Sarail, Alnasher C.

30 August 2017
2013-73980 Lingg 1 WFV

The Terminal: Looking into the development of Viktors English

The Terminal is a movie about Viktor Navorski, a traveller from the fictional country of
Krakozhia who is stranded in New Yorks 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 Viktors conversational English continues to improve as he interacts with more and
more people in the airport.
I will talk about Viktors 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, Viktors difficulties in English phonology can be seen. He does not
differentiate between // in chit and /i:/ in cheat. A look into the phonology of Bulgarian
reveals that the language does not use // 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 Enriques
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 Viktors English is his use of prepositions. For example, in
his conversation with Frank about using 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 Viktors 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 Viktors 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 didnt 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
were 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 post-
positions instead of prepositions. Theres 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.