Out to Eat

I think you could do worse than to learn a foreign language by spending nearly all of your time on food, drink and cooking. After all, you’ll need to eat if you visit a foreign country, and you may as well figure out how to ask for things you like or want to try. There are plenty of opportunities, too: you’ll get 2-3 chances a day to practice in that context; not counting afternoon coffee and tea, of course.

If you can ask for directions to good places to eat, make reservations and pay for a meal, you’ve actually covered a lot of ground, linguistically speaking. And if you can talk a little bit about or at least understand the preparations of various foods—kitchen tools and techniques—you’ll have even more verbs and prepositional phrases at your disposal.

Stories and food go together like peanut butter & jelly; everybody has fun and meaningful stories about food. You can learn how to tell one or two of yours in your target language, so that you have something you’ve rehearsed that you can use in conversation. People that you meet will have their own fun stories about food—you can listen to them and laugh over dinner and drinks. You can also just chat with your server or bartender and pick up new bits and pieces of the language, as well as recommendations for the next place to eat.

There’s a case to be made that human language only developed because we were able to grow big enough brains—brains which were a result of increased nutrition from learning how to cook food. If the very first language was developed as a result of food and cooking, then it only seems right to learn new languages with them.

Playing On And Around

Growing up, we we would bring our household garbage to a metal dumpster. It was parked at the end of our long-ish gravel driveway, a few feet away from the group of three mailboxes that seemed to form the nexus of the three households in our strangely-formed little neighborhood.

Sometimes the dumpster would get nearly full and our parents would have us climb up into it (perhaps giving us a boost at first?) to stomp down the garbage so we could fit in whatever else we still needed to throw away. 

Being an avid reader even at an early age, I couldn’t help but notice the stickers on the dumpster that read, “Do Not Play On or Around”. Pointing this out didn’t seem to raise anyone’s level of concern, apart from perhaps wanting me to finish my task quickly, discretely and without mentioning any more potential safety hazards. 

Even if I hadn’t considered the conflicting interests of my parents and the lawyers at the dumpster company, I think I knew intuitively that I was getting away with something. I was engaging in behavior that wasn’t completely sanctioned; even as I was directed by the highest authority I could think of, apart from the police and the President of the United States. It had a whiff of adventure; a fleeting detour from the rules.

But underneath that, I think the pleasure came from the sheer physical novelty: climbing up something that wasn’t a ladder or a tree; getting into something that wasn’t a bed or a swimming pool; walking on a completely different terrain than I could find anywhere else in my neighborhood. It was fun pulling myself up over the edge of the giant metal box and stomping around on the trash bags, cardboard and whatever else it was that got thrown away in the 70’s and 80’s instead of being recycled or up-cycled or sold on eBay.

As I got older, taking out the garbage and stomping it down when necessary became a dull chore, of course. But learning something new like ice skating or doing a cartwheel or swimming might be just as invigorating and won’t get strange looks from the neighbors.

New Recipes

Trying a new recipe is, ipso facto, doing something you haven’t done before. This may be a matter of degree, depending on your level of experience and how different the new recipe is from what you’re used to, but there’s something about it that is novel or unknown, which is where the uncertainty and the tension comes in.

It seems like “trying a new recipe” is a one-shot deal, but since most of us are fortunate enough to eat every day, it doesn’t have to be. We could try new recipes like artists begin a new piece of work, by doing a study—a series of sketches or rough outlines that approximate the intended work. We could plan on making a new dish two or three times to work out the mechanics, the timing or the seasonings. Doing everything right the first time, even when the instructions are correct (don’t get me started), seems unreasonable when you’re doing something new.

It might take some of the pressure off trying something new if we viewed it more like a new hobby than a single, high-stakes performance: do it a few times and see if it suits you.

It Bears Repeating

To remember a thing, to become more skillful at a task requires practice. Specifically: trying to remember that thing, performing the task and noting your performance.

A review can help you plan, but the plan is to practice the thing, again and again.

Falling All Over Ourselves

We humans tend to walk on two legs, which works out well most of the time. Walking is great: it’s efficient and pleasant and we can chew gum, talk on our phones (stop it) or point at birds and snap our fingers while we’re doing it because we only need 2 legs to walk, not 4. But we give up some stability by only using 2 legs, and since we’re “walking upright” like a bunch of showoffs, most of our body is at a significantly higher altitude than our legs.

Sometimes we fall over, or trip. Or are tripped by mischievous... well, never mind. We sometimes lose our balance and fall. This isn’t that dangerous most of the time, except when you see something like this:

(Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)

See Aaron Rodgers? (The guy with the yellow helmet) He’s being tackled at high speed. He’s lost his balance and he’s going to fall all the way to the ground—no doubt about it. He has also instinctively put out his left hand to stop his body plus the considerable mass of the other human body on top of him. It’s pretty stressful for Aaron’s wrist, elbow and shoulder joint and all the bones in between.

Sometimes when people do this (without even being tackled) break some of the bones in their arm. It might be a strength-to-weight ratio thing, or it might be because our arms were really developed for hanging from tree branches, but it doesn’t matter—our arms suck for stopping our bodies from falling when we stick them straight out.

However, there is a set of remarkable techniques for addressing this very problem.

The woman in blue is going to impact the ground very soon and very forcefully. Notice she is paying attention to how far away the ground is and NOT trying to stick her left hand out to stop this from happening. The arts of Jujutsu and Judo teach ukemi-waza or break falls: how to be tripped, thrown, swept off your feet—and survive. The thing that these techniques all have in common is that 1) you DON’T put your hand down to try to stop yourself from getting closer to the ground and 2) you DO tilt your head away from the ground. They also teach you to try to land on a large part of your body to absorb the impact better and to slap the ground with your hand and arm. (Curiously, slapping may be taught simply to occupy your arm with a harmless activity that prevents you from doing something stupid with it, like sticking it straight out toward an appointment with an ambulance or Emergency Room.)

Overcoming the instinctive urge to reach for the ground requires considerable practice, but I think it would be interesting if more people did. There are a fair number of emergency room visits for people with broken collarbones that might be avoided, like my mom who stumbled and “caught” herself a while back, or another friend who damaged tendons and ligaments in her shoulder while trying to catch herself from falling backwards. (“Fall On Outstretched Hand” or FOOSH is a common emergency room term.)

I had a close call quite a few years ago myself when, on a crisp Winter morning I stepped down off of a cement step onto a sidewalk, not realizing that it was glare ice. My feet shot straight out across the ice and the rest of me followed quickly in a downward arc after a moment of weightlessness that seemed both very long and all too brief. That cement step stayed in place. I don’t know exactly how close my head came to the step or the icy sidewalk, but the break falls I had been practicing for the previous 10 years paid handsome dividends: I tucked my head toward my chest and slapped the ground with my arms instead of sticking my arms back behind me toward the ice that had just tried to assassinate me.

The practice of break falls definitely might not work at scale, because we’re really not comfortable rolling around on the ground as we get older, much less deliberately doing something we avoid at all costs: suddenly meeting the Earth on gravity’s terms. But what if we started as children and then... just didn’t stop?