What we have here is a failure to
A student’s recap of his weekend has stuck with me for years:
“I visited my grandmother over the weekend. I spent time communicating with her.”
You what?
This is another example of how “translation” fails to render meaningful language.
First, we need to establish what “communicate” means in English. Cambridge defines it thusly:
to share information with others by speaking, writing, moving your body, or using other signals
While communicating is, by definition, a social act, the few examples that include social behavior don’t really get across the same idea that my student intended:
Do musicians really communicate with one another and with their audience?
Really, the physician is the only one who has to communicate with the patient, do the right thing, and be responsible.
Notice how impersonal and abstract this transfer of information is in both examples.
Now, unless your babushka was in a coma, you would never use “communicate” to describe the time you spent with her. The origins of this persistent, ubiquitous, and very annoying habit clearly arise from translation. Look at how several related, more relevant verbs and phrasal verbs are translated (as always, I used Reverso-Context):
Let’s see how Cambridge teaches “hang out,” meaning “to spend a lot of time in a place or with someone”:
They spent the whole day hanging out by the pool.
I don’t know why he hangs out with James, they’ve got nothing in common.
Haven’t you got anything better to do than hang out at the shopping centre?
They enjoyed hanging out with each other when they were kids.
Let’s transform it into Russian English:
They spent the whole day communicating out by the pool.
I don’t know why he communicates with James, they’ve got nothing in common.
Haven’t you got anything better to do than communicate at the shopping centre?
They enjoyed communicating with each other when they were kids.
These constructions are all absolutely unnatural and do not share the same ideas as the original versions at all.
The story with “interact (with)” is interesting.
The (written) word frequencies change depending on the context (or as much context as I can include in the NGram viewer).
Since the mid-1980s, in absolute terms, it looks like “interact with” has been ascendant if we look at English in general.
This is actually the same pattern if you add “with people” or “with others.” However, if you add “boss,” “husband,” or “wife,” “communicate with” comes out on top:
Surely, though, the context is about pure communication: exchanging understandable information. It’s hard to do this with your boss or spouse, sometimes.
You can interact all you want, but you might not really understand each other.
While “to mingle” can, generally, mean “to mix or combine,” socially it means:
to move around and talk to other people at a social event
Note that this does not refer to exchanging information. It’s far more specific. If the host of a party tells you to “communicate” with other attendees, make a beeline for the exit.
Or open bar.
Or open bar then exit.
It’s up to you.
If we’re talking about social activities, it’s hard to do any better than with the word “socialize”:
to spend time when you are not working with friends or with other people in order to enjoy yourself
Again, look at how much more context is embedded in this word: not working, in order to enjoy yourself.
Much like being told to go among the people and mingle, the command to “go out and socialize” is a common one, spoken by camp counselors, schoolteachers, and the like.
Russian students, save for those who have fortified themselves with a healthy diet of American sitcoms and movies, will consistently just use “communicate” for all of the aforementioned expressions, sounding a little odd at best and clueless at worst.
For years I have even said “It’s not общаться!” but students turn a deaf ear to this. It raises a question: what exactly do they want to improve about their English? In all of the aforementioned examples, there are words/phrases that convey precise meanings. Electing not to learn them puts the speaker at a social and communicative disadvantage and burdens the listener with trying to decipher precisely what is being said.
It’s somewhat ironic: you can use “communicate” all you want to roughly transfer the information you intend, but the one thing you won’t convey is that you possess a genuine command of the language.
