Golfinhos
Even though I don’t speak Portuguese, I have the word golfinho seared into my memory, the sound clear and vivid and the pronunciation of each vowel flawless in my ear.
Angra dos Reis, Brazil 2019
Even though I don’t speak Portuguese, I have the word golfinho seared into my memory, the sound clear and vivid and the pronunciation of each vowel flawless in my ear. This is a word that I’ll never forget. This is a word that’ll always remain ripe in my mind, the articulation of billowing vowels forever in the present tense. Of course the Portuguese sounds, if you’re listening closely as an English speaker, are not too far from dolphin. In the right context and with enough effort an English speaker should recognize what’s intended, especially if the meaning is literal and confirmed by your eyes. The Italian is delfino, which might have given me a slight advantage in decoding those Portuguese tones, but it isn’t exactly a word that I had regular occasion to use, and vocabulary is best learned by that elusive cocktail of context and habit and, most importantly, the emotional significance of a word.
In those moments I am on the back deck of a sailboat on a windless afternoon just off the coast of Brazil. The sky is cloudless, there’s a rather pleasant thickness to the air, and a bit of salt on my lips—a presence that gives a sharpness to every drink I take. My skin has a thin layer of sweat that seems to glow in the sun. I squint through my sunglasses at the expansive, brilliant sky, but the water is somehow even brighter, and the white boat comes with its own glare. It is just past noon for nearly the entire day.
And I can still hear how the two children on the front deck break the silence with their rambunctious, exuberant cries—in a moment that fosters the perfect combination of ingredients to singe a new word into memory: by the simple, but slightly deafening, repetition of golfinho by youthful voices; in how my eyes soon confirm the sounds that my ears hear; from the emotion of listening to two jubilant, irrepressible children in a setting that already flows with the sensory details of heat and salt and sun.
Because sounds do have this ability to echo in your mind, especially when they’re tinted with the extremes of joy or sadness. A moment of triumph prompts your mind to begin recording, as does, with even more fidelity, a moment of humiliation. The wrong word at the wrong time carves an emotional divot in your memory, keeping that combination of sounds on a loop. Many adults can describe the exact setting when they were young and a parent spoke particularly cruel words, or they can remember the temperature and time of day and what clothes they wore when a schoolyard bully laughed at them decades earlier—and for many people those old emotions can still rise to the surface with the right trigger. The salience of these times, the manner in which they leave an emotional crevice in your mind, also explains why nearly everybody who has learned another language has a much too vivid recollection of their most embarrassing mistakes—especially when those mistakes come from words that they supposedly know. If a new word resembles an old word in your native language, if there’s a coordination of sounds, you might accidentally toss the foreign word onto the native track in your mind.
For me there’s the time when someone in Rome inexplicably asked me to tell them about my kitchen, so I proceeded, like a polite conversationalist, to describe how it was perfectly usable but almost hilariously white—which was the only notable feature about my apartment kitchen—and I watched as they looked at me with utter shock because the real question was about my cousins; or there’s the strange look grocery store cashiers kept giving me when I first started learning the language, since I would ask for a bag to put my vegetables in without knowing that Italian has multiple words for what exists as one word in English, and my request to put a few tomatoes into a formal handbag must have been, I admit, perplexing; or there’s when someone, for some reason, mentioned the Pope in a conversation that was a bit too fast for my ability at the time, and I slipped into assuming that the Italian papa was indistinguishable from the English papa, and decided to interject that he would be visiting me in Rome soon; and there’s the time on a hot day at my neighborhood bar when I intended to say something like un succo di pesca so that I could enjoy a refreshing peach juice, yet I somehow ended up having different words leave my lips—un succo di pesce—which met looks of disgust and confusion but did ensure that I’ll never again accidentally ask for fish juice.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
Although I would argue that mistakes are necessary steps in the mapping of a new language in your mind—those abrupt and almost vertiginous moments when you recognize that you’ve placed a word far outside its context is quite helpful in remembering the right context. I might even argue that attempting to increase the riskiness of your mistakes while learning another language is a good method to learn faster. To add that this is best accomplished when driven by the learner and can have horrific consequences when practiced by an institution shouldn’t be necessary, even if I might accept the efficacy of what, for instance, George Orwell describes about his childhood.
This did not happen very often, but I do remember, more than once, being led out of the room in the middle of a Latin sentence, receiving a beating and then going straight ahead with the same sentence, just like that. It is a mistake to think such methods do not work. They work very well for their special purpose. Indeed, I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried on without corporal punishment.
Nothing encodes new sounds better than repetition and context and emotion, but that doesn’t quite justify incorporating violence into your lesson plans. Better methods are available—with my time on the water just one example where those same elements came together in a moment of joy.
Now part of the context on the boat is that I do consider myself more than just a swimming connoisseur, as I am a long-tested judge of stroke and form and ability, with it as perhaps the one subject where I am comfortable in admitting my well-earned arrogance, so I must confess to the plainest and most banal of all observations: dolphins are incredible swimmers. To watch a form that appears designed for speed and fluidity and with such an obvious reserve of propulsion is nothing less than thrilling—I must have watched those dolphins with the same longing that many people express when they talk about flight and birds. For a swimmer, in particular, there’s something magical about how they dive in one spot yet soar from a distant spot just moments later. It is also undeniable that the boat, for just the briefest of moments, was an item of curiosity in the dolphin community. How silly it is to ever feel the slightest tinge of jealously for another species, but how wonderful it must feel to have that freedom in the water, coming as it does with the perfect combination of ferocity and grace. And I definitely appreciate how their speed made photography impossible, as the fleeting nature of each leap upward forces you to drop every thought and concentrate—until those moments underneath the sun and amid the childlike screams of golfinhos are so heightened that they remain etched in your memory.