Do You Kankokugo Biliyor Musunuz?

“Apricot!” my youngest daughter bellows, a note of challenge in her voice. I cringe and gulp, but I’m not going to stop her from teaching me Turkish. She’s like a one-person language boot camp and I need her.

“Ka—” I stutter, frowning. “Kai—”

“Jeez!” my daughter hisses, rolling her eyes. “I don’t get why you can’t learn apricot!”

Neither can I, really. I’ve managed numbers up through 100, including some subtraction, addition and multiplication. I can say hello, please, thank you, bon appétit, good morning, and gezundheit. I know the words for the rooms of the house, most of my vegetables, and loads of fruit, including watermelon, apple, orange, peach – even persimmon. But not, for some reason, apricot.

“Try it again!” my daughter encourages. I prop my legs up against the dashboard and try again. “Kay—” All of a sudden, I know the next syllable and I almost choke in my triumphance “—Kayuh—”

My daughter leans forward, her arms around her legs. “Yes! Go on! Kayuh-what?”

I freeze, my hand over my mouth. Damn it, it's gone!

“Mooom!”

She praised me for my skill with numbers earlier and flattered me for my pronunciation of the lyrics to the national anthem, but I appear to have run out of steam. “My brain isn’t as flexible as yours,” I whine. “Anyway, this is weird – learning Turkish in a parking lot in Scotland.”

“You’ve got to learn it sometime,” my daughter rejoins, but even as she says this, it strikes me that this isn’t weird at all, it’s the way I’ve done it all my life.

Most of the major language breakthroughs I’ve had have been in unlikely places, with unlikely people. I developed fluency in Japanese by speaking it with Chinese and Brazilians. We all studied together, and when we took the train home, we’d have short conversations in our broken Japanese. Our level was still so elementary that we exhausted the patience of native or more fluent speakers, but weirdly enough, we generally managed to amuse and entertain each other. I studied Japanese with a woman from New Zealand and an American man too, but we could never have had the same crazy conversations I was able to enjoy with my Brazilian and Chinese pals. One of the Brazilians could never remember the difference between yasui ‘easy’ and yasai ‘vegetable’. I can remember laughing myself silly over this on a train from Shinagawa to Yokohama, while the Japanese around us stared as though we were crazy.

Even though I learned how to read Japanese in the States and Japan, it wasn’t until I was living in Amsterdam that I really developed fluency. As a student bumming around Europe, I found a job washing dishes in a Japanese restaurant right in the heart of Amsterdam. The manager kindly allowed me to live there, in the attic room where the waitresses changed into their kimono. Libraries in the Netherlands cost money to join and most of the books are, naturally, in Dutch. Dishwashers don’t make a lot of money anywhere, so I had a real problem during my time off when I’d finished the few paperbacks I had with me. I began to read the Japanese comic books and graphic novels left there by the waiters and the odd customer. I had my Shogakukan Japanese-English dictionary with me and I would spend my days in Amsterdam gripped by some Japanese murder mystery, feverishly consulting my dictionary for words whose meanings I couldn’t manage to guess. To this day I can still remember specific plots and characters.

A few years later, I spent almost a month traveling around Korea, relying on Japanese to communicate. Due to Japan’s past colonial history in Korea, many older Koreans still speak Japanese fluently. I felt awful doing this: Japanese rule in Korea was harsh and cruel and I was always nervous about stirring up unpleasant memories. One kindly old man shook his head as he directed me to the post office. “Never in my life did I imagine that I would one day be conversing in Japanese with a young American lady,” he murmured. I heard more about World War Two than I wanted to, but what I learned has stuck with me. And I know that I was greatly privileged to learn about history from the people who lived it.

In Japan, I converted my pitiful schoolgirl French into limited fluency by using it with my husband to talk about things we didn’t want our kids to understand. I’m awful at French, but I’d be even worse if it weren’t for being forced to crank out fractured sentences like Ou sont les galletes? and J’ai achete beaucoup de chocolate, c’est sous le bunk-bed des enfants.

Our kids do this too, come to think of it. This past year, when all three of them should have been learning Turkish, our girls have been feverishly absorbing Korean home dramas and movies. This has led to hours of Korean language study. My girls feel a little disgusted that I managed four trips to Korea and have to show for it only a handful of phrases in Korean. They are determined to make up for my deficit. They can sing whole songs in Korean. I get home from work to hear them discussing the writing system, and exchanging words and phrases in Korean.

“Which one is go in peace again?” one of them hisses to the other. “And which one is stay in peace?”

So what if they should have been learning Turkish? There’s plenty of time to go over their Turkish. Like when we’re killing time in a parking lot back in Scotland...

“Kai-yuh-su!” I cry out triumphantly and my daughter cheers. Suddenly I smile. “Hey, do you remember how to say apricot in Japanese?”