Gist in language

Lisbon, 2018

The photo was taken on holiday on the one afternoon I took the train from Cascais to the Lisbon tango festival.

My husband starts when I tell him what he has just said in Portuguese  - when, reluctanty and rarely he can be persuaded to indulge me.  We have known each other for twenty-five years.  I have learned Spanish in a fraction of that time and yet I still can't speak Portuguese. But he still won't speak it yet he has kept his nationality, living here for over thirty years.  Figure that one out if you can. I wouldn't say he is torn between amusement, compassion and resolution.  He is entirely resolute and fairly amused. 

He also looks at me suspiciously.  To what deviant am I tied? I understand too much Portuguese for someone who has just listened in with half an ear, occasionally, to one half of an infrequent phone conversation, years ago, when his parents were alive.  But while I can't string a sentence together I do seem to understand quite a bit.   

I could retort that he isn't exactly normal himself.  Being from Lisbon he only says half the word and curtly at that. If all Portuguese people sounded like my husband, one might expect them to be policemen or judges.  

I don't think he has never not mocked the Brazilian accent. The impression one is given is "not serious people", the way some stern Spaniards will talk about fun-loving Andalusians: amigos del bar. 

At the same time, he says that it is easier for people like me, who have Italian, to imitate Brazilian portuguese. I think he just wants an excuse to laugh.

Dad was always surprised how much German I understand.  I get the gist.  I did a couple of years of German but lived in Germany off and on for years, albeit surrounded by British people and services.  The sound of the language, the intonation, is entirely familiar.  

Dad, born in 1940 had a governess in 1947.  They had moved to Germany where my grandfather was a policeman. One day he was watching some boys playing football. Hinter! one of them shouted.  Dad got the gist, the ball had gone behind him or behind something and he was to send it back.  Conveniently, for his first word it was also, the only point.  My grandfather learned German in his study, to use at work and with German friends, which was unusual at the time.  But he never spoke it with the fluency dad acquired who picked it up, playing. He was never sure about grammar. He knew how the sentence was meant to sound or feel but he couldn't tell you if the grammar was correct or if it was then why it was. But how many native speakers, who learned the same way, can? 

When I started to use Italian for work, I was dismayed to realise I would have to use "lei", (you, polite form) with phone clients.  I had never done so, having picked up Italian with friends.  

The first Italian word I learned was BINARIO. I saw it capitalised like that when the train stopped briefly after we crossed the French-Italian border. I had never heard of the place. The next place was also BINARIO, an adjunct station, then, just as we have Farnborough and Farnborough North. Several BINARIO'S later the penny finally dropped that the word meant "platform". Context is all. (From The Italian Connection)

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Dehors, draussen, fuera, fuori, fora, buiten.  The last one, the outlier, is Dutch and that's why I don't speak it. Also, the Dutch have some of the most convincing English accents in the world. On a NATO army base I once knew a tall, curly-haired Mancunian and his sister only to find him in Dutch uniform one day. 

The Portuguese and German words I had to look up.  The German I recognised and the Portuguese, if I had heard it in context, would likely have guessed, being so close to Spanish. Bridging similar language is largely about spotting patterns and remembering exceptions.  

Letto (bed) in italian is cama in Spanish.    I remember trying to describe a guy in a milonga in Buenos Aires to the woman next to me.  I was trying to say The one in the grey t-shirt, but maglietta doesn't translate to camiseta.  Learning with context means you have memorable hooks on which to hang that experience and that word. 

From maglietta to maglia (Italian: pullover), don't ask me whey.  But maglia doesn't translate well to suéter.   And maleta (Spanish: suitcase) isn't similar to valigia. Va bene?  = ¿Está bien?But you can make a sort of train even of the exceptions 

Gist in language is about getting the main point -  recall this was the dictionary definition of the word.  If you can understand "dehors" you know where to start looking.  The context will probably provide the clue as to whether there is an event out there or whether you are supposed to go out there.  If someone is shouting Dehors! Dehors! and pointing and pushing you, you get the message and that word will be retained with a memorable emotional, near physical punch. That's the difference between learning immersively versus studying a language. 

It doesn't matter how you communicate, just that you do.  Most people I meet are far too hard on themselves about learning another language.  Most communication is not verbal, so most communication you can already do. Language is the bonus, the detail; often essential, frequently useful but not necessarily the main event. And, depending on your interlocutor, you don't need much language to radically transform your communication experience.  If you keep that in mind, the rest will come.

I think beginners can get understandably easily discouraged, as beginners, if a native speaker is impatient or unpleasant, or, perhaps more likely in Scotland, they just don't seem able to modify their accent. Even some Parliamentarians.  Even when asked repeatedly.  

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Looking for a single-word tag for these posts, I asked Chat GPT for One word that describes "learning by doing", "picking it up" "self taught", "getting the gist"

"Intuitive", it replied.