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Have you ever felt you missed out on a joke even though you understood every single word of it?
Have you ever felt lost in translation?
When I was younger I used to believe that learning a foreign language was not a difficult task. Words could be memorized, I thought. I remember thinking that one day there would be no more tenses to learn and that sooner or later I would be done with grammar. Boy, was I naive! The truth is that mastering a foreign language is actually an incredibly complex task. A language is not just reduced to dictionaries and grammar books. There is much more to it than that. Mastering a foreign language is getting to know every little aspect of it. It is understanding all its nuances and subtleties. So, probably you heard someone tell a joke and you didn’t get it. Well, the truth is that in order to understand a foreign language you have to be open and embrace its culture as well. Cultural differences, for example, play a big part in understanding jokes. And so do idioms and collocations, which might sometimes get a non-native speaker quite confused. That’s why a native speaker of English won’t have problems understanding the meaning behind “101.” And when his high school buddy didn’t mince his words and told him, “You’re in desperate need of a crash course in Dating 101,” he immediately understood what his friend was getting at. He soon got the idea that he needed to know the basics of high school dating as quickly as he could. A set of simple rules he should follow in order to get a date.
Mastering a language is much more than words, or numbers for that matter. Is is being able to see through cultural differences, to grasp the meaning of idioms and collocations and the contexts they are used. So, whenever you feel you’ve missed out on a joke, try to see what’s beyond the surface, try to see if there’s something more.
Clarisa Attademo
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