For the past two weeks, I have been learning Mandarin through my Pimsleur Language Program CDs. So far I can confidently say useful phrases like “Hello,” and “I am American, are you?” and “I would like to order two beers.” Not one beer. Two beers. And not for anyone else, just for me. Because the next phrase on the CD is “What would you like to drink?” I guess the Pimsleur company thinks Americans like to bogart the beer.
When I assault people with my broken Mandarin, they usually ask me why I am learning the language.
“Because it’s the most widely spoken language in the world,” I reply. “I have been taking Spanish since I was four, and I took French in high school. I already know English, so Mandarin is next. Then I will learn Hindi or Portuguese.”
Then they ask if I am planning a trip to China.
“No,” I respond. “But China owns most of the United States’ debt. So when they come to collect their money, I’ll be ready.” I will be armed with phrases like, “I can speak a little Mandarin, but I don’t speak well” and “eight o’clock or nine o’clock?” I plan to smile and nod a lot.
I enjoy learning new languages, if only to harass my friends and family with foreign-sounding words on a regular basis. I wish that more schools would encourage students to learn multiple languages. I remember telling my friends that during my elementary school’s Holiday shows, we would sing traditional American Christmas carols, along with traditional Virgin Islands Christmas carols, Feliz Navidad, Cascabeles (Jingle Bells en Español) and Shalom Haverim. I thought all schools did that. Weren’t everyone’s cultures important? Apparently not, because I haven’t met anyone else (outside of my own elementary school classmates) whose school made sure to have inclusive pageants.
Language is like music and art in schools. When students’ minds are engaged in these pursuits, they do better overall academically. Learning a new language, and subsequently a new culture, makes it harder to stereotype ethnic groups. Not all people who speak Spanish are “taking our jobs“, and not all people who speak French wear berets, smoke cigarettes or eat frogs.
If more Americans learned more languages, we could well be on our way to world peace.
Do you readers have any other overly simple solutions to immensely complex problems? Here’s another one to get you started: If every morning each of us gave a hug to the automobile driver in our household, we could cut down on road rage and car accidents.
How would you all solve the health care crisis? Predatory lending practices like subprime mortgages? Hunger? The AIDS pandemic? Poverty? The lack of women hosting late-night talk shows?
When I pass a homeless person panhandling for change, I look them in the eye and smile even if I’m not giving money. Acknowledging them as fellow people instead of passing by like they’re a fire hydrant or some other part of the urban landscape. It certainly doesn’t lift anyone out of homelessness, but I can’t imagine how invisible it would feel to have all the people passing by refuse to look at you.
Mr. J,
Wish you the best of luck in studying Mandarin. Though I’ve grown up speaking it, I understand how hard it is for those whose first language is an alphabetic and non-tonal based language. Keep practicing and find a language partner to practice with you. Oftentimes, you can probably work out a mutually beneficial arrangement where you can benefit from practicing off of a native-level mandarin speaker while s(he) could improve his/her English conversational skills from practicing off of you.
That may increase the potential chances of better understanding…but it is not always guaranteed. A decent number of the mid and senior-level civilian and military leaders of the Axis powers during the Second Sino-Japanese War/WWII were fluent in two or more languages.
In studying the Japanese colonial legacy’s impact on China, I was struck by the existence of military officers, especially at the most senior levels who not only had a great command of the Chinese language, but enough interest in studying Chinese history, society and culture to be considered Sinophiles. Despite their genuine interest and even “love” for the Chinese civilization, it did not stop many of them from holding racist attitudes against the local Chinese populace or commanding the very troops who perpetuated murderous atrocities against the Chinese civilian population during the war.
I’m betting there were analogous Wermacht officers who “loved” French or any other occupied country’s culture and civilization and yet didn’t give a damn about the local populaces concerned as they relished their roles as conquering occupiers.
In fact, the very group of Italian military and civilian Fascist leaders who used chemical weapons to forcibly annex Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 “loved” an artifact of Ethiopian civilization and culture so much that they took it back to Italy and with the passive consent of subsequent regimes and imperialist contempt for Ethiopia’s demands for its return…..kept that artifact until they started returning it this year.* :roll:
* link
I agree entirely. I wish that I had had more of an opportunity to learn new languages when I was younger (its so much easier!), but I am determined to be at the very least fluently bilingual. I think everyone should learn at least a little bit of Spanish. Arabic is next on my list to work on!
