Foreign Stranger
Recently I was walking through the city when an old man in his 60s asked me for directions. At least that what I thought because I didn’t understand what he was saying as he wasn’t speaking in English. I thought of taking my phone and letting him talk to Google Translate but my phone’s battery was at 5% and would likely die any moment soon. Instead I try to listen to what he was saying because it seems that some of the words seem familiar. He kept saying “platz” which means place or area in German and “boos” or written bus, which is exactly what you thought would mean, a bus. There were a lot of other words that I didn’t understand though.
“What language,” I asked. “Polish,” he answered, “know no English.”
I asked whether he knows German, to which he said no. Still, I started to talk to him in broken German. And I assumed he was asking the way to the bus station which I had just passed a few minutes earlier, so I began directing him to the station. He thanked me and went off. I then wondered to myself why did I speak to the old man in German? Presumably because I thought that Polish is not too different to German, them being neighbours and all? But then I remembered about 17 years ago when I was stopped by a Buddhist monk wearing an orange robe, and I replied automatically in German, that I didn’t speak Chinese. That was a one off occasion that I have forgotten until today.
Concluding from this small sample of two occasions, my hypothesis is that my mind works in an environment, and it determines what it is by the language that I hear. If it hears my mother tongue which is Malay, it starts to relax and speak in colloquial terms. If it hears English it changes to either technical or written sentences, because I read mostly in English. And if my mind hears some foreign strange language, it changed to German because that was the language that I normally am in, when I hear foreign language, because I travelled quite a bit while I was in Europe and Germany. Not really confident with this hypothesis but that’s that. Would be interested to hear any comment or read anything along the line and confirm or dispute this theory.
As for now, I’ll go and sleep and dream in my most familiar language. Thank you for reading.