‘You Are A Toilet, Where Am I?’
Published: June 22nd, 2010
By: Jim Mullen

‘You are a toilet, where am I?’

Can you say “Why don’t they learn to speak English if they want to live here?” in Spanish? In Italian? In Greek? I can’t. Unless you learned another language as a child or are particularly gifted – I saw a guy with Asperger’s on TV who learned to speak Icelandic in two weeks – it’s hard and extremely embarrassing to speak another language while you are learning it. Even if you know the vocabulary, you know you’re speaking with an accent, you know that you’re making a fool of yourself. Four-year-olds can speak the language better than you. So you try to avoid situations where you have to speak another tongue, usually until you really need to find a bathroom in a foreign land. Then you carefully compose the question in your head and screw up your courage say in their language: “You are a toilet, where am I?” Good luck on trying to understand the answer. Try to get through your day only speaking in the present tense and saying “he” when you mean “she” and you’ll get a feel for how awkward it is. Sure, people who plan to live in an English-speaking country should learn the language. I just don’t think we should pretend that it’s easy.

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