How learning multiple languages opened new doors to amazing experiences

byLuigiCappel

320 followers

5 years ago

In this picture taken in Tokyo in the 1990's I got to enjoy a traditional tea ceremony with one of the last of the real geisha's.

In my last blog I undertook to write about some of the experiences I've had to date as a result of being a linguist. It's a bit of a romp through my life. My last article was about neuroplasticity and dementia, and how you may be able to stave them off by learning new skills.

One of the great things about learning a language, is that you aren't just learning to translate words and sentence structure, you are learning about culture, how people live. You might learn songs or history and with learning being interactive, you are making good use of multiple parts of your brain. This increases dendrite connections and promotes brain health, and the more you learn, the more your brain works; and something that I found exciting is that contrary to what I was taught as a teenager, scientists now believe that adult brains can still grow.

I was born in Holland and naturally spoke Dutch. But at the age of 2 1/2 we immigrated to New Zealand. At the age of 3, I spoke fluent (child's vocabulary) Dutch and English.

We lived in New Brighton, Christchurch, New Zealand, in a 2 story house, split into 3 apartments. Our neighbours out the back in a dark dingy apartment, were from Hungary and I became good friends with their daughter, who was about the same age as me. Neither of her parents spoke English, so I learned (child's vocab) Hungarian and was able to communicate with her parents very quickly.

Now I'm bright, but I don't believe my early linguistics were because of my IQ. I believe all children have immense capacity to learn.

Wow I look at my 11 month old granddaughter and what she is learning. She uses Sign, understands basic Maori (her Mum is a teacher) and English, although she only has the odd word at this stage. She recognises people, understands remote control, the buttons on an iPhone when we video conference, knows where the food is, loves her rag doll, and has empathy and a wicked sense of humour.

Kids have a brain that is in intense learn mode and says feed me. It's up to us as parents to decide how well we support that, beyond a mother's instinct which is of course very powerful already.

So now I'm 4 and we're renting a house. Because I am fluent in Dutch (always spoken at home) and English, my parents look at this kid with an inquiring brain, still saying feed me, and decide to speak French when they want to say things they don't want me to understand. Guess what. In no time flat, I understand French. So they switch to German (my mother was born in Germany), which is similar to Dutch, so now I could understand 5 languages and was fluent in two of them before I turned 5.

I turned 10 at Intermediate School where French was an option, so I picked up on that and built from my child's vocab to a larger selection of words and learned about words that have gender. These were difficult times in my family and I spent a lot of time as a bookworm. I loved dictionaries, the thesaurus and our encyclopedia. The only one we had was a massive two volume tome in Dutch, so that helped me exercise my brain translating the articles and trying to understand difficult words I hadn't come across before.

At 11, my parents split up and I was sent back to Holland to live with my grandparents, uncles and aunts 4 of whom hadn't left home yet. I went to school there for 2 years and became fluent in Dutch with a greater vocab and one day at the age of 13, I was surprised when someone asked me for directions in English and I had to stop for a second and translate because I was now thinking solely in the Dutch language.

With access to many European TV channels, I was exposed to more French and then I started watching a TV Programme, initially because of the signature piece of music by Fernando Sor, which was one that my uncle had taught me to play on the guitar (my other passion was music). The program was a weekly Spanish language lesson designed for Dutch people planning a holiday in Spain or the Canary Islands. With my limited knowledge of French and the fact that many languages use versions of English words mixed in, it wasn't difficult.

When I came back to New Zealand, I was streamed academic and the class I was put into included Latin and French. I bemoaned the Latin as a dead language, but I didn't understand how much of a foundation it was to so many other languages. It helped my overall linguistics significantly.

When I came back to New Zealand, the plan was that we were going to build a big ketch (we did) and travel around the world, starting in South America (we didn't). So I went to night school and studied Spanish as it's spoken there, learning the differences for example of 'll' between South American and Spanish pronunciation.

When I became a Technical Service Officer, my first real job, from time to time if someone rang into the call centre and didn't speak English, they would give me a yell. That was the first time language came into my career.

Later it became a defining skill at my favourite job, which was Managing Casio Cash Register distribution for New Zealand. My language skills opened so many doors.

After the first of some 20 visits to Japan, I went to night school to learn how to speak Japanese. I found that Japanese sales managers all used a strategy of stopping negotiations to chat to each other, knowing the buyer (me) didn't understand what they were saying. I also had some ideas on improving products, but they looked upon me with disdain. Who is this gaijin who thinks he is smarter than us?

So I went to night school, yep, you got it, I studied Japanese. I started learning about culture and I absolutely loved the food. On about my 3rd or 4th visit, the International Sales Manager and his boss were doing their usual negotiation chatter and I realised they were chatting about what they had for breakfast and their meaningful glances at me during the conversation were just a tactic. So I joined in and told them about the buffet breakfast I had enjoyed at the Tokyo Hilton that morning. You can imagine the stunned silence, followed by embarrassed laughter.