My relatively simple idea that would solve a lot of problems is for everyone to study Statistics/ take a stat course. I once heard an entire lecture on how the vast majority of people do not understand the concept of an exponential function (that would be the populations curve for exponential growth, world resources for exponential decay, etc.) and how this will basically destroy the world. Probabilities, statistics, and such can be meaningful information that can inform our decisions, but only if we understand them. Numbers just are too easily manipulated if you haven’t studied the math…
My relatively simple idea that would solve a lot of problems is for everyone to study Statistics/ take a stat course.
HEY YOU TOOK MINE! Joking aside, I have thought this for a long time. At the very least, it should be required of anyone pursuing a journalism degree (since journalists write about statistics despite the fact that I bet a bunch of them can’t even define margin of error…) and I for one am someone appalled it is not.
My Episcopalian grade school had a Christmas pageant, but we also had an annual Hannukah celebration and a Kwanzaa celebration. And the choir teacher I had for 11th and 12th grade was very big on making sure we had a multicultural repertoire–lots of classical European stuff, of course, but also American gospel songs, as well as songs in Swahili, Spanish, French, Polish, Hebrew, and on one memorable occasion a nonexistent language (that was a hard song. but AWESOME).
I blame it on the brain damage causing short-term memory problems, but learning languages is so hard for me. I still love to take language classes, though. When I took Russian (which I loved because my handwriting in cyrillic is way better than my usual handwriting), I learned lots of useless phrases–my favorite of which, and the only one I can remember, is “Here comes the cat” (it’s the title of a children’s book). Soo-DAH ee-DYOT kot. Remember that. Because someday you’ll meet someone from Russian and need to say “ztdrasveetya (I’m just trying to approximate the English, sorry), soodah eedyot kot!” It will be perfect.
As for the female late night talk show host–I always wanted to be one, but since I can’t really host a show from the living room in my pjs, I nominate Kathy Griffin. Oh and a relatively simple idea that would get rid of lots of problems: comprehensive sex ed for everybody. Really. I don’t get why everyone is so afraid of people learning about sex.
As a native speaker of Mandarin, I can understand where you’re coming from. I have to say though, that just speaking Mandarin is but a small portion of the language, as it is the written form that carries the more powerful tie with the Chinese culture. The many dialects of China (the most popularly known being Cantonese) all come from the same set of characters.
One of the positive aspects of being born in a country where English is not the native tongue is that you get to learn your own native tongue plus English as well. No matter where you are in the world, if you hope to interact with the rest of the world’s citizens, you simply must know English, the global lingua franca in which most of the world communicate and does business in. One’s ability to communicate in English is most usually a very very huge advantage when seeking employment in countries where English is not the native tongue.
The sad thing is that many people see no benefits of speaking other languages besides English. To them, they see no need to learn how to speak another language when they are already masters of the only language that they perceive that matters: English. How often have we heard of news where immigrants and POC go to other countries and if their English is not up to scratch, they are heckled at, and told to “go fcking learn some English”. Even though I have been blessed with an upbringing that ensured I gained a reasonable command of the English language, when I see immigrants and POC getting treated rudely because they speak in heavy accents or in some cases, can only speak a smattering of English. The look of disdain truly disgusts me everytime I see it, letting a small window open to these people’s minds. Heck, even I still get people asking me “You know how to speak English?” before I even open my mouth, simply because of the colour of my skin.
This is vastly different from if an English speaking native went to another country, when a white man may question a native in English, but where the citizens might feel shy or disinclined to reply because their English is not up to scratch (even those fluent in the language such as myself at times feel the need to apologize to native English speakers for various reasons, in my case it’s because I haven’t and dont intend to absorb and use the local English (Australian) accent ). No one would say “Hey bub, learn Mandarin!”…because they expect the tourist/visitor to speak English.
Therefore, I think very positively whenever people study language in order to learn culture (if they learn it because of other reasons, however, that’s a completely different kettle of fish). By learning the language, both spoken and written, this really opens up another window to another culture, something that eating the food, or watching movies of another culture is not quite able to do.
I speak English, of course, majored in French in college, speak some Japanese and I want to learn Arabic next. As for all the problems in the world, here is my solution:
Class War -> ??? -> World Peace
I just have to figure out what goes where the “???” is.
I have no talent for languages, absolutely none, but that doesn’t diminish the value of learning them. I seriously wish I could.
The skill I would teach is critical thinking. I think everyone is capable of understanding the basic logic that underlies an argument (or fails to underlie many that are presented to us by the media and politicians). Being able to analyse an argument is an essential skill to anyone who wants to be a useful member of a democracy.
