8 Kamena 2013: Ibibazo by’Ururimi

My efforts to speak Kinyarwanda have been, broadly, a limited success. I can usually say about what I want to say, though not nearly with the detail and nuance that I want. I feel like my personality doesn’t really come through as much as it would if I were speaking English, just because I do not know how to communicate in very fine detail.

People have been very nice in trying to accommodate my disability. They are not quite doing it in the most effective way, though. This will take a minute to explain: Kinyarwanda is a language in which a single word can encode as much meaning as a whole phrase would in English—so “I gave it to them for you” might translate as nábâbiiheye (or something similar to that), where there are seven meaningful pieces (morphemes) in the word and the root ha, meaning “give,” is barely discernible. Now, I know a decent amount of vocabulary in Kinyarwanda, and in a given sentence it is reasonably likely that I know the meaning of each individual part. Parsing them into words that I can extract meaning from, however, is really hard!

People who talk to me tend to think I have the opposite problem. If I don’t understand what they say, they assume it is because I do not know a word at the root of their sentence. Granted, I might not, but the problem is much more that I cannot tell what that word is, in any language! So it is not terribly helpful when they try to rephrase, for two reasons: first, they usually speak just as fast both times, and second, once they move on to a different wording I will never know what they said the first time.

What would be really helpful is if they would just repeat the same thing, very slowly, until I was able to parse it into its component parts, and then help me understand if there were a piece that I couldn’t get. Alas, however, I don’t know how to tell people that’s what I want!

Something else that occurs to me, on a different note: Living in a house with a 3-year-old, I am witnessing a critical period in language acquisition. I don’t know a whole lot about that topic, but it is really interesting to hear what comes out of the kid’s mouth. Sometimes it is clearly Kinyarwanda, sometimes it is English—he’s got “one” through “twelve” down really well—and sometimes it doesn’t sound like much of anything. If I knew more (about both Kinyarwanda and language acquisition) I could say really interesting things about what he sounds like when he repeats after his parents, and the sounds he makes, which often are not part of either Kinyarwanda or English. Oh well. I guess I’ll just stick to talking about how cute he is. (He likes spinning the wheels on my suitcase and standing in the doorway of my bedroom looking all inquisitive; I enjoy it, but the adults tend to think he shouldn’t be bothering me or something. Now he has taken to waddling around in a pair of his dad’s shoes, which are huge on him.)