Comment by RugnirViking
4 days ago
> try to order in languages I don’t speak
why not? I guarantee it's less offensive than you think to be bad at a language but try anyway. I get the desire to avoid embarrassment - it's something I find really difficult to push through, but you've gotta do a whole lot of speaking badly to speak well, and people are generally very appreciative of someone earnestly trying.
If you met someone in person struggling to speak english, would you be offended? or would you be collaborative like "lets figure this out together"
Talking to younger Europeans today (or nearly any Dutch or Scandinavian-speaker under 60) and they may find it tiresome when foreigners try to practice their language, because just using English is more respectful of their time. No, they don't give the foreigner any credit for "earnestly trying".
But if the OP is talking about the US, there's that whole other dynamic mentioned in the sibling comment.
for both you and the sibling comment, I think these are hypotheticals. I hestate to call you guys out but on some level I think its rationalisation for being afraid of embarassment - I literally live in denmark as a foreigner and am learning the language. You can just say you want to practise a little, its not that hard.
You: hej må jeg have... et varm chokolade?
Them: of course, will there be anything else?
You: hvis det er okay jeg ville gerne øve mig på dansk *smile* åbenbart har jeg virkelig brug for det
Them: selvfølgelig! det kommer til... fem-og-halvfems kroner. Sidder i ind, eller ude?
If you don't explicitly say that you are trying to practise then yeah, they are going to default to whatever makes the interaction go smoother. Everyone does that, all the time! But people are generally pretty supportive of another person trying to learn. And of course, people aren't going to assume you think they can't speak english if you say you're practicing (it's not hard to smile and say how lovely you think the language is or whatever.
In general waitstaff and service workers deal with people being indecisive, slow, speaking with confusing dialects, speech impediments all day long. It is not an imposition to work through an imperfect language - and its pretty much the only way anyone ever gets good at a language.
I also get the impulse to be a little jealous of those natural born sunny extroverts who find it easy to do this. For me it does require pushing through a little discomfort, and often I wouldn't if I were busy doing something else. But it's 100% my own discomfort, not the other person. Being asked to hold a conversation in your own native language is not a chore
These aren't hypotheticals for me at all. I am a foreigner who long lived and worked in the Nordics as an linguist, and I have spent a significant portion of my adult life traveling the world mostly for language practice. I have seen firsthand shifting attitudes as more and more younger Europeans use so much English (sometimes even leading to domain loss in their native language) that this is by far their preferred way to interact with foreigners.
You may tell the Danish cafe staff that you need Danish and you want to practice, but that poor person is an employee and hardly in a position to tell you what they really think.
10 replies →
You’re absolutely right about learning languages. Perhaps I should have clarified, don’t speak and aren’t trying to learn.
theres
> someone earnestly trying
and then there are occasions where someone orders in a language they dont speak because they assume the person taking their order cant understand english. being associated with someone performing that level of bad faith in public makes me wish restaurants had eject seats