In Real Life Now

You can study all you want, but there are just some things you don´t pick up in a classroom. I consider my comand of basic spanish to be pretty good and I´ve had teachers that did a great job of introducing cultural aspects too, but now that I´m in Spain, there are still some important things I´m learning on the fly because the real world is trully the only place to complete your education.

Last night as I spent the evening with a handful of students from South America that I met in my hostel, we were engaging in a conversation that cxonstantly switched between languages. I asked one of the native spanish speakers where he was from… and got an unexpected result. First he looked at me in confusion and then everybody else teased me because I had used a form of the question that was so formal that they didn´t realize what I wanted to know at first. The way people engage in real life is not equivalent to the textbook! I was told not to use the informal tu form with any strangers…. but among young people here it´s always used. Somebody I don´t even know just used it to address me mere minutes ago! (he laughed because I used a grammatically incorrect response though).

Studying human interaction can be a life-long pursuit for us all, especially when crossing borders and learning new languages! It´s great seeing this with my own eyes and learning be doing (and by making mistakes).

Beyond me… bilingual characters

I am fascinated with languages. I think some of my previous posts have made that clear. However, I myself, am struggling to gain fluency in a second language, though I do like to gather random phrases from other languages. It’s fun to have the ability to communicate with a larger percentage of the Earth’s population. So of course, I’m jealous of people with complete fluency in multiple languages. I tend to like giving my characters abilities that I wish I had ( like hand-eye-coordination), but I have never written a bilingual character. I fear that it might add a level of complexity that I can’t handle. 

I would have to deal with showing how the character uses her second language. That is not an element that can simply be claimed and then ignored. Words from the secondary language would need to be artfully laced into the dialogue. I think those words would best be used in exclamations and under-the-breath muttering, but once again the concept of balance comes into play. Too many words in a foreign language and a series of risks develops. First, readers that don’t understand the words will be confused and lose interest, the dialogue could get weighed down with explanations, and the speed of the plot could get dramatically slowed down. Therefore, bilingual characters bring with them the unique challenge of needing to be developed with a sparse sprinkling of words, like appropriately balanced salt use.

In fantasy and science fiction genres, a whole new level can be added to the challenge if the second language that the character communicates in is not English. In that case, the writer has to develop and keep straight a whole vocabulary of their own invention. The complexity of that process is almost too much to handle. In the development of Avatar for the silver screen, a whole team of people contributed to inventing the alien language that was used. There’s a reason that masters of belingual worlds like JRR Tolkien gain places of honor in our literary tradtion.

For now, my characters speak english, only English. However, maybe one day in the future, I will be ready to hurtle myself to the next level with a character that has also acheived a level beyond mine.