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Poles still are oodles kinder than the Hungarians, for instance, who will literally begin chortling at the poor foreigner trying to pronounce, let alone speak, their admittedly often intractable language-:) The Polish I found most charitable. Only to repeat, I was frequently asked why I bothered learning Polish, to which my response of their lacking English skills rarely drew a reaction; people just sort of stood there numb.
This post reminds me of my own past: My mother is Hungarian, and her English is very, very poor, although she is able to read and write in the language; my father is part-Hungarian, and he is able to communicate very well in both English and Hungarian. I, however, can speak Hungarian but can't read or write a lick in the language--imagine that!
My mother, who grew up during Gerő's reign, told me and my brother a story about an Oxford English professor who lost his way at a train station. The professor saw my mother, her father and his friends nearby and rushed towards them. He was struggling to communicate to my grandfather's friends in Hungarian, even restoring to using his fingers to indicate what he wanted; my grandfather and his friends thought this action amusing and started to mock the poor gentleman until my mother intervened: "Don't mock him you old fools," she said.
To make a long story short, that English professor, years later, married my mother who gave him two children, my half-siblings. Sometimes in a foreign country you stick out like a sore thumb and are thus ridiculed, other times you are admired for struggling to learn the native language.
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