A major realization has occurred today in my life. I have a language inferiority complex. My two children have been blessed with a gene that allows them to absorb languages and become what I would call fluent. My son is fluent in Japanese and is very good with sign language. My daughter is fluent in German. I on the other hand have only taken enough Spanish to get thru the requirements of high school.
Today, I was sitting in a two hour meeting (which is suppose to be conducted entirely in English), but some heated discussions came up and a number of participants popped back into their native Arabic language. The owner’s rep noticed that I had a strange look on my face and stopped the Arabic bickering and said, “we need to get the meeting back to English, so that Tony can understand the situation.”
The contracts on the hotel project say that all written and verbal communications will be official only if in English. Therefore the meetings and memos and meeting minutes will be in English. Part of my task is to review the meeting minutes and make sure that the translated version is using proper English. So the pressure is on for me to make sure I do not use run-on sentences and explain things precisely. That will be a stretch for me too.
On the way home from the office, my boss was chatting with a consultant in Arabic about some situation. It got rather heated too......I had no idea what was going on. When I went to the hotel restaurant for a relaxing dinner, the room was filled with Italian tourists on their way back home after having visited some of the Roman ruins near Benghazi. Again, I was deluged in another language. Why couldn’t I have inherited the special gene that my children have.......maybe I have it, but it is not awake yet......
I hope to get more into my Rosetta Stone software and start learning Arabic. It is a difficult language with all of its little sounds and inflections. Plus the dialect of Libya is a little different than that of the UAE and other arab nations. Wish me luck, I am really going to need it.
That sounds EXTREMELY frustrating! Hang in there, Uncle Tony!
ReplyDelete