The Language Barrier

It is impossible to describe the feeling of complete helplessness when you don’t understand a word and nobody understands you... it is something everyone has to experience for themselves. I will try, however, to give you an idea of how I felt during my first day in Spain.

I was very confident in my language abilities after college (I was able to communicate in 4 different languages), so I didn’t bother learning Spanish over the summer (clearly I had better things to do). The first doubts about possible communication problems occurred to me on my flight from Frankfurt to Madrid. All of the announcements were made in Spanish first (at least I thought it was Spanish; it could have been Italian or Greek and I wouldn’t have known the difference), followed by the German translation. At the time I thought it was pretty funny that I couldn’t understand a word, but soon I realized that the joke was on me.

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