geo63:

darkweasel:

geo63: It is very wise to learn a few sentences when going to a foreign country - just in case. Crying "help" may not help you since it does't mean anything useful in Polish. But if you cry "pomocy" then everybody is alarmed at once.

If I hear someone cry in a loud voice, I'm alarmed and will check what is happening (at least for a second) regardless of what they cried, and in which language. This really is not a very good example.

You perhaps would do that, but I was once almost robbed when in China. I could shout "police, please help me" as loud as I could - only attracting other people to look at me. No one would help. But instead I cried "警察，幫助" and the situation was solved very quickly.

I heard about that if somebody is robbed at let me say 4 in the morning and no ones is an street, s/he should cry something what could bring everybody in danger in the neighbourhood and that is: in German: "Feuer! Hilfe es brennt! Verdammt es brennt! Hilfe es brennt!" Hopefully people will awake and run at the balkony and cry: "where?! tell me where?!". (Maybe in English: "It's catching fire! Help! It's catching fire!"(?).) That, hopfully will get enforce the attacker to escape. That's an advise for high aggressive attacks. Roaring solely "Help, Police!" will only enforce people to lift the drape and let the crime happen. If someones is happy people will inform the police who probably will show up to late. (Even in Munich which has a lot of very high motivated police aspirant "bloodhunds".)

erinja:A pocket dictionary wouldn't have helped the unarmed Nigerian man who was shot by the Polish police last year.

That case was quite different:

Polish police spokesman Mariusz Sokolowski said the Warsaw prosecutors’ office was investigating an assault on a policeman and, separately, whether the police officer had broken the law by firing his gun.

He said market vendors threw rocks and paving stones at police officers, destroying four police cars, after the Nigerian was handcuffed during routine checks on market traders.

“During this tussle the Nigerian man was shot in the leg. We don’t know if the shot was fired on purpose or by accident during the fighting,” Sokolowski said. “We assume it was in self-defense, but the prosecutors are checking this.”

He said police officers had tried to stop the Nigerian man bleeding while waiting for an ambulance but they were prevented from doing so because they were still under attack. Thirty-two people, mostly foreigners, were arrested in the fracas.

erinja:20 years ago, a man was arrested by the police in the US. He was behaving in a strange, erratic, and violent manner. And the police tasered him, and then they beat him up, even though he was already subdued, and even though he was unarmed. These were all native English speakers. There was no communication problem, but that didn't help Rodney King. So why would a few words help?

...Every country has had cases of police brutality. Sometimes policemen go bad and they do bad things. You can't always assume that a simple sentence will help. If a bad policeman wants to beat you up or taser you, a simple phrase won't help you, not in Canada, not in Poland, not in the US, not in any country.

This is pretty much it. Knowing the English phrase for 'Help me, I'm lost and can't understand English, I only understand Polish' might have helped him before the police got involved, but if the man was poor, uneducated and had no way of knowing what to expect once he got off the plane, how on earth could anyone expect him to have the foresight to think 'Oh hey, I should learn a couple of English phrases just in case'? I imagine he just planned to see his mother and stay with her for a while, so he'd be staying with someone who presumably understood both languages. He probably thought, and not wrongfully so in my opinion that he'd be perfectly fine without having to know much, or anything, at least not right off the bat. It should have been obvious the man needed help when he started throwing things, anyway. From there, it's the police's job to address the situation so that no one is hurt and these things can be sorted out. Unfortunately, instead they killed him. They did not kill him because he could not tell them not to, or any other fault of the Polish man, they killed him because they were incompetent at their jobs and didn't have the sense to stop tasing before a man died. So I think, that this is a bad example of where knowing "Help me" or "Don't kill me" in x language would help. It would in other situations, though.

Nahh, I would spare my breath instead of saying that.

If the Argentine goverment is pretty useless to prevent its citizens to be killed by criminals in our own land, I don't think its mention abroad would stop any killer for fear of a diplomatic incident.

Regards,

Daniel

geo63:
Please, read with comprehension - the answer was for an American. For you it would be: I am Argentine, do not kill me.

This is pretty much it. Knowing the English phrase for 'Help me, I'm lost and can't understand English, I only understand Polish'

That reminds me of this short video, and this one.

3rdblade:

This is pretty much it. Knowing the English phrase for 'Help me, I'm lost and can't understand English, I only understand Polish'

That reminds me of this short video, and this one.

The story of the Polish man is a sad one; a cascade of errors all around that ended very badly.

However, to say that him throwing furniture around in despair is acceptable - or, for that matter, even understandable - is silly. He had no excuse for that behavior.

All he had to do was find someone in a uniform, smile, act friendly, and use facial expressions and simple hand signs to communicate that he was lost and needed help. That's it. He would have had help.

It is always possible to communicate to some extent without speaking the language.

Benny (Lernu member IrishPolyglot) travels to a new country where he expressly does NOT know the language, usually without knowing any people there either, every three months! And he just dives right into communicating with people from the very beginning. He writes about his experiences over in his Fluent In Three Months blog - a very interesting read, which I highly recommend. Nearly every time, I believe, he starts with just facial expressions and hand signals; sometimes with a tiny smattering of the new language, but sometimes not.

