Dear Emily,
I’ve been living in a province in the north for the last 28 years, but neither I nor my husband learned to speak the language. When I first started making friends, I would ask what this or that word meant.
But soon I just stopped asking, as it was one-sided. They wouldn’t offer translations. They always invite me to go with them, but they keep speaking the language, often the whole night. When I’m the one driving, I feel like a driver as I feel left out.
I’m starting to feel offended. I’ve asked them a few times to speak Filipino, but they don’t, or won’t.
MISUNDERSTOOD
Twenty-eight years a resident, and can’t speak or understand the dialect? How is that possible? You must have learned at least to say thank you, how much, how are you, or go jump?
When you started living there and hearing what seemed Greek to you, weren’t you in the least interested or curious to know if they could be maligning you to your face with a smile? That should already have been an incentive for you to learn it.
No one expected you to recite the Constitution in their dialect, but couldn’t you have started your education with your house helpers, or just made an effort to learn one word or phrase a day just to move along in the conversation department?
What was it about the dialect that blocked your mind from learning? Were you like this guy in New York who, with his wife, refused to speak a word of Tagalog in front of their kids because it wasn’t French and considered it a “useless” language?
These people you’ve met must be in a quandary at how you’ve stayed ignorant of their dialect all these years. It would have flattered them no end if you made some effort to come up with some fairly common phrases or at least understood key words in the conversation—without, for decades, still asking them incessantly what they meant.
Think about it. The beauty of learning is that tiny matter of wanting to assimilate without being forced to.
E-mail
emarcelo@inquirer.com.ph or emarcelo629@gmail.com