On learning to talk — and listen — to each other

“I’m, like, eh.” The things you learn to say when you raise girls.

Over here, where Fourteen is in full bloom, I’m being schooled in Teenager, an extravagant language of rolled eyes, daggered looks, verbal italics, monosyllables, and sharply slammed bedroom doors.

It’s a language in which meaning often runs counterpoint to text. One recent afternoon, for instance, it was clear that someone’s blood sugar had fallen to subterranean levels, that same someone had just blurted that she “didn’t want an (expletive deleted) bagel; they’re disgusting!” Then she stomped up the front steps and into the house.

In former days (um, okay, until last week), I might have taken this bristling statement as provocation. I might have argued: “The bagels are fine, I just bought them yesterday, and besides, I don’t like that tone of voice.” But this time, I knew that I must go to the kitchen immediately, toast the bleeping bagel, and deliver it wordlessly to Fourteen, who by then was contrite and starving and happy to prop up pillows so we could eat together while watching White Collar on her laptop.

Distinguishing shrieks

We’re always learning each other’s native tongues. When they’re tiny, there’s a whole vocabulary of cries, a tonal language no less complex than Mandarin, in which the word “ma,” depending on the pitch of your voice, can mean either “mother” or “horse.” I learned to differentiate the panicked shriek that meant, “I just tumbled out of my crib, and now I’m on the floor” from the milder fussing that indicated, “I’m a little bored over here; could you come find my binky?”

Speaking Teenager calls for the same subtle ear. “Ama,” the name my daughter has called me since she was two, can be inflected with pleading (“Help; my backpack zipper is stuck, and I’m going to be late!”), mortification (“I can’t believe you wore overalls to pick me up from circus school”), fury, bemused exasperation, or a thousand other shades of gray.

Fourteen, too, is learning to translate: When she asks to go to a concert by that rapper whose lyrics make me cringe, and I say, “Hmm . . . I have to think about it,” are my words code for “Not until hell freezes over, but I’d rather not say no on the way to school”? If a teacher threatens detention for one more gum-chewing infraction, is that bluster or a genuine consequence?

Good days

And that’s only the people who speak English. “Why do they say ‘buenos dias’ in Spanish—‘good days’—when it’s just one day?” she queries, bent over her notebook. “Why do they say, ‘I have hunger’ instead of ‘I’m hungry’? Why are there two different words for ‘is’?”

We learn others’ languages to remember that we are not the hubs of the universe, that different people have their own disparate experiences, their own idiosyncratic modes of expression. When you learn a second language, you glimpse your own strangeness. It may seem odd to English speakers to say, “la taza se me cayó y se me rompió,” (“the cup dropped and broke itself with respect to me”), but it’s no more convoluted than our own passive-voiced evasions (“Mistakes were made. Collateral damage was incurred.”).

When I let myself sink into Fourteen’s turns of speech, I understand her better. The reflexive “right?” that punctuates the end of sentences — “That was hilarious, right?” — semaphores the crowd-sourcing, approval-seeking nature of adolescence.

Even the much-satirized tendency of teen girls and young women to inflect their statements into questions (“I want to go to Spain? Because it’s, like, important to see other cultures?”) stems from a self that’s profoundly uncertain, a time of life in which everything feels open-ended. It takes conviction to close your sentence with a period. It’s scary to declare.

Learning to hear

In New Jersey, all public K-8 students study a world language. The mandate recognizes that young brains are primed to absorb new vocabulary and syntax — Spanish or Arabic, Mandarin or American Sign Language — and that those neural pathways, once activated, remain spry. This policy strikes me as a no-brainer, with benefits that span far beyond school.

You’ve heard the old joke, right? If someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, and someone who speaks two is bilingual, what do you call someone who speaks just one language? Answer: American.

Ha ha. But maybe, just maybe, some of our current political stalemating, our inability to hear each other — across the Congressional aisle or the supermarket aisle — is rooted in the fact that most of us (79 percent of Americans, in 2011) speak only one language.

When you learn a second one (whether Teenager or Tagalog), you shoehorn yourself into someone else’s view of the world. Your tongue turns in unfamiliar ways. You make blush-worthy mistakes (whoops, “embarazada” means “pregnant,” not “embarrassed”). You struggle to be understood. Ideally, that effort fosters empathy with others — younger or older, disabled or foreign or different — who must work hard to make their voices heard.

Hearing to learn

Someone once told me that the point of translating was to exercise the muscle of translation. So I try to listen well when Fourteen speaks, and when she doesn’t. The clotted silence in the car might mean, “I’m furious and need to think.” It might mean, “I don’t want to cry here.” I often get it wrong. But that translation muscle, which might just be the heart, girds up with use.

Try it. Even your dinner table, ringed by the ones you love, is a Babel of babble. How to thread meaning from the mess? Listen closely. Know that your word is not the last word. Imagine every conversation ending the way one friend of mine closes all her e-mails: To be continued.