Foreign Language Fatigue

Even polyglots gotta stop somewhere

Dr Livci

wrote,

[…E]ven if Russians and spoke English like Western Europeans I would still try and conduct all my affairs in Russian regardless. I was in Lithuania a few years ago and Lithuanians generally all speak decent English but I only spoke Russian with them. It doesn't even make sense that I did that, I just didn't want to speak English, nor did I have any interest in learning some Lithuanian. In one instance a Lithuanian girl told me she didn't speak Russian when I was trying to order orange juice so I left and bought my juice somewhere else even though I could have used English lol. Like I didn't I want to validate her knowledge of English because I oppose globohomo Americanization but also I had no interest in learning a modest few words in her native tounge. The outcome was having to order orange juice somewhere else. My Russian friends and relatives would say quite correctly that I was acting like to a stupid American. Not so my much in my refusal to use English of course but because I could ideoligize ordering orange juice.

The good doctor has a level of Russian vastly superior to mine. Unlike him, I never got to live in a Russian-speaking country. I haven’t spoken Russian since the nineties, and the days of me reading raw Russian are also far behind me. These days I machine-trashlate Russian, fixing errors by comparing the output to the original. I still remember enough Russian to spot obvious oddities. If my Russian were up to Dr Livci’s level (I wish!), would I have done the same in Lithuania? (Never been there either, even though Lithuanian does kind of interest me as a bearer of what I call the Old Indo-European Spirit - as a sort of spoken Sanskrit - like Russian itself!)

Dr Livci got me thinking about a phenomenon I’ve noticed among high-level language learners and polyglots. I didn’t have a name for it until tonight when Foreign Language Fatigue popped into my head on the way back from dinner. I’m running out of time, so I’ll shorten it to FLF.

The Chinese character for ‘tired’ in the calligraphy of 懷素 Huaisu (737-799). One might trashlate it as ‘skin disease’ because it is a combination of 疒 ‘disease’ and 皮 ‘skin’, but that’s not what it means. In Chinese, ‘tired’ sounds like ‘skin’, so ‘tired’ was written as ‘illness [that sounds like] skin’. Koreans borrowed the Chinese word for ‘tired’, even though they already had their own native word for ‘tired’ (지치다 chichhida), which makes me wonder if they perceived some aspect of Chinese culture as tiring. The Japanese and Vietnamese used the character to write their unrelated native words for ‘tired’: tsukareru and mệt.

Here are three cases of FLF involving people I’ve encountered.

The first case involves a master of a Third World language. Which is just one of several languages they’ve studied at a high level. They often spend time in the Third World country next door to the Third World country they know best. Yet as far as I know, they don’t know even a word of that neighbor’s language despite being a frequent visitor. Maybe they have FLF. Maybe after doing so many languages and expending a lifetime of energy on their fave, they’re like, that’s it. No more.

The second case involves a professional translator of Germanic languages plus French. No other Romance languages, even though they could use French as a bridge to them (as I have). Why stop at French? I never asked them, but knowing them, my guess is that what they want to read is in French, and there’s nothing equally interesting in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or Romanian that hasn’t already been translated. So maybe they don’t really have a case of FLF. Then again, their love of anime hasn’t led to them getting far in Japanese. They might really be exhausted. And that’s okay. There doesn’t seem to be any untranslated anime they want to see. Wait … “untranslated”? Maybe the deal with Japanese is the same as with Italian, etc. I’ve just gone in a circle. Time to move on.

The third case involves a polyglot of non-European languages. Their speciality languages are often learned as sets: e.g., if you learn A, you may end up learning B too. They’ve got A, C, D, and E down, but no interest in B even though it’s between A and C, and it’s a big language. And even though B is relatively easy to learn after one has mastered A. I used to think that this was a case of FLF - that they were drained after learning A, C, and D which are all hard. But years later, they learned E which is also hard! Meaning they couldn’t be too tired. I never got to know them well and can only speculate. Maybe they had a bad experience involving B. If they did, I get it.

If any of the above have FLF, I get it. I’m getting old. And I’ve worked with so many languages. So one more couldn’t hurt, right? Yet when I was in Budapest on business, I just went globohomo and used English. Although I’ve messed around with Hungarian, I was too chicken to try using it in real life. Dare I say I feel I’ve earned the right to stop?