40%-50% Some thoughts on understanding a foreign language

Entry 13: Wednesday July 9th

I don’t speak Hebrew—I know probably 20 words, and each day, I augment this arsenal a little bit. I would say, though, that 40%-50% of the time I get the gist of the conversation. The reason for this high success rate:
1. I’m good (in any language) at “reading” people’s energy / mood.
2. I can smell subtext (in any language) from a mile away. This trait of “getting” what people are saying without them really saying it, is the hallmark of a good playwright.
3. I’m a good empathizer: I know how I would feel in a given situation and thus I can transfer this knowledge and “get” how another person will feel. This gives me a head start in figuring out what a person will say before he/she even opens his/her mouth.
4. I’m an aware individual (in general), and I process the environment for cues that would be the catalyst for a person to make a comment or a reference.
5. The most obvious and in general the easiest: body language. I am the queen of body language—I talk with my body and totally understand when others do the same.
6. Intonation, expression, accentuation, and melody: if you listen to a (good) song, often you don’t need to know the words to get what the song is about.
7. Paying super close attention to words that I know that tumble out of the bag of unintelligible chaos. [I also like to press “pause” and digest words that I hear in quick conversation, which I think might have the same root as a word that I already know. Then I try to discern its meaning based on my limited knowledge. More often than not I make a wacky and unwarranted connection. It’s fun though. And then there are times that I make a successful connection! And then I often forget the word the next day. For me to remember a word, I need to hear it repeated anywhere from 3-7 times. Not the greatest track record. A visual and literary learner, seeing it and writing it has proven helpful. Association is good, of course, as well as putting it into my body. For example, I retained Yemen (Right) and Small (Left) the first time I heard those words because, while I was learning these words, I gestured with my right and left hands. (I have found that the best method for “memorizing” lines for a theatre production is to combine the words with a physical action score.) Thus far, I have not felt that language has been any kind of barrier. For the most part, this is because every Israeli I’ve met has a pretty, solid handle on conversational English (even when they in their typical self-effacing fashion, assert that they don’t.)].