Què vol dir...?

Sometimes my life is like a big game of Taboo.

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Let's say you are giving an English class and a student asks you the meaning of a word. You have many options: You can look at the context, you can give synonyms, you can give a translation... but often times these either are not an option or not sufficient.

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For example, the other day I read a movie review from the New York Times with two of my private students. I hadn't read the review before our lessons, and it was probably too difficult for their level as it had lots of words they didn't know. Anyway, as we read they would stop me and ask for the meaning of various words. First I would try to explain it to them in English or give synonyms. If that wasn't enough, I would give them the translation. If that wasn't enough, I would look it up in my English-Catalan dictionary.

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For example, "pomegranate": a red fruit, you eat the seeds, there is a city in Spain with the same name (Granada); "leap": to jump; "gaze": mirada, etc.

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But sometimes words didn't appear in my dictionary. During both lessons my students asked for the meaning of "cursory" and "innocuous." I had no idea how to explain it to them.

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Living in this giant game of Taboo is challenging, but in a fun way. It also teaches you a lot about your own language. I came across a quote the other day which relates: "He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Of course, this also applies to other things, such as grammar (I probably learned more about things like prepositions, direct and indirect objects, and infinitives in my Spanish classes than in my English classes, and I had never even heard of a phrasal verb until I came to Andorra). While we usually function in our native language automatically and without thinking, speaking another forces you to look at it from a new perspective.

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It goes both ways too. Something you learn quickly functioning in another language is to describe words. If you are talking to somebody and want to say something but don't know the translation, you have to either rephrase what you're saying or try to explain it in another way. For instance, "So, we can't get our mail because somebody lost the key to, well, to the box by the stairs where they leave the mail... It's called a buzón? Well, we can't get our mail because somebody lost the key to the buzón."

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And maybe I'm not an English scholar, but explaining a word to somebody who speaks a language in which the word does not exist is tricky no matter who you are. Now try it in your second language.