Adrienne vagyok. Most én magyarul tanulok. (I am Adrienne. Now I am learning Hungarian)

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” –Charlemagne

You know those reusable bags Lululemon gives to customers with their purchases? The red, black and white ones that have all those nice affirming and uplifting words and phrases plastered all over them? Of course I never shopped there myself, but people would use these bags as their lunch bags and, as such, would provide me with fodder for the bus ride to school. There is one phrase on the bag that has stuck with me over the years: Do one thing that scares you everyday.

Well guess what? Right now, here in a new country with a new language, I am doing just that! Every trip to the bakery or the pub or the butcher or the cafe is doing one thing that scares me everyday. Let me explain.

There is a stifling insecurity that comes with making attempts to learn AND use a new language. Every potential interaction with someone becomes wracked with the fear that you’re going to sound stupid butchering the grammar and pronunciation of: Kérek egy fél kiló szalonnat? (May I have a half a kilogram of bacon?) Or: Mennybe kerül egy manikur? (How much is a manicure?)

I could very easily make due in English here in Budapest but that is not why I’m here now, is it. I am here to learn the language WELL; to be able to not only comfortably meet my basic needs like bacon, but have conversations about history, politics, food, to make jokes, read books, etc. I have met a number of expats now who have been here for multiple years and, while they have definitely acquired some Hungarian listening and reading skills, they have not developed the skill to be a part of a dialogue in Hungarian, to put sentences together on their own, due to not practicing with Hungarians.

Dr. Pimsleur, the language instructor famous for his unique pedagogical methods that involve repeating and repeating and repeating, posits that it takes around a year and a half to obtain a good working use of a second language. But he also found through his years of experience that successfully learning a language requires a strong intrinsic motivation; external motivation alone will not produce good speakers of a second language (Beuke, 2013) (think about all those high school students in Canada who did twelve years of French class in school and came out still not speaking French at an acceptable level to meet their needs in a French speaking country…I’ve seen this and it’s shocking).

I have pushed myself everyday while here to practice doing all my interactions with Hungarians in Hungarian as much as possible. And it is a PUSH. Believe me, I’d LOVE to take the easy way out but my sheer force of determination to learn this language compels me to make a fool of myself everyday, much to the chagrin of the snooty hipster bartenders to whom I seem to be perpetually invisible (the art of good bartending service has not been mastered here quite yet). But I FORCE those little skinny-jean-sporting shits to let me order in Hungarian. Oh, they try and switch to English but I don’t cave. NEM!

Before each interaction there is a mini-discussion in my brain that goes something like: “Adrienne, you can do this….you need to do this… you need to practice. You sit around working alone all day on your laptop and if you don’t practice when you get the chance how will you ever learn??“….then I work out the phrase I want to say in Hungarian in my head and repeat it a couple times out loud to myself. Once in the store (a boltban) there is first the greeting portion of the interaction. Everyone says hello and goodbye to each other all the time with varying degrees of formality depending on the situation. Each degree of formality and in each context has its own phrases for hellos and goodbyes. I’ve started to become quite comfortable with these. Then comes the brief pause as I steady my language-learning brain. I breathe in. I say out loud, “okay”, as if to say, “here goes nothing.” Then it happens, the moment, the decision turning point, the climax. Hungarian words that mean “I am asking for a kilogram of chicken!!!”, some of which are usually incorrectly pronounced, ejaculate from my lips. Lo and behold, I have in my hand what I wanted and I leave the store with an immense feeling of achievement coupled with a need for a nap.

There is a thrill in engaging in an entire interaction, however small, in whatever new language you are trying to learn. It is those moments that provide feedback about how much you actually have learned! It is those moments that fuel the fire to continue to learn and try!

