My Own Private UN

Tomorrow night i start another 8-week segment of Hungarian language classes, so i figured it was time to finally write about the last one. This has been one of the most interactive multi-cultural experiences i’ve had in BP – interactive because of the nature of the situation (obviously), but also on a very personal level, as everyone has been fairly interested in everyone else’s national or ethnic orientation to living and working here. We were ten people from ten different countries, four different continents. After English, which everyone spoke to some degree, the second most common language was Arabic; the two Hungarian teachers – Agi on Mondays, Ildiko on Wednesdays – were sometimes driven to tell us “Stop speaking Arabic!” at times of vocabulary crises, which i found rather hilarious. We also had two Russian speakers, and two of us spoke French.

Left>Right: Ahmed (Palestinian Jordanian), Dave (Belgium), Richard (UK), myself (CA), Mohammed (Egypt), Tatyana (Russia), Sasha (Ukraine), Reza (Iran), and Kursat (Turkey). Missing: Omar (Somalia).

Imagine the UN without headsets - that’s pretty much what this was like. The teacher writes something on the board and it’s immediately recorded in 7 or 8 different languages. Together we formed a giant web of alphabets, diacritical marks and phonetic near-equivalents. What we most had in common is that everyone is figuring out how Hungarians put their ideas together, which is at times non-translatable (depending on your language) even while being culturally comprehensible, since we’re all living here and see it in action every day. Mohammed and Omar, who come from cultures with strong oral traditions, definitely picked things up faster than the rest of us; a gentle reminder to me that academic educational levels can have little importance when it comes to communicative abilities (particularly vocabulary retention).

On the last day of the last session we had, two weeks ago, Reza gave everyone holiday cards on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, Nourouz, along with print-outs about the holiday in Hungarian and Arabic (for half of us). When people ask me whether i ever plan to return to the US to live, this is one of the reasons at the heart of my resounding NO. There is something about translating from one second language into another second language, on a regular basis, that makes me feel plugged into the multicultural transmigrations of the modern era like little else can. It’s such an integral part of life in Europe; Hungarians may be cynical about any of us reaching a fluency level in their language, but nearly all of them are engaged in learning a 2^nd or 3^rd language as well. Sure, it’s economically driven, people want to be able to word abroad, or work here, and so you’ve got to be able to communicate. About a week ago, i was at a friend’s flat and among 6 people, there were 4 different native tongues (Hungarian, English, Spanish and Italian). In my European experience, this is normal; reflecting back on my years in the US, it was far from the norm.

Tomorrow, it’s back to the Hungarian post-position grind: post-positions are little tags that give prepositional meanings to words and they are quite difficult to master (as prepositions in every language tend to be). i don't know how many of these individuals will be in my next class, hopefully all of them, but it'd be great to add people from eastern Asia and South America, just to grow the web a bit. We may not be able to solve the world's problems, but it's the flipside of the cultural clashes motif, which has got to be good for something.