Speaking Louder to Someone Who Doesn't Understand Your Language isn't Going to Make them Understand it

There are times when I really don’t understand people’s logic. Someone explain it to me. If I don’t speak your language, what makes you think yelling it at me will make me understand it any better? Here’s a useful piece of information: your volume doesn’t matter. If someone doesn’t speak your language, raising your voice is not going to make them magically understand you. Really, it won’t. Some of the customers we get are so aggravating. Though I can say in the year that I’ve worked here, this is the first time I’ve had this happen…… I really hope it doesn’t become a common thing.

Occasionally, I will help my parents out at the local motel they manage. I’ve been doing this for a little over a year now. When they need the coverage, they’ll ask me to watch the office for a couple hours. Let me tell you, the hospitality industry really does get some interesting characters. We’ve had a lot of really weird crap happen at this motel. For example, a couple weeks ago, we had someone tag our bathroom in Sharpie. I don’t even…. What? Where the fuck do you get the idea to graffiti a motel bathroom? We found this one pretty funny actually considering it was the first time any of us had ever seen it happen. So I guess compared to other things, the subject of yelling isn’t really ‘weird’, more so it is just very annoying.

When I get a customer who doesn’t speak English very well or at all, it doesn’t bother me. Sure, it makes checking them in a bit harder but this is something you should expect working at a motel/hotel. Of course you will need to deal with customers who don’t speak English, it’s common sense. So it doesn’t bother me. If I find they don’t speak English and are struggling to understand me, I’ll try to demonstrate what I’m saying with hand movements or drawing and they’ll do the same thing to help me understand them. If it’s a Spanish or Japanese speaking customer, it’s slightly easier because I know a small amount of both of those languages so I can combine them with English to better get my point across. There are ways to break through the language barrier and I’ve learned a lot of them by working here.

Last night, I had a Korean couple come in. They had a reservation with us so it made it slightly easier. We got through the folio process and were onto the payment when the trouble started. They were asking me questions in Korean and I kindly stopped them, letting them know as best I could that I didn’t understand Korean. We were making progress with hand movements so I gave them a sheet of paper and tried to get them to agree to draw what they meant, hoping it would help us understand one another better. But instead of doing that, the man insists on raising his voice and starting to basically yell at me. I mean, I know he wasn’t like angry yelling or anything, he was just doing that thing where people raise their voice thinking the person will understand them if they do. I tried to get him to stop but he wouldn’t stop and was just getting progressively louder, so I gave up and handed him his room key. I showed him where his room was at on the map and he left.

Not only was it aggravating, it was making me uncomfortable. I don’t like people yelling. Even more so, I don’t like them yelling at me. Even if I know it’s not them yelling in anger, I still don’t like it. I’ve found that people yelling is a very big trigger for my anxiety. So to have him speaking so loudly to me, it was making me really uncomfortable. I really hope that doesn’t happen again.

So Mibba, if you like speaking louder thinking it’ll make someone understand your language, can I give you a piece of advice? Stop it. No one is understanding your language any better, you’re just aggravating people and making yourself look like a jerk. It’s nothing but annoying. Seriously, just stop. Don’t do it.