My warm and fuzzy, harder to define theory is that parents should focus on teaching their children to respect themselves and find pride in their own achievements rather than teaching them respect for authority and aiming to make their parents proud. Respect for other people is clearly the next step. Of course I can just wave my magic wand and make that happen!
Stealing underwear.
If everybody moved country every five years or so, then nobody would get too attached to one piece of turf, and then there would be far fewer wars over whatever. If you then make a provision that the occupiers of a home are allowed to do whatever they like to it over their five year possession, it stands to reason that those from the wealthier nations would improve homes in “poorer” countries to a standard closer to what they are used to having, thus living standards everywhere would improve dramatically over a generation or two!
If everybody kept in touch with current and former neighbours, then that would also foster a greater sense of world community.
Ooooo…I like Hypatia’s suggestion about everyone learning a little statistics. It really DOES change how you critical view numbers and data and “facts” that get slung your way. Thinking about data in distributions and not just big lump at the center helps one keep in mind that all things are variable (oh, say things like male/female mathematical aptitude or sex drive). “Normal” is just the center of a (usually) widely spread distribution and is not necessarily normative. Even if you’re sitting far out from the norm at 3 standard deviations from the mean, you’re still NORMAL. Correlation =/= causation. What was the sample size, how was the data collected/analyzed, who did it and what were their possible motives/biases, what other alternative interpretations are there? But then I’m a math geek…
I also think that a lot of societal friction, messing about in other people’s business, mean-spiritedness, misogyny, etc. would be alleviated or attenuated if people dropped the insecurities/judgement/moralizing/etc. and just got naked with someone they really were attracted to and had some really good sex. Bad TV shows and marketing would probably take a hit, but then they’re interested in keeping us apart and anxious so we buy more stuff.
Think about it…isn’t it awesome that you can have so much fun for free just with two people taking their clothes off?!? We should do it more and with more respect and playfulness. Everyone would be in a much better mood. Especially Republicans…they need some badly.
My relatively simple idea that would solve a lot of problems is for everyone to study Statistics/ take a stat course.
Hypatia, I second! Math in general is not just “adding numbers” like people think, it’s a way of understanding and reasoning, which I feel more people (at least, in the US, in my experience) could use.
i agree with your promotion of 2nd & 3rd languages.it would enrich our population, and improve or image around the world.
i also think every child should learn music…lean to sing and play at ;east one musical instrument. i also think philosophy is important.
as an english teacher tho’ i cringed when i saw “Weren’t everyone’s cultures important?”
So wise. So insightful.
I don’t know if language is really all that magically uniting. Otherwise, wouldn’t all English speaking peoples have a smoother time getting along?
I don’t know if language is really all that magically uniting. Otherwise, wouldn’t all English speaking peoples have a smoother time getting along?
I don’t think that’s where Mr J was going with the post. I read him as suggesting that speaking multiple languages makes your brain learn to change frames in order to interface with different cultures, rather than meaning that it would simply be a good thing if everyone understood each other.
Oh, I speak English, muy poco Espanol, and C#.
joe in oklahoma, what would be a better way to construct that sentence? I like grammar.
Toast, I’m a lady. But yes, that was my sentiment. If more people learned different languages, they would realize that there are different ways to be, other than solely American and English-speaking.
Heck, one does not need to be an immigrant to receive such treatment. As a US-born child of Chinese immigrants, I’ve been heckled by the White “townies” in my college town on a few occasions when I happened to be conversing in Mandarin with Chinese students from abroad while walking about the town. When I ripped into them by shouting a response along the lines of “The Constitution gives me the right to use whatever damned language I please…so shut the F&^k up you fascist/commie bastard(s)”…the look on their faces was priceless. Don’t know whether it was the cursing, equating them to being anti-democratic tyrants, or their surprise at my being able to speak such “good English”. After the long moment of shock, they usually just slink off in silence.
what would be a better way to construct that sentence?
“Weren’t all cultures important” might be better.
Toast, I’m a lady. But yes, that was my sentiment.
Gah! The “Mr.” messed with me. I’ll bear that in mind for the future.
Very true. When I was studying abroad in China, I recall seeing countless American and Western tourists throwing temper tantrums when they are in situations where no one speaks/understands English well enough for their standards. What was worse is the tendency for them to raise the volume of their yelling as if that solved anything. :roll:
If all other reasons fail to be as compelling, I’d strongly recommend learning Mandarin to minimize the possibility that the Chinese hosts and acquaintances will be making fun of you behind your back. Being reasonably conversant enough to almost pass as a native-speaker, it took practically no time before they treated me as a fellow Chinese student and recounted in Mandarin the stories about how rude, snotty, and idiotic many American and Western tourists and students were to them and other Chinese. They were not only talking about some random people….but the very classmates with whom i was studying with which was very discomfiting…though I cannot blame them as they were unfortunately dead-on about their behavior.
