Yoko meshi (n.)

Origin: Japan

The peculiar stress of speaking a foreign language (literally means ‘a meal eaten sideways’)

(http://www.geckosadventures.com/tales/24-inspiring-travel-words-youve-never-heard-of/)

I don’t really think that there is any amount of work you can do to prepare yourself for speaking a foreign language in the country of origin. This is my eighth year of learning French and every now and then I am completely thrown by the language, it’s beauty and it’s stupidity. I picked up little bits of Italian, German and Dutch on my travels, but I still didn’t feel the pressure and stress to understand and speak in those languages like in did in France. It was less of a societal pressure and more of an internal one, now that I look back, and for good reason too.

I arrived in Paris, Gare de Lyon on a 15 hour overnight train from Venice with my family. That train ride had definitely been one of the low lights of the trip, but an experience nonetheless… However, I have no burning desire to ever spend 15 hours in such close proximity to my family again. The trip was spent in a 2.5m cubed room with broken air conditioning in the middle of summer was not the most pleasant of evenings I spent with my family.

After very little and highly interrupted sleep, we arrived in Paris, the city that I had been dreaming about visiting since I was 14 years old. To be honest, I certainly didn’t have that breathtaking experience that I had built up in my head for the past 6 years. Coming into Paris in a train actually shows you the gritty, gnarly graffiti-stricken Paris that features in French movies. It’s industrial, raw, and not that romantic or pretty. But it was real.

It was more of a feeling of gratitude and self-accomplishment that struck me as my fatigue kicked in when we arrived in the city. Gratitude towards my parents for being constant pillars of support to helping me get there, for their encouragement in achieving something I had set out to do for such a long time, and of course for the monetary aid when I needed it. Gratitude towards my high school French teacher, whose love and passion for having a positive influence on her pupils, and who had always pushed me and given me the time and resources to better myself. And finally, self-accomplishment. Because despite all the support I had around me, I still spent a lot of time and put in a lot of effort to get where I am today, and I should be proud of that.

I love the imagery that is conjured with the direct translation of the phrase Yoko Meshi – a meal eaten sideways. Because every time I find myself speaking French I feel like like I’m in a battle with my mouth and my brain. My brain is thinking in terms of patterns, rules and agreements that I have been training it to recognise and recite religiously for the last eight years. Whereas my mouth still hasn’t quite cottoned on to the idea of dropping that lazy-jawed, inarticulate Kiwi accent that it has formed for my 20 years. So my brain and my mouth meet somewhere awkwardly in the middle. It is not quite yet the pleasant collaboration that I would like, but we’re getting there.

Speaking another language can be very stressful, and this has been at the heart of all my anxieties whilst travelling. It’s that feeling of not trusting yourself and thinking that your brain is going to shut down in a situation when you really need it to work. And yes, it does happen. And yes, you muddle through all while using the wrong word, using the incorrect tense and verb conjugation and have to repeat yourself several times to be understood. But the next time you are in that situation, you know how it works and the muddling through becomes easier and more familiar until, finally, you’ve conquered that task. That said task could be something as simple as going to the supermarket, or asking for help at a train station, but the stress of speaking a foreign language doesn’t go away overnight.

On another related note, I’ve always been a person who has always read body language rather well and people-watching was a skill and a pleasurable pass-time that my mother and I have always shared. It didn’t become obvious until living in a non anglophone country, but I now understand how a spoken language is so inherently connected to the physical expression of that particular language. Reading body language in France has been something that I have struggled with, and more so because it is something that I usually fall back on in English. When I went to England and Ireland I was entertained for hours by just sitting in cafes and pubs just watching and listening -something that I just haven’t done so much in France.

I admit that I write with a rather critical tone in regards to the experience of speaking another language. However, as stressful as it can be, it certainly comes with its rewards. From little moments where people compliment you on your level of language, to going to a party with locals and being able to contribute to the conversation – it’s the times like these when the stresses pay off a bit, especially with un verre de vin rouge à la main!