The Fourth Player

My 'driveway moments' used to be in three languages (English, Hindi, and Bengali) until the summer of 2010. Now there is a fourth player.

Urban dictionary defines a driveway moment as "the inability to leave one's car after arriving at the destination because of the riveting nature of a story you're listening to on the radio." I think NPR came up with the original term, so they limited it to 'a story' and 'on the radio.' To me, the term has a broader meaning...anything that you are listening to while driving (or being driven) has the potential to create a driveway moment, including a radio program, a song played on air or from your own CD/music player, an audio book, a voice message, or even audio-based course materials that you listen to on the road. Come to think of it, a driveway moment can include a real conversation (with a co-passenger or on the phone) that started while driving, and didn't quite finish when you reached the destination. But I already see that I am being carried away with just defining a term (I bet the legal professional in me is to be blamed), so let me swerve back on track.

The fourth language that I am talking about is my new-found love, Spanish. I took an evening course on Beginners' Spanish this summer. It was just a series of eight three-hour-long sessions (of which I missed one due to the Japan trip in July)--and I do hope to enroll in the intermediate level course at some point--but I still feel like a new window has already been opened for me. Every little Spanish that I can follow now, be it on a Spanish radio channel, on a website, in a sandwich shop or at a tourist attraction, thrills me like a child. One of Kaiser Permanente's innovative "Thrive" series of ads that claims that learning a new foreign language (among other things) exercises your 'flabby' brain, appears to have a whole new meaning now. Medical studies have shown that learning a new foreign language and keeping at it can prevent or at least delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease, as Catherine Forsythe's blog post reports.

And the more immediate benefits and rewards of being able to communicate in or understand a new language come in surprising little packages. Who knew that being able to exchange simple written notes in Spanish with the cleaning lady can be so exhilarating! These days, many a times I leave notes in broken Spanish on the dining table for my cleaning lady, who makes life so much easier (and tidier) for me every Friday. The notes cover everything from "Clean the inside of the oven this week, please!" to "Please take this piece of cake from my son's birthday." When I come back, I see her return-notes, which are mostly "!Gracias, señora!", but the notes never fail to make this señora contenta...totalmente!

Another immediate reward came in the form of airport announcements. In late August, I was stuck in Atlanta airport for five hours while coming back from a very refreshing East coast trip visiting friends and family. I was indignant to reach home, and was getting frustrated. But one of the things that kept me amused was trying to decipher the airport announcements in Spanish. I was intentionally trying not the listen to the English version of the announcement when it was being played for the first time. Instead, I was listening extra carefully to the Spanish version that followed. When you have to understand what's being announced in order to know what's going on so that you can make your plans accordingly, then automatically you pay the most attention. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I understood basic Spanish to a reasonable extent, because I did cross check the accuracy of my understanding by listening to the repeat of the same announcement in English. You can't take a chance when it comes to going home, after all!


Speaking of the East coast trip, I have to share this amazing article that I got to read during the lazy, beautiful ride on Amtrak, en route to New Jersey from Washington DC. The article, titled, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?", appeared in the New Yorker magazine. The article talks about whether our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts for the lack of ways to express those thoughts. According to the article, "Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about." The author of the article, Guy Deutscher, offers the following example to elaborate. "Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin."

Spanish also forces you to 'disclose' the gender of not only a person (or any living thing for that matter), but of inanimate objects too. I am not a linguist by any stretch of imagination, but I had a hunch that probably all of the so called "Romance Languages"--and the list includes Spanish--have this linguistic gender-dependence, and Wikipedia sort of confirms it.
But, at the same time, Spanish is rather biased in terms of describing the gender of a non-homogeneous group of persons/things. For example, if someone wants to ask you, "How many siblings do you have?", it is sufficient to ask "How many brothers do you have?" Nobody is stopping you from asking, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?", but it is not a must. I guess every language has its quirkiness. That's what makes them endearing.

Well, Spanish is not called a "Romance Language" for nothing. Let's say I will cruise through my mid-life without the proverbial 'mid-life crisis'. Still, this pre-mid-life (or is it mid-life already?) romance of mine with a foreign language is nothing short of an invigorating affair. If you must know, Love (el amor), and Romance (el romance) are assigned masculine genders in Spanish, but 'a romantic affair' (una relación amorosa) is assigned a feminine gender! Now feel free to draw your own conclusion!

P.S. my sis-in-law reminds me (after reading this post), that in Hindi, "Pyar" (love) is masculine, but "Mohabbat" (a more intense version of love) is feminine :-)