Fraternity dudes and to a lesser extent Sorority girls have been doing that for decades. Have yet to see any sort of peace on college campuses….much less the world. In fact, there were several references to “stealing underwear” and one cartoon of a male student attempting to vacuum underwear off of a female student wearing a skirt in my college’s 1954 yearbook.
Health care: Teach everyone to farm their back yards, and give them a bike.
Predatory lending: Teach everyone to build their own cob house.
Hunger: See Health Care.
AIDS Pandemic: Free drugs, free condoms, lot of hugs.
Poverty: See Health Care and Predatory Lending.
Lack of women hosting late-night talk-shows: Clone Tine Fey. As many times as necessary.
Toast, that’s okay. My nickname confuses many people. It’s my initials: M, R and J.
Toast, that’s okay. My nickname confuses many people. It’s my initials: M, R and J.
Ah. Gotcha.
As for myself, I’m actually a piece of burnt bread. ;-)
Mr. J,
I am also starting to learn Chinese from a CD, in addition to my 5 years of Japanese in school. And I have to say, good luck.
Who doesn’t love toast?
Thank you, lemur!
Yes! You took mine!
I agree with learning statistics as well.
“…when I see immigrants and POC getting treated rudely because they speak in heavy accents or in some cases, can only speak a smattering of English. The look of disdain truly disgusts me everytime I see it”
Me too. Horrific disdain. I just came back from about 7 months in Beiijing and often times I’d be embarrassed by my poor Mandarin skills when I couldn’t understand someone or expect them to get frustrated with me, but it almost never happened. I never got treated like a stupid foreigner (even when I felt like one :) and we eventually figured out some way to communicate. And I know that the same situation would have been different in America. My family moved to the States in the late 80s from Poland and my parents still have thick accents (which happens when you learn a new language at 30 years old). They still occasionally get unbelievably rude comments from someone about how they can’t understand them. I hate that Americans can be so arrogant, ignorant, and mean. And just plain lazy and stupid when it comes to dealing with foreigners. I think some people just turn off their ears when they hear an accent instead of paying just a little closer attention to what someone is saying.
I learned English pretty young, but I absolutely respect the difficulties in learning it. Learning other languages makes me appreciate how hard English is. Mandarin is difficult (so good luck learning it!) but trying to learn Mandarin made me see how English itself is a tough language, with its insane amount of exceptions to every rule.
As exholt mentioned above, I too have seen Americans throw hissyfits in China when no one could speak English. And it made me embarrassed to be American and for America. Along with learning a 2nd or 3rd language, I would add on traveling as an important step towards solving world problems. The more you know about different places and how people live, and just the simple act of meeting people can change how we think about other nations and cultures and (I hope) would lead to a much greater respect and appreciation for other countries. Nothing substitutes actually traveling to a place to learn about it. Of course this would mean having to inflict the pain of annoying stupid American tourists on the world for awhile, but eventually if traveling abroad became a normal thing, the stupid (and loud! omg Americans are so loud…) comments would stop.
My friend Matt has the following deceptively simple foreign policy solution:
Ice cream. That is, our nation’s foreign policy should center around giving out ice cream (or, for the lactose intolerant, sorbet or granita). First, everybody loves ice cream. Second, you can’t be expected to fight another country when you’re eating ice cream. And third, you probably wouldn’t want to fight another country if that country keeps giving you ice cream.
(His domestic policy solution is encouraging non-procreative sex.)
I agree with language learning. I majored in Russian, minored in French, and took Spanish. Next language will be ASL.
Yep. One common excuse I keep hearing from undergrad classmates and current undergrads for their academic difficulties is “Prof/TA [x] has such a strong accent/poor command of English that I couldn’t understand him/her”. This is not only applied to foreign-born students from non-English speaking countries, but also American-born POC who do not look “American”. One Asian-American Prof. I know of has had such idiotic reviews written about her even though her command of written and spoken English far exceeds that of most “American” university students. No doubt, I’ll receive the same comments if and when I teach undergrads even though I am US-born and I worked as an academic writing tutor.
Considering it is usually the mediocre and the overentitled students who tend to make such comments IME, my first inclination when an undergrad makes the “I’m having such a hard time because of Prof/TA [x]‘s accent” is to think that undergrad is making excuses to justify and rationalize his/her mediocre/failing academic performance in that course.
