And Now for Something Completely Different

I've been thinking about this since I was in France last semester: being an Anglophone is made of a little bit of fail. On one hand, sure, it's great, because English is the new international language and everyone else wants to learn it. On the other hand, what reason is there then to learn other languages? Why should we bother? When I was at the Boren Convocation in June a girl who was going to China was telling us that on her flight to DC she was talking to the man sitting next to her and he pretty much asked the same question. Why did she want to learn Chinese? She already speaks English. It should be up to everyone else to learn English; it's not our problem to learn their language. Of course the rest of us were like, "Um, WUT."

Things like this make me sad. It also makes me sad that in the US we don't care about learning languages in schools. If you're lucky you take 2-3 years in high school, maybe a year or two in college depending on your high school grades, and that's it. You're done. And unless you're something special, 2-3 years of a language is just not worth it. You can't really communicate or do anything. I started French ten years ago but I wouldn't call myself fluent yet. (Granted it's pretty much on me to get there on my own now because there's not a whole lot left I can learn in classes, but still.) I'm not saying it takes that long to be proficient in any language, but if all you're doing is taking classes in school you're not going to get anywhere.

When I was in France there were a bunch of Europeans studying there as well. They all spoke their native language, obviously, as well as English and French to varying degrees. But they were learning two foreign languages, and they were practicing them both at the same time because we all spoke to each other in English. This is where I feel like it's a disadvantage to be an Anglophone. Everyone learns English so what is there left for us to learn?

There's also the fact that Americans are stereotyped as not knowing other languages and not travelling and whatever. Both in France and here I've had people ask me if I'm French because of the way I speak. When I say no, they go for British, probably because I'm white. When I say American, I've actually been told that no, I can't be American, because Americans don't speak French, don't go to other countries, don't study in other countries especially, etc. The study abroad coordinator guy at Savoie was British and when I said I was going to Morocco even he was like "Really? But Americans don't go to Morocco." Yeah, I got that. Thanks. And of course when I went to Turkey with Carolyn people flipped out that an American was speaking Turkish to them.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm wired differently and there's something weird about me. I mean, I know there is because I know I understand languages really well and all that, so I'm sure that influences the fact that I want to learn more. But I hate going to another country and not understanding what's going on. It's so frustrating to think that with more time and more pratice I could understand, but I don't really have the time. I wish I'd started learning languages earlier, or that at least when I was younger I would have actually used the teach-yourself-Spanish things I had. (But when you're 7 you don't really think about these things.) When I was younger I did decide that I wanted to be fluent in every language ever. I later dismissed that becuase it was stupid and would never happen. Now I'm thinking it's not as unrealistic as I thought it was. Of course I won't be fluent in every language, but I'd settle for proficiency in a handful of them. Mainly these ones:

*Arabic
*Spanish
*Japanese
*German
*Gaelic
*Hebrew
*Portuguese
*Russian
*something from Eastern Europe
*Mandarin

Not necessarily in that order, but something like it. Not that Gaelic is any kind of useful for anything and Hebrew is kind of limited, but yeah. One day I will be awesome and surprise the heck out of people I meet because I can speak multiple languages very well. إن شاء الله