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Well, now that I've planned a trip to Europe that includes Barcelona I've decided to concentrate on getting a little more fluency in Spanish (Castellano) since I have someone to help me with that, and no Catalans handy.
I was just talking with someone in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
eurotravel about the discomforts of trying to communicate in a language that you're not very comfortable with. I realize that I seem to take on the persona of a very hestiant kid (in spite of my years)--I guess the inability to come up with words equal to your thoughts makes that happen. At any rate, then I usually read the native speaker's helpful or even amused responses as kindly (usually! Some get very unmistakably angry, like a lady in a Berlin ticket office--and I didn't blame her, although the other Germans in line behind me did. I think she had an individual rather than a cultural one). But I'm realizing that other people sometimes perceive the native speakers as being unfriendly. I'm wondering too if cultural nonverbal signals are getting misread, and there's no good dictionary to look them up in.
I was just talking with someone in
eurotravel about the discomforts of trying to communicate in a language that you're not very comfortable with. I realize that I seem to take on the persona of a very hestiant kid (in spite of my years)--I guess the inability to come up with words equal to your thoughts makes that happen. At any rate, then I usually read the native speaker's helpful or even amused responses as kindly (usually! Some get very unmistakably angry, like a lady in a Berlin ticket office--and I didn't blame her, although the other Germans in line behind me did. I think she had an individual rather than a cultural one). But I'm realizing that other people sometimes perceive the native speakers as being unfriendly. I'm wondering too if cultural nonverbal signals are getting misread, and there's no good dictionary to look them up in.