If you speak another language quite fluently, perhaps if
you've lived in another country for a while, if you're European level B2 or
above or maybe you have A-level or an IB that contains a strong element, try
this:
Write in your chosen language for twenty minutes. Give
yourself a topic but if you can’t think of one, write about where you are, or
about a happy memory or retell a favourite story. Do not look up words you do
not know. If you can’t find the right word, skirt round it, being ungrammatical
if you have to.
You may also use words
from another language you know.
Then, translate what you have written into English. You will
notice that you have written much more simply and probably also more
effectively than if you had gone straight into English. Less is more. If you
used a language in which you are fluent, you may have imported some interesting
idioms, euphemisms or phrases that are clichés in the foreign language but are
pleasingly fresh in your own.
A bit of fun:
Equipment
A bilingual dictionary in your chosen language.
Method
Spend ten minutes doing this every so often – once a week,
once in a blue moon, once a month.
Choose a letter of the alphabet. Read through the dictionary
looking for idiomatic and eccentric words. Collect some words and try to get
them into your writing.
German is a particularly good language for this. For
instance, a helicopter is a “hopping screwdiver”, a nurse is an “ill-person’s
sister”, an ambulance is “rescue car” and a mole is a “gob throw”. French has some beauties as well: rat poison
is “death to the rats”, bungee jumping is “jump on elastic”, a bat is “bald
mouse” and the word for dustbin sounds like “smells beautiful (female)”.
Use these new expressions in your writing.
Here is a piece of such writing I’ve used in a novel. I was
in Holland when I wrote it. Dutch has similar “building-block” words to German.
‘May I call eye-baller Thomant, who says the blamed watched
Old Mother Gossipen struggle up the penty-slope from the provisions centre. He
did indeed carry her holdy-all, but only as far as their path followed the same
direction aim. He should have gone the extra mile to her living-in.’ (The Prophecy 229)
Alternatively
Collect these words whilst in a country where people speak
your chosen language.
Collect them also, as you work on other exercises. Once
you’re aware of them, you’ll keep on seeing them.
Extension
As collecting the words and phrases becomes a habit, you
might consider also looking for proverbs and sayings from other languages. They
are clichés in their own language but can sound fresh in another one.
For example, when everybody suddenly stops talking, the
French say “It’s an angel passing over”. In German, interfering people may be
accused of putting their mustard on somebody else’s sausage and rather than
treading on people’s toes, they tread on others’ ties. A clever pun exists in
Spanish because “to be superior” to someone is to “lie on top of them” and many
a Spanish husband is very proud of being superior to his wife. But let’s hope
they didn’t also eat the soup before mid-day because that leads to pregnancy
before marriage. The Greeks rather charmingly tell us that one swallow does not
mean that spring has arrived.