@exholt: yea, I heard that a lot when I was in a college science class. i had a professor from China who had an accent and frankly, maybe there were a few words here and there i couldn’t make out but i totally agree that kids will use it as an excuse to justify they’re crappy skills at the subject. i really think there’s some sense of laziness and superiority from a lot of people that i can almost see in their face when they hear an accent. it’s like, the person hasn’t even finished their sentence and it’s “I can’t understand what you’re saying!” well listen goddamnit! argh! drives me crazy.
Exholt–I can empathize. I run into the same thing with hearing people who want to learn ASL but have a dismissive view of deaf culture. I think part of it is that ASL is a separate language and has a syntax similar to French (“I-want-car-red”, for example). I know several deaf signers who write in ASL-syntax, which might contribute to the impression that we’re not very smart. (what a joke–for one, deaf drivers often have better driving records than hearing people) I’ve seen that sort of dismissive attitude towards the people even if someone is fascinated by the culture itself, especially when I spent a week at Gallaudet in one program where we stayed in the same Dorm as hearing students who were studying ASL. The RA’s had to take away their cell phones and give them about three lectures on respect and signing instead of voicing before they got the idea. It was rather dissapointing on several levels.
Rachel– Awesome! Good luck!
I love foreign languages. In high school (senior this fall, Gah!) I’ve taken three years of French, a year of Spanish, and have been dunked into ASL over the course of about three years in varying time periods (and am now a boarding student at a school for the deaf). I’m planning on studying Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and German in the future, and hopefully more beyond that. :)
People are regularly understandably flummoxed over how a deaf girl (by identity, hard of hearing in actuality ^-^v) can learn to speak a foreign language. I’m a very good lip reader, and also Romance languages convey the past, present, future, and pronouns via the vowel pronunciation instead of consonant ending, and that makes all the difference in the world. I regularly get the numbers in the fifties and sixties mixed up–they are completely indistinguishable for me, even with hearing aids. I fully expect to have far more trouble with German than I have had with French or Spanish! ;) But that is no reason not to study the language. “`\^-^/“`
I think that as far as the whole “I can’t understand your accent” issue goes, Americans are on the hypocrytical side, since I regularly struggle with understanding them because they mumble and move their lips so little. I’ve been spoiled a little at home because my parents worked in Theater for years, and my brother is a loud and expressive chatterbox (^__~). That’s part of the reason I like Obama–he moves his lips and enunciates! Woo-hoo! Bush is al mumbly, so I am always reading captions with him. Kerry wasn’t especially fabulous at moving his lips either. I also think that Americans are guilty of confusing “listening” with “hearing” (there were a lot of jokes about this back during the Gallaudet protest of ’88 lols!). Simply hearing someone with an accent doesn’t mean that they aren’t understandable. My mother takes the effort to speak French in Quebec and France, and the citizens there are simply delighted with her efforts, though she does sound distinctly Quebecoise ;)
Education-wise, I would recommend second, third, and fourth languages (it is possible to do more than three–the UN has a pre-school for the children of their employees, who have proven this), Anthropology and Philosophy classes, high-level mathematics, sciences, a comparative religion class (a class studying the bible from a literary/rhetorical point of view might also be a good idea, since the bible is referenced left and right–this is a die-hard atheist talking), Sciences, sociology, regular museum visits, federally-funded international class trips, international sports clubs (also federally funded in lower socioeconomic classes–upper class and upper-middle classes can pay their own way though), regular guest speakers, MUN (XD), a wider range of music in band/orchestra beyond the European classicals (though obviously they should be studied too), and rhetoric studies of national rhetoric, both ours and other nations. And weave in discussions on Peacemaking if possible. And ASL of course ;)
I also recommend that anyone who hasn’t seen it should watch The Battle of Algiers. It’s about an Algerian revolt against the French Government from ’53 to ’57. It’s an Italian film spoken in French and can be found with English subtitles. Compare France’s rhetoric on torture with the USA. It’s spooky.
The US is an anti-intellectualist country, and will obviously have to change on that front.
I like the Ice Cream Idea!
But I want to say that travelling abroad will not necessarily make you more open minded.
I once heard a story about a man who was very proud to consider himself a non-racist–he opened the door for black women, helped them carry things, and generally went out of his way to be very nice to black people. But then he realized that he was the worst kind of racist one could ever be.
I think that’s a story that one should keep in mind through out daily life.
Rachel, I like ice cream.
Lo-hi!-OH, that works for me!