I won't go into detail, but the consequence is that I became very good friends with the people I was doing business with. I went to their homes for meals, to whisky clubs, karaoke bars. They took me all over Honshu, to medieval castles, a geothermal mountain area, where we ate eggs that were black from being boiled in a geyser pool, and there were more sulphur plumes than you would find in Rotorua. Once I innocently asked one of the managers to suggest a restaurant where I could try something different for dinner. Next thing I know we are on a train to Yokohama for a Chinese banquet, the likes of which I had never experienced before or since. That's how people respond when you make an effort to speak their language in their country.

My ability to speak Japanese not only won me respect, but understanding the culture I was able to help them with design of retail POS systems and have very difficult discussions at their R&D centre. One of these resulted in changes to the design of one of the very first touch screen, scanning, communicating handheld computers. It's a very long story, but an ex union person almost wrecked my sale of the first track and trace system for Courier Post in New Zealand, and I had to jump on a plane on a Saturday so I could be in Hamura (R&D) first thing Monday, and convince them to increase the thickness of the touch screen, which they had refused to do when I asked them over the phone because there was nothing wrong with it. I had to help them not lose face and gain a mutual win.

Not only did I succeed in that, but the results of the sale of some 800 expensive terminals in New Zealand helped them win supply deals for Korea Post and German Post amongst others. My understanding of Japanese psychology as well as wireless communications made them and us a lot of money.

We had some challenges with bugs and 'features' of the cash registers and POS systems we were importing into New Zealand and Australia. Whenever we raised this with Japan they would tell us we were the only country that was complaining. I had my doubts about this and contacted several exclusive dealers in other countries. It turned out that they were also being told they were the only ones who were complaining.

I communicated with the managers of these distributors, who like us had exclusivity for Casio product and suggested we all get together for a conference and invite the Japanese to join us. Thus the Casio World VAR Association was born. Through that we joined forces with developers in Israel, UAE, France and other countries, solved many problems and next thing I was importing circuit boards, software and other products from other Casio dealers.

I visited many of these countries as we took turns hosting the annual conference. On a trip to the US, I visited Casio's head office in New Jersey and we talked about pricing. I had a product shortage that Japan couldn't help with and wanted to buy some machines that the Americans had overstocked. I asked why they were quoting me a price much higher than I bought the same product for out of Japan. It turned out that because the Japanese liked me so much, I was getting some of the cheapest prices in the world, even though I was buying way less product. Oops:) They used to show me their factory buy prices, pretty much unheard of.

My division was highly profitable and growing. I started importing printers from Ithaca NY and from France.

My grandmother was about to turn 90. She was a famous author in Germany and the Netherlands, and the PEN Club and other organisations were honouring her in Amsterdam with a fete, where she was given keys to Amsterdam and Berlin and other gifts of recognition. I really wanted to go, but it was very expensive. I hadn't been back 'home' for several years.

I believe in serendipity. To cut the story short, the next Casio World VAR conference was to be held in the Radisson Hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport and Casio were paying for my trip. Then off to a small town in the north of France to see some new printer models. My limited French won me new friends in a factory where no one spoke English.

This all worked out to be one week before my grandmother, Elisabeth Augustine's fete. So I was to do business with a Dutch scanner manufacturer and was able to visit with my family, meaning the company did not have to pay for accomodation and I got to see everyone and attend this grand literary occasion.

I thought that would be the last time I would see my Omi, because 90 is a pretty good innings. Because of my fluent Dutch I was able to visit her 3 more times after that, on business trips, presenting at a conference at Schiphol Airport and on another trip visiting the ANWB, the Dutch motoring association to discuss potential joint ventures over real time traffic and web mapping. The last time I got to see her, she was 98 years old and that was another fascinating story. She was author in residence at the Witsen Museum in Oosterpark and living on liquid foods.

She asked me to go to the apothecary to pick up her food and tried to explain the way to me. I wasn't sure so stopped a few people for directions. The neighbourhood, once famous for Dutch artists, writers and forward thinkers was now mostly inhabited by Moroccans who didn't speak Dutch or English.

No I didn't learn to speak Moroccan, but I did go back to night school and study Russian for 6 months while exploring a potential amazing start up opportunity in the tourism sector. I signed an NDA so I can't tell you any more about it. I decided it was too big and scary for me and not in an area I had any experience for. So menya zavut Luigi no ya ne govoryu po Russki.

I could go on with my stories about the adventures I had in New Caledonia, In South Africa, Las Palmas and other places where I was able to communicate as a traveler rather than a tourist, mostly on business trips that also included pleasure. Most of my European Travel was as a consequence of being able to speak enough of many languages. It has allowed me to appreciate cultures and reach out to people from around the world for business and pleasure.

The great thing is that, as modern science shows us, it is never too late to start learning something new. Not only that, it is good for your health.