and therefore have not taken it upon themselves to learn another and, yes, I’m including myself in that group.
That’s not to say that everyone has an arrogant attitude towards it. A person’s drive to learn another language is influenced by all manner of things such as family location, job opportunities or just natural curiosity/interest.
So, to all you multi-lingual clever cloggae (plural of cloggs, of course), I have the utmost respect and admiration for your skill and please do not apologise to anyone about the “state of your English”.