CASUAL

...Neither ever tells the other to "have a nice day," but they seem to get through the weeks without language quite nicely anyhow...

...My spoken French—I can read the language with the help of dictionaries—still falls short of being despicable...

...Yet it turned out that I'd learned it just well enough to board the wrong train from Florence to Milan, causing me to miss my bus and have to pay a cab driver the equivalent of $80 to get me to the airport, during which we spoke to each other about Frank Sinatra in execrable French...

...I had some free time—why not fill it up by failing to learn yet another new language...

...My aged father recently returned from the hospital, requiring someone to watch him full time...

...To be in a land where you do not speak the language can be an unnerving, even a harrowing feeling...

...The one language I am extremely glad not to have to attempt to learn is English, which provides, or so it seems to me, almost no help whatsoever by way of clear rules about syntax and a vocabulary full of homonyms, nonsensical idioms, and other words and constructions that have no connection that I can see with logic...

...Listening to her answer "No problem" to nearly everything I had said to her one day in my office, I thought that any immigrant to America today can probably survive with mastery of only three idioms: (l) No problem, (2) Go screw yourself, and (3) Have a nice day...

...and Ph.D., which she is, in Ukraine...

...Once, on a trip to Italy, I believed I was getting the hang of that nation's glorious, sonorous language...

...As a writer, I often wonder how I would have fared if I had been born in a country whose politics forced me into exile and, with it, into another language...

...Many years ago, I tried to teach myself Russian...

...Foreigners who seem easily to master it impress me greatly...

...Her business card has after her name the initials M.D...

...Without a common language, one feels almost of another species, rather as if one didn't have prehensile thumbs...

...Casual A BAD CASE OF MONO My pity goes out to the monolingual, those poor devils trapped in the prison of a single language, their linguistic horizons occluded by knowing only the language of their own country...

...Here, with no English, she is reduced to tending to the needs of my father, and she does it with a kindliness that has touched both him and me...

...He is aware of her devotion, and returns it with affection...

...I would acquire a German grammar, flash cards, the rest of the language-learning apparatus...

...They spend days together with perhaps two hundred words of English between them...

...I call her by her first name, Erica...

...Every so often I get a German exchange student in one of my classes and am astonished at how adept he or she is in writing and, often, speaking English...

...While he naps, she sits in his kitchen, listening to classical music and working on an English-Russian grammar book, at which she seems not to be making much progress...

...Her last name is a bit of barbed wire, chiefly comprising the letters l, y, and u, which I have not attempted to pronounce even to myself...

...Not very well, I suspect...

...I speak just enough Yiddish to fool the Gentiles but not enough to speak to real Jews...

...I have felt it, in a modified form, when I was a tourist in Turkey and in the cities of the Dalmatian coast...

...One such student, whose written was much better than her spoken English, early caught on to the phrase "No problem"—the American all-purpose equivalent of the Italian "Prego"—and was beating it into the ground with overuse...

...Only the other day I saw, in a bin of 50-cent sale books at my local library, a handsome German edition of the plays of Gerhart Haupt-mann, and wondered if I oughtn't to buy it...

...He calls her, in a sturdy old American cliche, "a diamond in the rough...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...I hired a woman from Ukraine, in (I should guess) her late forties, with a most intelligent face, a refined manner, and either not enough English to say "no problem" or too much sense not to recognize that the English language is for her a momentous problem...

...On another occasion, I enrolled in a course in Ancient Greek, and found myself spending something like four hours a day (including classroom time) on it, and had to drop out...

...I have dabbled in other languages, but with nothing approaching success...

...My pity, I had better quickly insert, is self-pity, for I am such a prisoner—a lifer, it is beginning to become clear...

...I carried a little Russian-English grammar about with me, which finally didn't help me learn the language but caused one of my co-workers to start the rumor that I was a Communist...

...she does not call me by any name at all, and she calls my father "Mister...