The Terminal Reflection Paper h3eb

Sarail, Alnasher C. 2013-73980

30 August 2017 Lingg 1 WFV

The Terminal: Looking into the development of Viktor’s English

The Terminal is a movie about Viktor Navorski, a traveller from the fictional country of Krakozhia who is stranded in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport due to military unrest in his home country, leaving him without a nationality and thus cannot be allowed to enter the United States. He comes into the country with only little understanding of English and knowing only a few English phrases. However, throughout his stay in the airport, he will begin to learn to understand and speak enough English to be able to hold casual conversations with other English speakers. This short essay will be about the development of his English throughout the movie and relate this learning process with my own experience in learning foreign languages. His (active) learning process started by reading rolling texts in news programs and reading two books of the same New York travel guide book. The guide books were written in two different languages, one in English and the other in what seems to be a Slavic language, which I assume to be Bulgarian. This way, he learned enough English to craft simple sentences, albeit slowly. His conversational English then developed further thanks to interactions with maintenance staff Enrique, immigration officer Dolores, and field commissioner Frank. From here on out Viktor’s conversational English continues to improve as he interacts with more and more people in the airport. I will talk about Viktor’s pronunciation first, as it is usually easy to notice whether one is a native speaker or not just from their pronunciation, and it is very difficult to correct as well. Early in the movie, Viktor’s difficulties in English phonology can be seen. He does not differentiate between /ɪ/ in “chit” and /i:/ in “cheat”. A look into the phonology of Bulgarian reveals that the language does not use /ɪ/ and instead uses only /i/, which explains why Viktor could not differentiate between the two vowels. Diphthongs are also not present in Bulgarian, which is why he pronounces “okay” as something like “okeh”. Also, he hears Enrique’s “mystery” as “misery” and communicates it to Dolores as such. His lack of knowledge in irregular nouns also showed when he pluralised “woman” as “womans”.

Another thing to note about Viktor’s English is his use of prepositions. For example, in his conversation with Frank ing the notion of fear to be tried before a judge and possible sent to an asylum, he interchanges between the prepositions “of” and “from” in the sentence “I am afraid of (something)”. In some sentences, the preposition is missing. This is rather understandable from my perspective. From experience, I have found that prepositions can be the most difficult part of English speech to understand and master. At least for me, it is not uncommon to confuse prepositions with each other in a good number of cases, especially when I rarely use English outside of the academic and social network settings. We also note of his use of verbs. The most noticeable thing about his verbs is that he does not use progressive verbs. Instead, he uses “imperfective” verbs in place of progressive verbs. A look into Bulgarian verbs shows no progressive verb tenses, using imperfective verbs instead to denote progressive action. The way Viktor forms interrogative sentences in English is also worthy of mention. Early in the movie, we see Viktor ask the airport security the question “What I do?”. This kind of structure can be seen throughout the movie, where he does not add the auxiliary verb in sentences (for example, “Why he need puzzle?”). In another instance, he uses “what cost” instead of “how much” when asking for the cost of a “cantaloni”. Word order is also a noticeable aspect of Viktor’s interrogative sentences. Most of the time, he uses a declarative word order, that is, that standard subject-verb-object in English, instead ending the sentence with a high tone to signify that he is actually asking a question. These grammatical errors, however, gets corrected from time to time, with Viktor using the proper auxiliary verb and the proper word order. Lastly, I would like to relate Viktor’s experience with my experience learning foreign languages. Currently, I am fairly competent with English and on the process of learning Japanese. As a native Tagalog speaker, English was not particularly difficult to learn. For one, elementary Filipino textbooks discuss two structures of Filipino sentences. The verb precedes the noun in the standard structure; the noun precedes the verb in the other “non-casual” structure, mirroring that of English. It should also be noted that English is readily accessible to Filipinos, the language being recognized as one of the official languages of the state. As such, I didn’t have that much difficulty learning English, unlike Viktor. Of course, pronunciation was a hurdle, especially the consonants. For a long time, I pronounced “the” as “da”, “teeth” as “teet”, and “fork” as “pork”.

I still also interchange prepositions with each other from time to time, as I have said earlier, but we’re getting there. Learning Japanese, however, is much more difficult, as it is a completely different language from both Filipino and English. When trying to construct Japanese, I have the tendency to think in English and Filipino first, much like Viktor. For one, the sentence structure is totally different, the standard word order being subject-object-verb. The language also uses postpositions instead of prepositions. There’s also the difference between the sentence topic and the sentence subject, which to my knowledge is absent in both English and Filipino; this has to be the most difficult aspect of Japanese to learn. Verb inflection, however, was not particularly difficult, since Filipino verbs tend have difficult inflections as well. Unlike Viktor, I cannot learn Japanese as easily as he learned English, since I barely know any Japanese speakers in my circles or in my environment, at least. Being forced to be in an environment where only English is spoken, Viktor had it rather easily.