Romania and learning a language by immersion – beware the perils

Have you ever been with people in a remote place and wished you could speak their language? I decided to do something about that desire one time, and had great success; although not in the way I would ever have intended.

It was the mid 1990s and there was a glut of aid projects working in Romanian orphanages. These institutions, more accurately children’s homes as the parents had abandoned their kids and not passed away, had fallen into scandalous neglect. I joined a group from the West Midlands Fire Service on such a trip and soon after coming home was determined to return. My skills in DIY are legendary (my wife will barely allow me to change a light bulb for fear of the damage I might cause). As a qualified optometrist, and seeing that none of the children in the home had ever had access to eye care, I figured this was my most useful contribution.

I made arrangements to travel out two months later with my eye testing kit and spend a couple of weeks checking the children in the home. Sam would then join me in the third week, bringing with her the pairs of glasses that I had prescribed and she had collected from a UK technician, who I had collared into making them in exchange for a bit of free publicity in an article for the optical press. And I would need to speak Romanian to be effecitve – so with the help of a Teach Yourself Romanian book and cassette, and a short wave radio, I read, wrote and listened to the language until I felt I had a grasp.

On arrival I quickly noticed that my cassette and book had been of limited use. Yes, I could understand the basic structures of the language but the vocabulary seemed almost alien to me. Yet in my two weeks out there before my wife arrived to join me, I barely had any communication in English. I spent the day at the children’s home, talking to staff and kids. In the evenings I would socialise with some of the caretaking staff; hard workers and even harder drinkers.

This total immersion worked wonders. Within a couple of weeks I was understanding most of what was going on, and was largely able to make myself understood. Arguments with taxi drivers and waiters are a great way to learn a language, and Bucharest provided plenty of these opportunites too. And yet it was after two weeks that I received a very rude awakening.

Along with the long-term volunteer we decided we would travel to neighbouring Moldova for an England football match that was taking place that week. As I entered a posh-looking travel office in the city centre, I was pleased and confident that I would surprise the smartly dressed young lady behind the desk with my mastery of Romanian. I greeted her and started to explain what I wanted. Her expression went from curiousity to disgust in a short moment. I was shocked! She gave me short shrift, told me she couldn’t help and I was out of the door in less than a minute. What had gone wrong?

It was only later that I understood. I had been learning to speak Romanian from street children, gyspies, and those at the bottom of Romania’s social ladder. I had done it so well that when I stepped into this office and started to speak in semi-fluent “ghetto talk”, the young lady was understandly appalled!

In this way I learned a sobering lesson. It’s great to learn a language by immersion in a local community – but be careful where you choose to learn it.