I don’t have the best hearing. I’ve always been just ever-so-slightly deaf. Not deaf enough for it to really matter (i.e., I don’t wear a hearing aid and medically, I don’t need one), but my hearing is such that I frequently mishear words and sound quite stupid upon repeating them.
So it should not really be a surprise that for most of my childhood, I mistakenly thought the Persian word for cantaloupe, “kharbozeh,” was pronounced “khargoozeh.”
So I pronounced it “khargoozeh” without really thinking about it until, at perhaps nine or ten years of age, I said it quite loudly in a Persian supermarket, in the presence of lots of proper Iranian ladies. Apparently my half-yelling, “Maman, can we buy some ‘khargoozeh’?” across the little produce section actually meant, “Mom, can we buy some donkey farts?”
Obviously, I blame my parents for this. True, I have bad hearing. But clearly, they must have been horrible listeners. Why else would they have let a crucial misnomer like this slide for years and years, quite literally?
Of course, from this experience and many others like it, I am extremely paranoid about making mistakes like this now. It’s a detriment to my Farsi language skills to be self-conscious about speaking Farsi, to be sure, but I’m far too old - and surrounded by far too many smart Iranians - ever to play off an error like that as cute. In fact, I think it is a huge liability to speak incorrectly when, for instance, I am interviewing someone and it’s important that they take my questions (and me) seriously, and that our conversation is natural.
So, what do you think? Is it better to make horrible mistakes in a professional capacity, as one perfects one’s mother-tongue? Or is it wiser to speak English, even in interviews with Iranians, which most subjects understand but which definitely does not yield the best answers from them because their best language is Farsi. I’m partial to the former approach, if only because it’s a question of access to certain subjects, and lately, the former has become my modus operandi because my Farsi is only going to get worse if I don’t use it. But I am curious about how other people would approach this issue, and if the poor Farsi is forgivable as long as the interviewer is trying.
2 Comments
My dear, it is not only you, it is actually most of us!
I had exactly the same problem with that particular word until about that age too. Your parents were not really that responsible for it either, perhaps because they enjoyed your ’shirin zabani’ as a small girl so they did not try to correct you earlier, or they were just too busy with other responsibilities of life and they suffered from a similar “hearing problem” only this time THEY heard you wrong instead of right!
(And what is “right” or “wrong” after all?)
A similar problem persists with the Persian word “gavazn”, which most of us used to read it as “goozan” as a child. (I read it that way once even at the age of sixteen or older!)
The “Sweet Language of Persian” and above all its ‘nice writing style’ and alpha bet is also to blame I would imagine but I am sure all other languages do suffer from similar problems in their own way anyway.
Good luck.
D
I’ve thought about this, and stressed about it, for a long time. My Farsi has also gotten worse as time has passed, and it has left me very self-conscious about using it. Growing up, my brother was thought to have the funny accent and mistaken-word Farsi (he was only a year old when we moved to Canada) while I was mostly fluent. In the past few years, as I have spoken Farsi less and less, he has made an effort to improve his Farsi, but I feel uncomfortable making the same effort. Where his mistakes are ignored because he used to make even worse ones, I’m afraid of sticking out, and being laughed at, and seen as unprofessional or unknowing, etc. So, I tend to use English exclusively these days, and feel guilty about it; I don’t practise Farsi very often, not even with my parents and feel guilty about that too. I really do need to make more of an effort, suck it up and learn, and not make stupid excuses or hide in English for ridiculous reasons.
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