BRUSSELS, Belgium — The train sped through the early-morning darkness from Bruges, the ancient port city that was once the trading hub of northwest Europe, toward Brussels.
In those pre-dawn hours this past Sunday, our passenger car was nearly empty: aside from my wife Lee Ann and our traveling companion, Kay Patterson — who for the second year in a row has joined us on our church’s annual mission trip to Ukraine — there were only two other groups of people on board.
And something fascinating was taking place inside: conversation, even though I didn’t understand a single word.
In the row in front of me were three young men, probably 20 years of age. They looked to be college students en route back to school after a weekend backpacking jaunt.
Behind me sat a family of five, a mother and father and three energetic late-teen daughters, talking and laughing enthusiastically while we sleepy-headed Americans tried to shake off the gloomy rain outside.
The boys were speaking to each other in Flemish; the family behind us conversed in a language I didn’t recognize. Talking and sharing, not texting or web surfing, was the order of the day.
It got even better. At a stop close to Brussels, another family boarded: a mom and dad and two young girls, probably 4 and 3 years old. The daughters, spritely and blonde like their mum, chatted happily to her in French while dad sat smiling nearby. French is a complex but beautiful language (I tried to learn in college, and failed miserably), and hearing the floral intonations shared between the three made me smile, too. It was exquisite.
That experience, and our trip (which we’re still on as you read this) reminded me about the wonder of language and the ways we use it. Have you ever eavesdropped on three conversations simultaneously in three languages you didn’t understand?
It was, it turned out, a beautiful thing.
When it comes to learning other languages, we Americans are pretty near the bottom of the rung. We have a bit of an excuse: about 20 percent of the globe’s population speaks at least passable English. That makes it easy for us. During visits to nine European countries as a tourist in the last four years, only once — with a server in a small restaurant in rural Ukraine, in the Carpathian mountains — have I attempted to engage in conversation with someone who spoke not a single word of English. (We made the meal work with a crude version of sign language.)
So one in five Earthlings speaks English, but it’s the native language for only a quarter of those — or about one in 20 worldwide. But many of the friends we’ve made on our European travels speak three or four languages serviceably. During our few days in Bruges — our “side trip” for R&R prior to the week of work we’re doing now in Ukraine — every server, shopkeeper and museum docent spoke English.
We even witnessed an argument break out when a young couple crossing a canal bridge in the “Venice of the North” accidentally bumped into a middle-aged woman, who proceeded to scream at them in heavily-accented English.
The couple apologized — in heavily-accented English.
I’m on my fourth trip to Ukraine and I know only about six or eight basic Russian phrases and still begin most of my encounters with a feeble, “English, please???”
In nationalistic Lviv, Ukrainian is the preferred language — so here I’m doubly lost; speaking Russian here is frowned upon, even if you’re an English-speaking foreigner.
In Lviv, a close friend we made during our first trip here four years ago has come to stay with us. She’s from Odessa, on the other side of Ukraine, but lives now with her husband in Gdansk, Poland. She speaks Russian, Ukrainian and English, but had to learn Polish to find a job in her adopted new home. The ease at which this young woman — Katya is remarkable in many, many ways, but not a trained linguist — has learned these languages, and transitions smoothly between them, astonishes me.
It’s par for the course for many Europeans.
Every year on this trip, I yearn to up my game and learn a new language. Will it happen this year? I doubt it. I’ll end up making excuses, and besides that, I’ve been reminded time and again how easy it is to get blindly lost in your own tongue.
Case in point: another friend staying with us, Katya’s sister-in-law, Lera, asked me this week to explain to her the differences and appropriate uses of the words “have” and “having.”
I fumbled with my response, confusing Lera even more, and then realized I didn’t have an adequate explanation.
Finally, I gave her the best answer I could come up with.
“Ask Katya.”
Turns out it was the most fluent thing I’ve said all week.