There's a joke I've told my students numerous times over the past few years. It goes:
"A person who can speak three languages is known as?
Trilingual
And a person who can speak two langugages is?
Bilingual
And a person who can only speak one language?
An American!"
I tell this joke in part because I'm always amazed (and a little bit jealous) when my students can come to my lectures in business subjects - that are all given in English - and understand the difficult, theoretical concepts I talk about. After all, about 99% of all my students are non-native English speakers. We Americans have set ourselves up very badly in terms of our ability to speak in languages other than English. In fact, some backwards-thinking Americans have made matters worse, such as the 1998 passage of Proposition 227 in California and the 2000 passage of Proposition 203 in Arizona.
And, now, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Washington Post published an interesting article on Our Diplomats' Arabic Handicap. The United States' State Department has a grand total of eight (8) people worldwide who are able to speak Arabic at the highest levels of fluency. And I suspect that, while the article focuses on fluency in Arabic, the problem goes much deeper, that there are very few individuals employed by the State Department (and other agencies of the government) who can speak other important world languages. When do American school children begin learning foreign languages? When I was a teenager, my middle school had a short-lived pilot program to help teach Spanish. Regular foreign language instruction didn't begin until my sophomore year, with classes in Spanish, French and German - and these are still the only languages taught at my high school. That's waaay too late in life to start learning another language well.
Whereas...
...When I lived in Korea, foreign language instruction began for my university-aged students when they were in middle school. Today's Korean children begin learning English in primary school. Now, granted, most of those students use up all of their English conversational skills with a foreigner like me within a minute or two; however, I once had a 45-minute conversation with a group of ten or so primary school kids I had met at the beach. How many of us could have done the same at that age?
...Here in S'pore, all students learn both English and at least one "Mother Tongue" (either Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil - a language primarily spoken in southern India). Virtually all Singaporeans who are my age and younger are bilingual.
As Tom Friedman recently pointed out, the world is flat...and getting flatter. The need for Americans to speak another person's language, whether it's for diplomatic, military, educational, commercial, or just plain ol' social purposes is an absolute necessity. And I'm stunned that people still don't get this. For example, just now, while looking at Amazon's webpage for Tom Friedman's book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", I found the following comment, "If the world is so flat, then why is everyone else in the world trying to beat a path to our door?" My response: Don't flatter yourself. Even if the United States opened up its doors to unlimited immigration, 99% of the world would still stay at home. You (Americans) will still have to deal with the rest of the world. And the only way you can really get to know someone is if you understand that person's language (which is also a gateway to understanding that person's culture).
This is an important topic, and one that I've only touched the merest surface of. Insha'allah, I'll write more about this in the future. In the meantime, my advice to those of you with young children is: get them started on a second and third language now!!! And don't just focus on European languages. Yes, Spanish is very helpful if you live in the Southwest, but the future belongs to Asia (if you haven't figured that out yet). Get those kids learning Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic. And it wouldn't hurt if you, mom and dad, joined in the language lessons either.
3 comments:
The problem is that Asian languages are more difficult for English speakers to learn than European ones. The Defense Language Institute grouped languages into four difficulty levels:
Level 1: French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish
Level 2: Farsi, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Indonesian
Level 3: Finnish, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Hebrew
Level 4: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean
Oh, I'm well aware that most Asian languages are *much* more difficult to learn - from personal experience! :) My wife and I are taking Arabic classes right now, I learned a bit of Korean when I lived up there several years ago, and I know just how difficult learning Chinese can be from interacting with my Chinese students and colleagues. (I once told an ethnic Chinese colleague that I could recognize about 25 Chinese characters - out of the thousands that there are - and she was impressed!) And, of course, my in-laws are always harping on me to learn Malay (which is almost identical to level 2 Indonesian).
The thing is, I honestly believe that for the next 50-100 years, we're going to see the world revolve around East Asia. If the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s will most likely be the Chinese/Indian century. The dynamos that are these countries' economies are only starting to spin up, and they will take some time to fully spin up if only because of the size of their populations. But should these two countries get to a level of productivity that is comparable to the West - watch out!
In this regard, it only makes sense for Westerners to start learning Asian languages. Yes, they are very difficult to learn, but if the West has any desire to keep up economically with China and India in the future, we are going to need a population with the requisite linguistic skills. (Here in S'pore, many entry-level jobs, especially those that deal with customers, but even professional jobs such as accountants and attorneys, require the employees to be at least bilingual.)
And because these languages are so difficult to learn, it's best to start learning these languages as quickly as possible in life - like pre-school age. (Seriously. My 4 year old niece - who's already growing up bilingual in Malay and English - has also been taught Arabic since she was a year-and-a-half old.)
This has *got* to be done - or you can kiss the West goodbye from first world to second world status.
Oh, George, the situation is much more complicated than that! :) First, before you can get, say, the Chinese and Japanese to share a common written language, you must get the Chinese to do so first! :) Seriously, there are five major dialects in China (and who knows how many minor dialects), of which Mandarin is only one of the five. And many of these five dialects (if not all five) have their own written script. Here in S'pore, where Mandarin is the dominant dialect (and Hokkien, another dialect, is commonplace), subtitles must be shown on Cantonese TV shows out of Hong Kong so that the local Chinese here can understand what is being said.
Then there is the matter of pride. As my ustaz (religious teacher) was saying last night, should, say, a Cantonese-speaking man meet up with a Mandarin-speaking man, they may choose to speak a third language (such as English or Malay) because neither may want (or know how) to speak in the other's dialect. The same also applies for Indians and Sikhs here.
And, so, to do what you propose would require a massive educational effort over a span of decades (centuries?), and that would be just for one of the three countries you mentioned. :)
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