Some of you might not know that I’ve been studying Haitian Creole for over a year now, and have achieved some success. I don’t talk about it much, and so it might be a surprise to find this out –
Who am I kidding?! Of course it’s all I talk about! I’ve had some good success, and my instructors are encouraging and helpful. So I’m feeling pretty good. It’s only been a year, and yet I can hold a conversation, if you talk slowly and repeat new words.
But then tonight—hoo boy, was I confounded. As part of our “fun” activities in my student group, we listen to videos on YouTube in Haitian Creole, and then one of us teaches the rest of the class what’s going on. We go slowly still, and there are things that are just difficult for all of us. For me, it is especially difficult to hear spoken Creole and understand it on the fly if it goes too fast (I’m looking at you, Wilky Toussaint!) or if it has complex thoughts or too many new words. But given a little bit of time and practice, I can usually bang out the meaning, even if it means I still can’t do it well on the fly in a street conversation.
So we watched a video by the group named “Lakou Kajou,” literally “Cashew-tree yard.” It’s a series of cartoons and recorded videos of kids doing things and explaining them, or being tasked to discover things, and typically the topics are centered around a theme. Tonight’s video was centered around the idea of identifying shapes such as triangles, squares, circles, cylinders, and spheres. I know these words! I know these concepts!
But this young kid, maybe 7 or 8 years old, was explaining the simple model of a house he built with sticks and cords, and he then walked us through his dad’s job of ferrying tourists up the dirt road to the Citadel (the most important fort of the Haitian revolution) with its many discernable shapes (cylinders for the cannon, spheres for the stacks of cannon balls, rectangles and squares for the doors and windows, and so on).
That kid was speaking Creole effortlessly and precisely, describing everything as if it was the easiest thing in the world to handle the tenses and vocabulary while communicating something more useful than “Hello! How are you? I’m fine,” which is about my level of comfort.
I know he’s young, and in Haiti, and of course would know his language well enough by that age.
Still, here I am at an older age where I know a lot of words in English, which gives me a leg up in learning Haitian Creole (many English words have understandable cognates in Haitian Creole, so when I hear new words I can often figure them out right away). And yet I’m struggling to keep up with this young boy.
I felt so slow and ignorant. I’m not that advanced, not at all, and I am a slow learner who is just not going to get much further along than I am. I’m feeling so discouraged.
My mind, of course, being rational, tells me that I’m not that bad, and that I am always able to continue to learn. But my emotions? They tell me to just give up and maybe take up papier-mâché as a hobby. That just takes ripping up paper and gluing it into shapes like triangles, circles, squares, and the like.
I think I can do that.
Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash