Learning to Sound Words Out, or How I learned to stop worrying and love cognates

Even if you don't read a lot, you do read a lot. Here is a sampling of written items the comprehension of which you take for granted on a daily basis: street signs, ingredients on food packaging, labels that distinguish products such as fabric softener and detergent from each other, movie posters, The Watchtower (I assure you, Jehovah's Witnesses are everywhere), the backs of cereal boxes, posters having to do with the Communist Party, graffiti, billboards, subtitles, name tags, and menus. 

In the past two and a half months I have found myself incapable of discerning any of the writing on the above items. To add insult to injury, it's not just the words I can't get a grip on, it's the letters too. Sure, now I'm beginning to recognize that the one shaped like a v sounds like an n, and the one shaped like a p sounds like r, but stringing together words full of unrecognizable letters leaves me speaking at a snail's pace, and on one occasion telling a sweet elderly woman on the bus not "I don't know" but rather "not out," which, frankly, made no sense. Thankfully, over the course of my Greek class I am beginning to understand to some extent the alphabet, diphthongs and how accents effect pronunciation. 

So now I can sound words out. The same skill level as a precocious kindergartner. However, when kindergartners sound out a word, they tend to recognize the meaning contained in the sounds they produce, however slowly they produce them. This, unfortunately, is not the case in my situation. I get to the end of a word having strung all its sounds together, and I am left with that: the sound of a word whose meaning I do not know and can oftentimes not hope to obtain from context. 

This is no life-threatening obstacle, I won't perish if I can't read some poorly spray painted graffiti or a movie poster starring Cameron Diaz and that guy who's dating Demi Moore. Even the Watchtower ladies finally offered me one in English (only after a Polish one, which I've gotten twice now), so I'll survive even I'm not one of the 144,000. Yet the joke between my roommate and I that we'll have to take remedial English upon reentry to the U.S. seems like it may be in large part due to the absence of linguistic comprehension in our everyday lives. 

The experience of not knowing what I'm looking at when I'm looking at words is making me think about language a lot more. One aspect of the study of language that didn't click for me until maybe senior year of high school is that in order to really learn a language you have to stop thinking of it as code for your native tongue and start thinking of it as it's own system of meaning. "Chat" does not mean "cat" it means small, furry quadrupeds with anti-social tendencies. Cat means the same thing, but still the two subjects do not equal each other just because they equal the same object. Cat is too simple an example; I'll have to get back to you on this. 

Those few words that look suspiciously familiar, those are the ones keeping me scanning the backs of food products, the insides of disregarded instruction manuals, the jewelry descriptions of Greek QVC. Along with the rare cognate, I find hope in my favorite literal translation so far: "translator," a word that in Modern Greek looks something like μεταφραστές and which I think of as "metaphorist."