These are two things you don’t see together back in the States.
If a place serves alcohol, and it’s not a restaurant, there will not be anyone under the age of 21 anywhere near the place.
True story: When I went home for Christmas I saw the grocery store clerk ask for my dad’s I.D. – and he’s 83!
But it’s a different story here in my adopted home of the Czech Republic.
One of my favorite beer gardens has a playground so the parents can talk and drink while the kids play.
And that explains how last Friday night a friend and I found ourselves in a conversation with a five-year-old girl while we were drinking some Czech beer.
Here’s her story: Her mom is Czech. Her dad is Serbian. And so far she speaks five languages.
Not bad.
We tested her on Czech and English – she passed – but I wanted to hear her Hungarian.
So I asked her, what’s the word for “hammock” in Hungarian (we were sitting on them).
She thought about it for a second, and then said, as if the answer was obvious.
“Well, I don’t know every word.”
Good answer, I thought.
But you know what she was really saying?
Not with her words, but with her voice tone and her body language and even the fact that she was talking to two strangers sent the message:
“I don’t care.”
She didn’t care what we thought… She didn’t care if she made a mistake… She didn’t care if she didn’t know a word…
And I can say the same thing for every fluent speaker I know.
Not every perfect speaker – they don’t exist – but every non-natives speaker who has knocked down the English wall, i.e. whatever they want to do, English doesn’t stop them.
They just don’t care