Languages

I was reminiscing about a song in a show I've done called "I Speak Six Languages." The character in the play speaks French, German, Russian, Hebrew, and Japanese in addition to English...and she's only 11.

This got me thinking about how I've wanted to learn more than one foreign language. We Americans are woefully inadequate when it comes to learning them. Granted, English is a difficult language to master (indeed, many of us don't seem to have it down yet, and we've been speaking it our entire lives). Furthermore, America is such a large country that we can travel within it for days and not need to know another language to get by--regional accents and terms change, but we can still be understood. Besides, we arrogantly think, the rest of the world is learning English anyway as the international business language, so why should we bother?

I imagine that mentality does not work at all in Europe. The countries there are much smaller, so anyone who wants to travel will likely need to know at least one other language. Besides that, their education system seems geared toward being multi-lingual: most students seem to know their primary tongue, plus English and one or two others by the time they finish high school. One of my classmates was a foreign exchange student from Germany who was taking French more or less for fun, yet it seemed her mastery was already beyond ours.

This isn't limited to just Europe, either. My former neighbor, originally from India, knows Hindi, Punjabi, and at least 3 or 4 other Indian languages in addition to English and Spanish. This, I would suspect, comes not just from his education, which is considerable, but also from necessity: with hundreds of millions of people living in such proximity, speaking dozens of languages and perhaps hundreds of dialects, knowing several of them would be a matter of survival.

More than one travel guide has stated that learning even a little bit of the local language goes a long way. The service is better when they see you're trying; it's a measure of respect, because you're not some American who demands everything in English, as if your language is somehow superior to theirs. And while I haven't traveled abroad yet, how cool would that be to visit Europe and use as little English as possible? I bet you could go almost anywhere and find someone who knows French, German, Italian, or Spanish and get what you want before you have to use English as a last resort.

I've always had a lot of respect for folks who know several languages. At one point, I was pretty good at French, having studied it for one-and-a-half years in junior high, two years in high school, and one year in college. But years of not needing it, and therefore not using it, have taken much of the vocabulary away. I still know the basics, but I'd need a long review to get to where I was. My Spanish is OK, but not great; at least the more frequent use of it has kept it in my head. I don't regret studying French at all; but I know that if I'd learned the same amount of Spanish, I'd still be using it today and would be near-fluent.

Some years ago, Jennifer and I decided to study another language. We debated between Italian and German before settling on German. That was the language she had studied in college, so we thought it would be easier for her to pick up where she left off. It went well for a couple years, and our vocabulary grew to where we could possibly talk to an 8-year-old. But again, the lack of opportunity to use it robbed our enthusiasm, and we stopped.

Now I think we're going to start on Italian. I know, there's no more opportunity in America for Italian than there is for German or French or most other languages, unless you live in an area with a concentration of speakers in one neighborhood. But it's so beautiful to listen to; most of the vowels and pronunciation rules are pretty regular; and so much of English comes from Latin that we already know more words than we realize. Will it be different this time around? We certainly hope so. If we decide we're going to do it, and do it right, we'll be fine.