I was hoping you'd say that

Learning a language is a bloody hard thing to do. I should know, I’ve had a crack at it before, and only partially succeeded. Now I am back in the position of grappling ineptly with words that feel foreign and furry on my tongue, and sound about as intelligible as a teething toddler.

While I cause momentary fits of hilarity amongst my colleagues by testing out my best colloquialisms, “hey, how you doin’?”, I make secret pledges to myself to be a better student and actually study some of the Bangla grammar books that lie around the house so I can stun them one day with my syntactical mastery.

Of course we both know the pledges are empty, but I have a remarkably well-practiced ability to deceive myself even when I’m not really deceiving myself. This could have once been seen as a quality to be laughed at in the self-deprecating way we Aussies take such a shine to if only George Dubya hadn’t proved so proficient at it.

In any case, it’s not all doom and gloom because I seem to have crossed a bridge in the language barrier without even trying. While on the bus to Chittagong from Dhaka once again, I caught myself crinkling my brow in annoyance as the passenger beside me explained painstakingly that he was half way, and we’d stopped for food, and he wasn’t sure what time the bus would arrive, but it would probably be after five.

And then the passenger across the aisle had the exact same conversation two minutes later, as did the guy in front of him, which was incredibly annoying when I was trying to decide if I agreed with Clive James’ point that you have to at least consider that the use of nuclear weapons to bring World War II to a sudden close may have been worth it (considered and rejected). What, wait a minute… what?

Eureka! I thought, I’ve finally cracked it! The equivalent in learning a language of breaking the sound barrier on land, I believe, is that moment when you can’t help but overhear other people’s mundane conversations despite your very best efforts not to.

Since that enlightening bus journey I’ve listened in to the people downstairs discuss the beans that needed washing before dinner; heard my neighbour in the next apartment organise a holiday; and laughed as a CNG wallah tried to coax me into his cab by explaining that his CNG was simply beautiful and cleaned just for me that very morning!

Frustratingly this sudden ‘giant leap’ for Lyrian has not translated into an increase in my oral vocabulary; it appears I can only understand the words that other people say but can’t actually say them myself. When that happens I will be able to write another post heralding Stage Two in the journey towards counting Bangla as a language I have ‘conversational command’ of on my CV.

In the mean time, I’ve asked my brother to send me industrial strength earplugs.