At church today, my Brazilian friend was rejoicing over how “luck” she is to have such wonderful friends, etc. No one thought she was weird for saying it wrong, but no one corrected her either, because her tiny mistake did not impair the communication at all.

I pondered on this, though, and later asked my husband (who is fully fluent in Spanish and has a pretty good handle on Italian, Portuguese, Imara, and Quechua) whether people in other cultures are offended when English speakers butcher their words.

He said no, but they are more likely to correct because it helps the person learning.

OK, but what if it’s some drastically wrong word like in that cell-phone commercial when the guy calls the Chinese businessman “stinky fish face” ???!

He said that commercial is unrealistic and that most people would NOT really be offended, but would correct the error so the other person could learn.

Now what I wonder is if the one person only speaks the one language, how are they going to correct someone who clearly isn’t fluent enough to understand?

Anyway . . . my point is that I realized today that a big limitation to my learning new languages is FEAR!!! I don’t want to offend anyone by saying something stupid, and I certainly don’t want anyone to think I AM stupid, so I don’t try. I just learn and then don’t use what I know.

That’s about as silly as anything. What good is knowing stuff if you don’t use it?!