Prabusire a Limbii

There are some classroom moments when you realize that your understanding of the language is just not up to snuff.

I'm talking about my English.

On Thursday, a girl in my seventh grade class was reading her homework out loud. The assignment had been to describe a friend's bedroom, using vocabulary that we had learned in the last lesson. During her reading, she said something like, "There is a desk, a cassette player and a video." I asked her to clarify what she meant by "video". She made the gestures of putting a videotape into a machine. I understood what she meant, and moved toward the board to write the correct word.

But what was the correct word?

I had forgotten. Five seconds passed.

"What is it?" I asked out loud. 10 seconds passed. My children began laughing.

"We use DVD players more in America, so I've forgotten the word," I said, trying to cover. 20 seconds.

"I know this," I said, tapping my foot and looking out the window in a desperate attempt to find the word written on the hills outside. 30 seconds.

Absolutely stumped. 40 seconds.

"A VCR!" I got it! I wrote the word on the board and had the students pronounce it.

"I'm really embarrassed about that," I told them. Hopefully, not too many of them know what "embarrassed" means.

My sense of accomplishment was bittersweet. I had found my answer, but it was if at age 22, I had been stumped by "What is two plus two?" It took me 45 seconds to remember the name of a basic electronic item that I have had in my living room for my entire life.

This loss of native language is widespread among anyone who lives abroad for a long period of time. I no longer use the word "to pour" in English; my first instinct is to say, "Can I turn you some wine?" since the Romanian verb "a turna" means "to pour".

A fellow volunteer who has been in Moldova for nearly two years and lived in the Czech Republic before that often has lapses in her English. I used to tease her about it. But now my language is declining like Charlie in the second half of Flowers for Algernon. I don't laugh anymore.