As a former Marine Korean-Linguist, I spent much of my young adulthood in Korea. One of the favorite stories of that time was an attempt being made at discussing some forgotten matter of import with our host South Koreans on of the mountains I was on. My Korean (nor my team chief's) was up to par to discuss this particular matter and none of our Korean counterparts' English abilities were working either. Finally, we came upon an avenue of communication. One of the Korean's was quite fluent in French and one of the non-Korean speaking members of our small Marine team had just happened to be the son of a missionary that had spent much of his childhood in Africa in an area where French was a primary language. So our team chief would tell him in English, he would translate that into French. The French speaking Korean soldier would translate the French into Korean for his skipper who would answer in Korean and the process would reverse until the issue was resolved. Were we able to communicate with our Korean counterparts? Absolutely...just not always how our superiors might think we were.
'm always reminded of this story when I see someone trying to gain the attention of a fish by tapping on the glass of the tank as this seems to be the default mode of fish-human communication, we tap, they swim
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