In a way I can somewhat relate to Joseph Suina in “And Then
I Went to School” and Amy Tan in “Mother Tongue” because I’ve had a recent
experience when I was among people who I did not share a common language with.
This past Columbus Day weekend some friends and I went to Montreal to visit my
friend for her 18th birthday. In Montreal the common language is
either English or French. Luckily most people there spoke English but there
were a handful of people who only spoke French. Most of the signs were all in French
too so it was kind of hard to understand where to go. Unlike my other friends I
was with I took French in high school. So I had some idea of where to go and
what people were saying, even though I was never really good at French. But it
was so weird to be surrounded by another language I only knew so little of. It
felt kind of confusing to navigate our way around Canada.
We're lucky that English is one of the most common languages in the world. I think we take it for granted because many other people in the world travel to other places and most of the times, the translations are in Mandarin, Spanish, and English (according to google) and they might not speak those languages. Being in a new country with a different language can really make a person feel lost and isolated so it's important to bring a pocket translator while traveling!
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