I was very good at several languages; not so much so these days. What you don’t use you tend to lose. So if I do throw out a phrase or two I always add "I haven’t used it much the last 40 years but ---- " to let the person know my intent isn’t anything bad. Actually it works out well for me sometimes as it starts a conversation and I surprise myself at how much comes back.
I pretty much flunked Spanish but have retained a few useful phrases. I use them at work when talking to guests from Mexico. Mostly they understand me, but being able to say “menos que un minuto” fluently sometimes leads to their thinking I’m fluent after all.
Besides “hello,” “goodbye,” “please,” and “thank you,” I learned to ask where the bsthroom was in about 5 languages. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that, unlees the response was a gesture to the appropriate door, I was more lost than before.
Exactly.
I would always phrase a question where the answer would be a yes or no. The response would go on for five minutes. And I never heard a yes or no.
I was more lost than before, also.
Just remembered I recently watched this James May Manlab episode: https://youtu.be/vDjm4VLfG_g?t=2165.
He tested using a book translator to mimed gestures to get directions from foreign language speaking strangers. Spoiler: [COLOR=“White”]Miming won[/COLOR]
Since the OP asks about a Mexican restaurant, it’s relevant to mention the practice of “Mock Spanish” and the heavy-duty sociology generated when gringo managers of Mexican restaurants use it on their native-Spanish-speaking staff.[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1[/sup] Barrett, Rusty (April 2006). “Language ideology and racial inequality: Competing functions of Spanish in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant”. Language in Society. 35 (2): 163–204. doi:10.1017/s0047404506060088. JSTOR 4169491.
This. It isn’t that it’s rude or insulting. I learned this the first time I visited a Spanish speaking country. If I called or stopped by the hotel desk and said “Good Morning”, I had a conversation in English about whatever I needed to chat about. If I said “Buenos Dias”, ( I only made this mistake once) I got a response in conversational Spanish that I had absolutely no chance of understanding.
Then I had to back up and say something to the effect of…
“Sorry, I don’t actually speak Spanish, I was just…well, I’m not really sure what I was trying to accomplish just now, maybe prove that I knew two words in your native language and I’m not a rube like those other Americans but that didn’t go so well, did it? Never mind , my question wasn’t important and I’ll just stop by later after shift change and ask it in English, I’m too embarrassed right now ”
Just speak the language that you understand.
I think it’s fine to sprinkle token gesture phrases in a local language while abroad, to indicate good will, along with your English - kind of like how in France, waitstaff and store clerks might dislike someone just coming up and talking in English (even if they are conversant), it’s more polite to start with a “bonjour, parlez-vous anglais?”.
An Anglo speaking Spanish at a Mexican restaurant in the United States is a similar scenario, as Spanish is basically the second language in many parts of this country, despite some people’s animosity to that fact. Sprinkle in a phrase or two to show good will (as opposed to the “ha ha lookit I’m talking funny foreign speak” attitude) and it should be received in the spirit it was done in.
The problematic scenario is when one tries to do this as a cold guess as to another person’s ethnicity, like going up to an East Asian looking person at a party and bowing while saying, “konnichiwa?” (a Japanese greeting) without knowing if the other person is Chinese, Japanese, or a 3+ generation Japanese-American who doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t care to be confronted with that by a drunk Anglo.
Yeah. I’m pretty good in Japanese. Business fluent. I also hated it when people would try to force their English on me.
It depends on what your purpose is and how friendly you are.
One down side is that everyone who knows two words of Spanish may be trying the same thing. Think of a tall guy who gets the same tired “How’s the weather up there?” line daily.
Apropos of nothing -
Years ago while in Europe, we tried to exercise our rudimentary foreign language skills (German, Italian, French) in low risk settings (shops and restaurants). It was good exercise, and frankly fun. Once in Brussels we were working through ordering in French, the waitress responding in kind. At one point we broke into English between ourselves to work something out and the waitress heard us and chimed in, “Oh, you’re American! I’m American too! Can we just speak English?” Well, OK, I guess. :o
This. I was in Barbados and ordered food from a woman working a snack stand near the beach. Holding her baby, she cooked me a very nice lunch.
Wanting to thank her, I told her, in Spanish, that the food was delicious and her child was cute. She smiled. In perfect English she told me that I just told her that her baby looked delicious and I’d like to eat it. We laughed.
Another time I asked a bartender in Puerto Rico(?) “Como se dice “vodka” en Espanol?” She looked me in the eye, and verrry slowly said,“vodka”, to which I replied, “te quiero.”
When I was on a team to Guatemala, the guy on the team who could supposedly speak some Spanish ordered “two cold Thursdays” (dos jueves frias) instead of “two fried eggs” (dos huevos fritos) on our first morning at the hotel.
If I speak your language much better than you speak mine, I think it can be rude for you to insist on speaking my language. It wastes time and effort. You’re just using me for language practice, and I don’t always welcome that. A greeting is fine, of course, but not an entire conversation.
New Years Eve we were at a nice restaurant having dinner. A woman at a nearby table said something in what my gf recognized as “Slovak”, which is where her dad’s side of the family is from. Turns out my gf can speak a few words (I did not know that).
As we were leaving, my gf stopped at the woman’s table and said, “blkrthvsky zzrty*ht@st” or something similar. The woman freaked out, asked us to join them, and bought us an after dinner drink.
Given the situation outlined by the OP (You are in the UNITED STATES, interacting with someone whose first language is not English) I tend to stick to English only. My concern is that the person may think I am insulting their linguistic abilities, and don’t want anyone to think I am putting them down. And I speak Spanish and French passably well.
Outside the U.S., it’s a different story. I try to speak the standard language of the country, unless my interlocutor requests English.
Even if you learn a language fairly fluently, you’re still going to be stuck when you have to say things like “please take a roll-away to room 1234” or " room 2345 has requested 6 additional clothes hangers. " because you never learned it. And even if you did, who knows if hangers in Peruvian Andean Spanish is the same as hangers in Mexican Spanish. I had a co-worker who grew up in Mexico - his parents were sent there to manage a manufacturing plant from the U.S. - and learned Spanish. When we had a couple from Chile working as night housekeeping he found sometimes that his Spanish was meaningless to them.
I haven’t read the article (I don’t have permission), only the wiki remarks about it, but if wiki is to be believed (excuse me while I go get the salt), Barrett posits that the workers were “empowered” by the manager’s “lack of attention and indiference to the Spanish language”, which allowed them to do things such as use duplicated garbage bags to their benefit. Having a manager who doesn’t pay attention to what the subordinates are doing or who doesn’t understand what they do does allow the subordinates to sell white elephants to the boss regardless of language(s) involved, I’d say. Mr. Barrett seems to need to get out more.
Be careful if the language has phonemic distinctions lost on English speakers. Words may seem like homonyms to our ears which are NOT homophones to them. Here’s an example that may confound tourists trying to flirt with a pretty girl!
[ul][li] สวย /sua̯j˩˩˦/ — beautiful[/li][li]ซวย /sua̯j˧/ — unlucky[/ul][/li]The Thai woman may not know you’re trying to flirt with her after you call her ‘unlucky’! The words have different tones. (Neither is written with a tone mark, but the mapping between tone marks and tones is non-trivial.)