The Oy Vey – Amai Connection
I was walking to a tram stop this afternoon when a large German Shephard going on a walk with his owner came at me. I flinched back, the dog went the other way and as I continued on down the street I thought to myself, “amai!”
Amai is the equivalent of “oh my” in English, but also a common Yiddish phrase, “oy vey”. I’m typically an “oy vey”er, so much so that I’ve turned gentile friends into users of the phrase. I was sincerely surprised that the Dutch word came into my head before the Yiddish or even the English.
Perhaps some of you out there have had this sort of experience before. I asked CB about it but he’s been speaking English so long that I don’t think he recalls the early stages of becoming fluent. See, lately I’ve been having moments where I can’t think of some words in English, but I can think of the equivalent in Dutch. Or I often start thinking half and half, with some words coming out in English, and some in Dutch. I imagine this is because I’ve made it a habit when I’m alone (which is often) to try to translate my thoughts as I’m thinking them into Dutch. It usually works something like this:
Me, thinking to myself: Ugh, I’m thirsty and I’m out of water. I wonder if there’s a shop nearby so I can buy another bottle of water…
Then I propose the question to myself in Dutch, in case I would want to ask someone: Excuseer meneer/ mevrouw, is er een winkel in de buurt? Ik wil een flesje water kopen.
And most of my thinking goes along those lines. I’m constantly trying to think of how I would say what I’m thinking in Dutch. Most of the time I can think of how to say things, but when I can’t I try to remember what words I was lacking or what expression I didn’t know so that I can ask CB about it later. But the end result is that I often mix both languages when I think to myself. And actually, when we get together with CB’s family it comes in handy because half of his relatives will speak in Dutch, the others in English, or they’ll throw in a Dutch word if they don’t know the English or an English word if I don’t know the Dutch, so much of my conversation with others is often mixed as well.
This isn’t a bad thing, by any means. In fact, I find it encouraging that the lines between the languages are blurring more noticeably for me. Lately I’ve even noticed that when someone tells me something in Dutch, when I try to recall it, I hear them speaking in English. It’s strange, because I know for sure I was spoken to in Dutch, but I recollect it very clearly in English. It’s an interesting process, this whole learning another language thing.
I wonder when I’ll be ready for French…
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I remember very clearly being on an exchange that in the beginning I used the dictionarry Dutch-English all the time.
In the second half of the year I was writing a letter to my parents talking about avalanches and all of a sudden I had no clue anymore what the dutch word for it was. How strange it is to grab a dictionarry English-Dutch to look up a word in your own mother language!!!!
I also noticed that when I talk about my experiences in Canada I keep slipping English words into my story. One time somebody told me “well that makes perfect sense right…your memories are in English as you lived these experiences in English”. I guess indeed I’ve had some experiences purely in English that I never needed to translate before and hence when I all of a sudden need to talk about them in Dutch, I need to translate them for the first time.
Once I heard from a Canadian exchange student in Japan that after x months he had his first dream in Japanese. Finally he had mastered the language enough to dream in Japanese. In this dream his parents were there and they too talked to him in Japanese and he got so mad at them in the dream for already talking Japanese so quickly while it had cost him so much effort to learn the basics of this language
It are very weird processes indeed and it’s so strange when it is happening to you.
hahaha, some foreigner once told me that “Amai” is the most polyvalent word in Dutch and can be used in all kind of sentences depending on the intonation or context, so it was an important word to learn quickly. He gave some examples where it expresses amazement, frustration, joy etc… I had never thought of it and thought it was quite funny :p
Wow, that is so impressive. How long did it take you to get to this point? I can’t even remember to say sorry in French when I bump into people in the metro.
I love that kind of transitioning. You’re on your way!
Exciting! I think I had one of those moments when I was sarcastic to my French teacher…in French.
I’m going to take some pictures of a Taiwanese 7/11 to show you…
I always associate oy vey with kind of an unpleasant shock or “ugh” as that’s how I used it in Russian. (they only use Oi, not the vey) But amai, like someone said earlier… is very flexible to me. An “oh boy” or “oh my!” but never like “ugh”… but I’m not Jewish/a speaker of Yiddish so I don’t know much about the proper uses of oy vey.
I have noticed quite a commonality between common Yiddish words used by Jewish-Americans and Dutch, though!
I think the hardest words for me to remember in English are words I associate with another culture, so if I associate something with Belgium then I remember the Dutch or French… (for instance, the commune, because I in Brussels and also I would have rarely said “town hall” in English… the same goes with things such as Vakbond or Mutualiteit…) It’s an interesting process! When I came back from a year in Russia it took me ages to think of the word “sour cream” because the stuff is SO POPULAR in Russia that it’s only natural to use the native word. That, and… it’s much easier.