Slow Down, You Talk Too Fast

I'm sitting in this Starbucks, see, huddled off in a back corner, wondering whether I'm beginning to go senile at this relatively young age of (nearly) 57.  It started on my drive down here when, literally out of the blue, it began to ran.  Sure, there were some puffy clouds to be seen around, but nothing to indicate any impending precipitation.  Still, it looked as if my original idea of sitting in the wide-open outdoors to drink my coffee and study (including writing this blog article) would be for naught.  And the prospects for finding a seat ANYWHERE inside this Starbucks likewise dimmed with the freshly falling rain, as it is a popular hangout in this part of town and is usually filled to capacity on Sunday afternoons.  I nevertheless pulled into the parking lot: who knows, I might find a spot anyway.  And as I said, I did...in an obscure corner of the java joint.

So anyway, I'm sitting here, writing out some foreign language sentences for practice, which is something I do as a daily routine.  The rest of the place is packed with customers, some of whom are studying by themselves (or pretending to do so) and some of whom are engaging in sociable conversations.  As I sit here studying OTHER languages, an eerie feeling begins to creep up on me: everyone else around me is speaking English, but at the fast rate that they are speaking, their words are almost incomprehensible to me...almost as if they were speaking an exotic tongue.

I've long had a block when it came to picking up and understanding normal conversation when I hear it in other languages...even those languages that I have studied and can comprehend when it is spoken in a more formal setting on radio and TV news broadcasts.  It's almost as if, regardless of whatever language they are speaking, the talkers are in a completely different gear of communication from anything else.  And now, today, the same troubling feeling started coming to me as others were SPEAKING ENGLISH so fast in conversation that I could scarcely make out their words.  Then a universal principle hit me...

It seems that in nervous social conversation, people regardless of their culture or language tend to talk at a breakneck pace, almost seemingly necessitating a psychic link among themselves from them to understand what each other are saying.  The speed of speech can get very, very fast...to the point sometimes that a native language can sound foreign.  That's a little scary for me...

Then again, there is possibly a more mundane, reasonable interpretation for all this.  When people are conversing in person, a great portion of the communication that is going on between them is unspoken but rather revealed through facial expressions, gestures, and body language.  As a matter of fact, I wonder sometimes if these aren't the main elements in the communication and not the actual words.  In any event, when I'm sitting there with my back to others, I'm not picking up on these integral elements of the interactions between these people and, quite possibly, this may make their spoken language less clear as a result...