Learning Languages

My husband and I have been called to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Holland—The Netherlands—so I am learning a new language.

This is not my first rodeo. I studied Spanish in high school, and Dutch during a previous visit, but now I’m here for 18 months, and I really want to ahievve fluency. It’s been an interesting journey. Months before we left home, charged with excitement and driven by visions of myself prattling away in a new tongue, I opened my grammar book and started reading. It sounded interesting, and not too hard. New words—like a secret code that 18 million people use every day. I got a tutor and talked with her. I started reading and writing, a little here, a little there.

A big step was learning to pray in Dutch—I carefully wrote out my first prayer with my tutor and chanted it over and over. I couldn’t seem to get the phrases to stick in my head. I didn’t especially like praying in Dutch, because my sentences were hard and stilted, and in prayer I wanted to speak freely. Everything sounded awkward and canned—I knew how to ask for His blessings, so why not use the same phrase every time? A fellow Dutch-learner told me that when she was learning to pray in Dutch, she was constantly interrupting her supplications so she could look up a new word. I can relate! However, over time, I have been developing a prayer vocabulary: thank, ask, bless, all in Christ’s name. the amazing thing is, despite my stumbles, I still feel listened to, and answered.

Then we moved to the Netherlands. Suddenly the language was flowing all around me, in the air, on billboards, and on the neighborhood notices that dropped into our mailbox. Luckily, my husband is more skilled in Dutch than I so he translated for me and offered constant assistance with my lame speaking attempts: oops, wrong word, try this one, careful of word arrangement, that kind of thing.

When translation devices were available at church, I made a point to go without. So, for weeks I understood very little. Despite my daily flashcard use and my husband’s coaching, I could catch one word every few sentences, and, while gloating over my achievement, the speaker went on to say much more that I couldn’t understand. Oh well. After the meeting I would ask my husband something like, “I heard his story had blood in it—was it his wife’s blood, his blood or Christ’s blood?” I was mostly lost. But people were kind, and some even spoke to me in English to help me feel welcome.

We have been here three months now, and I am feeling like the sun is rising. People talk, and often I can understand. I can follow conversations much more easily. I can read with better accuracy. Speaking remains challenging—I just have to do it more, more, more. But I am feeling more successful as I decode the language all around me.

My husband’s journey as a more advanced speaker has been interesting, too. He first needed to brush up on vocabulary. Now he is working on nuances and idioms. He’s trying to think like a Dutchman, and when we travel on the trains, he often asks grammar questions: does this word mean last week, or does it mean the final week? What do you call all these greenhouses? And what is the difference between these two different words for canal? Again, most people are kind and willingly offer good-humored assistance.

People learn languages all over the world for all kinds of reasons. It’s not easy, but I have begun to think that, despite my American upbringing, being bi- or tri-lingual is more the rule than the exception. In Holland, most people, young and old, speak English, as well as other languages, because, as a small country, they know the wisdom of being able to talk to your neighbors.

Despite their multi-culturalism, the Netherlanders love it when visitors speak their language. When they are confident that they are understood, they relax and speak with more freedom. They don’t have to conjugate the next verb—I’ll do that instead. I am beginning to see that speaking another language is a gift to the native speaker; it validates who they are and how they communicate.

In this journey, I recognize that learning a new language is a parable for our experiences with Father in Heaven. I don’t speak His language, but He speaks mine. However, if I want to truly know Him better, I need to put in the hard work to learn how to communicate in word and action as He does. I need to learn to think celestially.

In this effort, Christ is a valuable example and translator. As his disciple, I want to make my language His. Fluency is a long game, and certainly, this is the case as I develop my skills in reading His words, writing His messages to me, listening to the whispers of the Holy Ghost, and learning to speak with the tongue of angels. Interestingly, the result of my efforts in learning His language cannot be described in words: the feeling of peace which passeth all understanding.

Kristin Fry raised her eight children in Palmer and is now serving the people of Belgium with her husband as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.