This morning I experienced a very pronounced version of what I’ve described and the dialogue that goes on in my head in every situation. I went for an early morning walk around City Park (Városlíget) and it’s castles:

…and I noticed there was an extremely large festival being set up. I couldn’t tell exactly what the festival was from looking at the stalls….I could see there were multiple performance stages, various food and drink booths and that’s about it. I thought it might be something worth checking out later in the day but I wanted to know what it was. Here’s how the dialogue in my head went:

Me: I could ask one of these people milling about what festival this is.

Myself: ah shit it’s too early in the morning to practice Hungarian and for the level of anxiety, albeit a brief moment of anxiety, to bother trying to ask someone what this is….I’ll just google it when I get home.

Me: Adrienne, these are the moments you can practice! They are very few right now so you should just suck it up and try and ask someone!

Myself: Okay fine…. I guess I would ask it like, “Mi ez a fesztivál?” (What is this festival)

Me: Yes that sounds like it might get the point across. Go for it!

Myself: (to a security guard) Elnézést (excuse me), mi ez a fesztivál?

Security guard: (says something in Hungarian I didn’t understand).

Myself: Mit jelent? (what does that mean?)

Security guard: (pointing to a live bull tied to a tree (or so I thought) saying something in Hungarian I still did not really understand).

Myself: (to the guard in English) ohhhhhh like a beef festival?

Security guard: (nods) Igen. (yes).

Myself: (to the guard) like ‘moooooo’?

Security guard: Igen.

Myself: oh okay! Kösönöm szépen (thank you very much), viszlát (goodbye)!

So that was that and I felt great that I was able to understand. However, I did indeed google the festival when I arrived home and no, it was not a beef festival, it was the fűzdefeszt, or the annual craft beer festival….but to be fair they also sell a lot of BBQ at this particular festival.

At least I tried and now I know (story of my life) about the annual craft beer fest (which I will likely never attend).

And now….

Anthropology 101, a class I took waaaay back when when I was an undergrad in Camrose, Alberta, offered some nice, tidy components that cross-cut every society in different ways to make up ‘culture’. Some of these, that I can recall off the top of my head, included: kinship; reciprocity; language; physical structures (houses, meeting spaces, etc); material objects (tools and clothes, etc); food and drink; work; leisure; art/music/literature; normative gender structures and associated practices; spirituality and rituals; governance structures…to name a few… it was so long ago so I’m sure this is not a comprehensive list (I would cite something if I had my old textbooks with me so don’t get your citation-police undies in a knot).

Exploring these various elements of a culture can provide not only superficial descriptions of things like how to prepare gulyas (or ‘goulash’ for the anglos) but can also lead to a more in-depth insight into the values, beliefs, and worldviews of a society. In other words, the list above are ways that the values, beliefs, and worldviews of a society manifest in daily life, or the ways they are ‘acted out’…. we ‘act out’ culture everyday, all of us. The components of culture listed above, then, may be considered the portals to the ‘soul’ of a society.

This blog post will be the first of, what I hope becomes kind of a sub-series of posts relevant to different elements of culture, like language, that will help me in thinking more clearly about the big questions I have about Hungary: “What is this place? Who are these people? What defines them? And What values, beliefs, and worldviews underlie this society?”. I find myself bursting with thoughts around these more broad concepts and I can’t figure out a way to fit it all in with the ‘travel stories’-kind of posts. Alas, this is my attempt at segregating for simplicity’s sake.

Disclaimer:

***I have no intention of this being academic (for gawd’s sakes I have ENOUGH of that pressure in my life) so it will simply be based on my own observations, experiences and interpretations, mashed in with some discussions with people, maybe some resources here and there (likely not peer-reviewed…GASP). I’m not aiming for rigorous ethnographic exploration, by any means. Everything probably won’t be underpinned by a cohesive, consistent ontological and epistemological perspective. This is one place where I will feel at liberty to be inconsistent, on-the-fence, wrong, assuming, etc. Basically I’m going to people-watch and tell you about it in a fun way.***

References:

Beuke, C. 2013. How to learn a language: Paul Pimsleur’s forgotten wisdom. Psychology today. Available from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/youre-hired/201301/how-learn-language