You have the distinction of being not just multilingual, but a multilingual comedian. What has made you want to be funny and perform in multiple languages, when so many people have a hard time being funny in just one?
I can now perform all through France and French-speaking countries, and in Germany and German-speaking countries, including Austria and Schweizerdeutsch.
With Spanish, you get a massive region. I was born in an Arabic country. It seems positive. So now, you may not know this, but the Germans are now performing in English, and the Russians in English, the French, the Spanish, the Scandinavian.
English is a much easier way to go. Maybe because of the language, but also a Hollywood career can beckon or they can tour the world with it. French people are now playing in Finland in English, and the Finnish kids are watching in English. You learned French when you were in school, but how have you gone about learning the other languages you know? What are the standard procedures when you learn your show in a second language?
So I sort of had to make all of that up, and I started doing lessons one-on-one in a teaching school in Paris. I find that too much. That was too heavy-duty. In France, I was sitting in cafes for three hours every day. I was going through my show that I would be improvising on stage, and people would correct me or give me better words for things.
With my shows, I have a whole different technique, which is that I actually learn the show in English, and it gets translated. So I got there, and I did the whole of my English show, so I did about an hour in English, and then at the end I did a two-minute encore in Spanish. The second night, I did a four-minute encore in Spanish.
Then a six-minute. Growing up with a second language at home did mean that I struggled with the pronunciation of some words in English when I was very young, and I still can't say lunch or shoulder properly.
Having another language from a very young age accustoms your mind to the idea that there are many different ways or words with which to express concepts and objects, and I suspect it must also shape the brain to make more connections between things. It also enables you to understand what fluency in a language really means, as well as the nuances of different languages, and what kind of concepts each language is best for expressing.
It's always seemed to me that speaking another language was the mark of achievement and culture. When I was five or six, I had two little playmates who were Spanish, and they would switch to speak in their common language: the feeling of being left out is something I remember clearly from that time.
Much later, I went to Asia to teach English, and there were long stretches of time when I didn't speak any English at all.
I was not only grappling with Mandarin Chinese but also thinking, "Why is Chinese hard for me? Why is it becoming easier? Also grappling with the politics of language: why are so many people learning English and why isn't anyone angry about it? If you're trying to promote language learning, the family identity and family story is a very important way of doing that.
When I taught at the University of Texas, I got students to write a linguistic history of their family. There was always a bilingual group and a monolingual group. And the second group would say: "What do we have to write about? Is learning a language difficult? It's something that's perfectly natural. One of the things that makes the experience challenging is that methods of teaching living foreign languages are drawn from the way dead languages were taught.
At certain points in history, the people who were teachers of Latin and Greek were tasked with teaching French and German. And their methods were not based on an understanding of how people acquire languages.
That legacy still exists. Another challenge is the common definition of success: when you learn a foreign language you will never speak it like a native speaker, so holding up a native speaker as the model is setting people up to fail.
In France, where I have a house, it's quite remote and none of my neighbours spoke any English. I rocked up 10 years ago and had no more ability in French than being able to go to Paris and survive a weekend. I bought some CDs, but learning it that way didn't work for me, so I had to think of a plan B.
I bought some wildlife books at a local bookshop and because I understood the context, I was able read them cover to cover and grasp some of what they were saying. Then I said to my neighbours: "Look, I'll speak to you in French and I want you to constantly correct me. Teach Abroad. Volunteer Abroad. Work Abroad. EU Careers. Further Study. CV Advice. Language Launchpad. The Graduate Project.
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