I'm a circuitous talker. I'll start out telling a story, remember something relevant to it halfway through and get sidetracked, then resume my tale, all the time waiting for exclamations, contributions and questions from my interlocutor. Most of my friends are used to my rambling ways and kindly indulge me, but of course not everyone appreciates this conversational style.
I used to have a neighbor I could barely communicate with. Although we both spoke English -- North American English, for that matter -- we had completely different conversational styles. She was more of a surgical strike talker -- she got to the point so fast it made my head spin. It also (to my mind) ruined many a good story, which could have been drawn out and embellished considerably.
It's not as though I always take ages to get to the point; I know there is a time and a place for verbosity. But when you've got the time and a really good story, it seems a shame to rush through it. I never realized what a sore trial I must have been to my neighbor until one day when we got stopped by an elderly woman living in my apartment block. This woman was lonely and she tended to go on forever, and as my neighbor didn't speak Japanese, she was particularly frustrated by the interruption. When the elderly lady finally said goodbye and went on her way, my English-speaking neighbor commented rather acidly that I sure could go on. Which is indisputable, but her casual remark horrified me because I realized I'd been driving her wild. Suddenly everything clicked: all the time we'd known each other, she'd been as puzzled and irritated by my long-windedness as I was by her tendency to cut to the chase.
Up until that time, we'd always had rather awkward, slightly disjointed conversations, but after that I turned into a gibbering idiot around her. I found myself in such a rush to make my point that I struggled -- and failed -- to find words. I couldn't talk properly anymore: idioms I knew perfectly well eluded me and I started doing stupid things like forgetting the past participles of irregular verbs. And I began to see that communication was so much more than a shared language -- that it had a lot to do with a shared conversational style and the knowledge that what you have to say will be appreciated.
Years later, when my eldest daughter started elementary school and I went to the obligatory class observation, I got to talking to another mother, Ariyama-san, at the school. I'd noticed her taking careful notes, her eyes never leaving the teacher's face and I'd wondered at her diligence. I didn't have to wonder long.
"I'm deaf," Ariyama-san told me in slow but perfect Japanese. "I lost my hearing when I was eight. But I can lip read."
We'd been talking for five minutes and I'd wondered at her slow, carefully- enunciated speech and assumed that she was adjusting her speed for me because I was foreign. I was stunned to realize that this was the way she usually talked, but even more surprised that she and I understood each other perfectly. Arguably, she was easy for me to understand because she did speak slowly, and although she was a bright woman, she'd no doubt lost some language as a result of her affliction. But her communicative skills were absolutely first rate and I have never met a more careful listener. I was amazed by her ability to understand everything I said. Of course, my Japanese was far simpler than the fast-paced, heavily idiomatic Japanese the other parents spoke, but I stumbled over words and made mistakes. But if she ever got flustered or confused over what I said, she was great at hiding it. And of course she never had the least bit of trouble with my accent.
One day when we were talking, I couldn't help myself. "You really understand what I'm saying," I exclaimed. "And you never talk down to me."
Ariyama-san looked amazed. "You understand me. You don't exaggerate your syllables and I don't get the feeling you're patronizing me." She glanced around. "Lots of people patronize me."
I made a lot of wonderful Japanese friends at my kids' schools, but two of the people I was able to communicate with best were Kim-san, who was a Japanese-speaking Korean woman, and Ariyama-san, who was legally deaf. Kim-san and I managed to communicate in a foreign language, and Ariyama-san read my lips. I still can't get over how effortless it was to talk to these women -- how we almost never had awkward conversations where we both started talking at the same time or misunderstood each other.
Our ability to communicate was probably enhanced by the fact that we were all odd men out in a country where it doesn't pay to stick out. Kim-san's Japanese was better than mine, but she still had an accent and whenever people noticed it, she got flustered. Ariyama-san's mother once told me that a lot of people shied away from her, imagining it would be too much trouble to talk to her. As a foreigner with a rambling conversational style, I knew all too well that good, sympathetic interlocutors were hard to find. All three of us were linguistically challenged.
More than anything else, we were able to communicate with each other because we desperately wanted to.