Needless to say, he hasn't been killed yet.

Behaving in a friendly and nonthreatening manner is a universal statement that doesn't require knowledge of any language. The Polish man would have been much better served by adopting that stance, no matter how frustrated he might have felt.

RiotNrrd:... to say that him throwing furniture around in despair is acceptable - or, for that matter, even understandable - is silly. He had no excuse for that behavior.

...silly is your post. Are you some kind of a psychiatrist to tell what people should do or not when being in stress? What do you know about life, the real life, not the one read from books? You can't admit that the real cause of his death was the language barrier.

What barrier? Do that or that, don't do that or that and you'll live. You describe the behaviour of some educated person. Not the one who lived whole his life in a small town, who did not know how to communicate. Dziekanski didn't start throwing furniture right away as soon as he left the plane - all this happened after many hours (10 at least) of futile trials to get off that damned airport. The personel did not understand him, nobody even was interested of him. He was in despair. And in despair people do throw ferniture or even do much worse things.

Example: American helicopter pilots shoot unarmed civilians in Iraque - all of this can be watched on video if you do not believe me. Perhaps they should land, get out of their machines, come to those civilians and ask politely:

Excuse us, we are fighting war around here - are you a threat, can we kill you?

Instead they just fire a rocket or machine gun and say: Die bastard, die.

Yes, very humane...

No further comment.

RiotNrrd's point about a smile being universally human sounds all right to me. It sounds to me like Dziekanski lost his temper, and his frustration had tragic consequences.

In general, though, if someone intends to emigrate to a foreign country, is it not wise to learn at least some of the language beforehand, and carry a pocket dictionary or phrase book, for survival?

geo63:

RiotNrrd:... to say that him throwing furniture around in despair is acceptable - or, for that matter, even understandable - is silly. He had no excuse for that behavior.

...silly is your post. Are you some kind of a psychiatrist to tell what people should do or not when being in stress? What do you know about life, the real life, not the one read from books? You can't admit that the real cause of his death was the language barrier.

It doesn't warrant death, but it does warrant security action because it's a possible precursor to a security threat to civilians in the area. The death was accidental (at least it appears that way, but I doubt there was foul play), and seems to be a health complication in combination with a non-lethal weapon's malfunction.

This is a case of manslaughter at the very extreme - it can't be argued as murder, despite the fact it is very tragic for the polish traveller.

Ultimately, the fault rests on no one person in this case. It is a mixture of police not being trained correctly to use tasers only when they'd otherwise use a real firearm, health complications (a taser should not kill a grown man so easily, even when stressed. Something extra must have been wrong), and inappropriate action on behalf of the deceased, that is, the barricading as if he was preparing for a fight (he didn't have to have the intention, but as one could say "if you're telling the police you're going to attack someone, don't be surprised if they try to arrest you").

So future situations can be resolved much more easily by A) Training police to be better, and B) making sure passengers on airline flights know that strange and scary actions are likely to be interpreted as threatening even if that is not the intention. And C), the airport staff needed to be better trained. But I don't believe they ask for degrees in crisis management from airport staff unfortunately.

geo63:Example: American helicopter pilots shoot unarmed civilians in Iraque - all of this can be watched on video if you do not believe me. Perhaps they should land, get out of their machines, come to those civilians and ask politely:

Excuse us, we are fighting war around here - are you a threat, can we kill you?

Instead they just fire a rocket or machine gun and say: Die bastard, die.

Yes, very humane...

No further comment.

This is a completely different situation, and a different problem. This is the army being a bunch of trigger happy idiots really. Of course, it's also related to the fact that superiors don't pay enough attention to the actions of people on the frontlines, so there was no one to go "hey, hold on, they might be civilians".
Other complications include bad intel (I believe in those cases they thought it was a gang of combatants and had no idea that journalists were in the area), and bad technology (they misidentified cameras as RPGs).

All can be solved, but armies don't like to listen to arm-chair tacticians, or anti-war protestors

He was in despair. And in despair people do throw ferniture or even do much worse things.

This is pretty much impossible to overcome. We can't control someone else's actions unless we educate them. If we haven't been given the chance, we can't be blamed.
In school when I was about 10 years younger I used to kick desks and chairs when I had a temper tantrum, normally due to bullying or teachers not understanding me. Sure, they had a fault, but such actions did not help me nor them, and only made things worse. I was a child then, but the results are the same for adults, only adults are succeptable to real-world laws and justice-systems. ("Justice" is a laughable adjective for the courts and police, no?)

Ultimately none of these things was intended to have happened. Including the original poster's book's language being changed to French and not Esperanto. This isn't about language barriers though, this is about miscommunication (whether linguistically or through body language and actions), and people acting on their own accord without confirming things that they should have. These are the most prevalent types of human caused conflicts and tragedies, and the only way we can hope to solve them is if everyone thinks about their actions, and chills out/stops tripping/etc