{"id":2303,"date":"2014-07-07T08:39:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T12:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/?p=2303"},"modified":"2020-10-02T13:22:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-02T17:22:20","slug":"fighting-expats-unease-dont-sweat-the-vocab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/2014\/07\/07\/fighting-expats-unease-dont-sweat-the-vocab\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Expat’s Unease: Don’t Sweat the Vocab"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Itchy<\/a><\/p>\n

I have a certain psychological condition I like to call Expat\u2019s Unease: I wish I could pass as a local, and it bothers me when I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I wish I could just blend in with the crowd and speak like the locals speak. I wish I could enter into conversation with random people on the street without immediately branding myself as a foreigner. In Germany, if I\u2019m mistaken for a local, I\u2019ll just nod and smile and say \u201cja<\/em>!\u201d when I don\u2019t understand what they\u2019re saying to me, rather than say \u201csorry, what?\u201d and break the illusion. When I return\u00a0home, I find myself talking to strangers much more often than I ever did before, mostly because I\u2019m just soaking in the smooth joy of speaking like a local, with a local.<\/p>\n

Among the many tricky facets to learning a language is the sheer volume of vocabulary one must ingest in order to effectively communicate. The challenge is compounded when learning more than one new language\u2014you\u2019ve got to learn the word for \u201ccheese\u201d again, and the word for \u201cpain,\u201d and \u201cto swim\u201d and \u201cproblem\u201d and all the colors and shapes and days of the week. You\u2019ll start to prioritize which words you\u2019re going to need to know first (\u201cwhere\u2019s the bathroom\u201d over \u201cthe cat is on the table,\u201d let\u2019s say), but filling up your mental dictionary is nearly unending work.<\/p>\n

Stumbling over gaps in my vocabulary (as in the above comic, one of the few taken verbatim from a personal experience) is a sure sign to any native speaker that I\u2019m a learner, and it bugs me. I study flashcards, I practice with friends, but when you run into that empty hole in your adopted dictionary it\u2019s like running into a brick wall. Suddenly your sentence has run afoul of a linguistic black hole. You can\u2019t retreat, you can\u2019t skip over, you can only mentally scream as it sucks you into the misery of stammering, waving your hands in vague circles, and staring at the ceiling as you attempt to conjure the absent word from the abyss, while your conversation partner looks on in pity and\/or Schadenfreude<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Luckily, there\u2019s an out to this heinous scenario: learn your grammar!<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve mastered a language’s rules, it doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019re missing a word, you can easily describe your way around it. This is what we do with our native tongues all the time\u2014when we don\u2019t know a word, we define or describe it. The same goes for languages you\u2019re learning. You\u2019ll find yourself able to saunter\u00a0around that conversational black hole by simply describing what you mean, or even finding another way to phrase it. Yes, this too requires certain vocabulary, but don\u2019t feel like you have to learn every word in that language before you can go out and speak.<\/p>\n

If you can navigate a language\u2019s verb tenses, word order, declensions, and prepositions without slipping up, you should pat yourself on the back: you\u2019re basically fluent. The only things left for you to do, really, are to learn figures of speech and slang (so you don\u2019t sound like a grammar textbook when you talk) and to fill up that vocab list. These can easily be accomplished over time, and will often come as a natural part of speaking the language with locals. Where grammar often must be studied to be fully understood, new words automatically slip into those dictionary gaps like Tetris pieces in your mind, ready for use.<\/p>\n

So the next time you\u2019re in conversation, struggling around a word you\u2019ve neglected to add to your study sheet, just remember: it\u2019s not the words that count, it\u2019s what you\u2019re saying! Don\u2019t sweat the vocab, focus on the grammar, and everything will be just fine. The point is to communicate, not fool the locals into thinking you’re one of them. Nobody gives prizes for Best Fake Local Speaker anyway.<\/p>\n

What about yourselves? Have you found any words to be particularly irritating to learn? Do you notice any helpful vocab overlap between similar languages, such as French and Italian? Do you also wish you could just blend in, or are you comfortable with your status as a dirty foreigner?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\"\"

I have a certain psychological condition I like to call Expat\u2019s Unease: I wish I could pass as a local, and it bothers me when I don\u2019t. I wish I could just blend in with the crowd and speak like the locals speak. I wish I could enter into conversation with random people on the…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":4485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[542801],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2303","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archived-posts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2305,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2303\/revisions\/2305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/language-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}