Language

Unbelievable as it seems, I have been gone from home for almost four weeks. The past week or so has felt like a transition from being a tourist overwhelmed by unfamiliar impressions to being a temporary inhabitant of a place that feels ever more familiar, if no less mysterious and foreign.

Language has been a big part of my impressions from the start. Jamie is teaching English and learning Chinese, and we have talked about those endeavors quite a bit. Many people speak to us in English -- everything from “Hello” on the street to discussions with Jamie’s colleagues. A couple of them (especially Marien from Holland) speak such fluent English that those conversations go without a hitch.

On the other hand, I speak no Chinese at all apart from “ni hao” (hello) and “xie xie” (thank you), and very few people here can say more in English than I can say in Chinese. We hear “Hello - nice to meet you” on the streets a lot, but with most people it tends to end there. I can pick up a few words and phrases -- mostly stuff I listened to on CD’s before I came here -- but none of the meaning of what people are saying in Chinese.

As in Brussels, I wish I could have direct, in-depth conversations with local people. Jamie speaks what sounds to me like fluent Chinese (though he continues to deny that he’s very good!), and he does a lot of translating for me. Without him I would have lost my mind or fled home a long time ago. But it would take years of effort to be able to function here in terms of language, and both Jamie and his colleagues are evidence of that. All of them have been studying Chinese or English (respectively) for a long time, and I haven’t run into anyone who appears to have native fluency in English, nor does Jamie have native fluency in Chinese. Except for a very few language geniuses, only babies find this sort of thing easy!

Aside from the personal side of language issues, there’s also the politics. In China, every school child starts learning English in third grade and goes on with it through high school. The government not only supports English learning, it mandates it. (There is a national educational policy here; I don’t know what role the provincial and local governments play.) English majors at Yulin University must also learn Japanese, and I have met a number of people who also studied Russian or German.

Without going into a long rant, I will say that I wish the U.S. would place more emphasis on language learning. In that respect, coming here has only intensified a feeling I’ve had for a long time. The fact that many Chinese people know English, while very few Americans know Chinese (or any other foreign language) seems likely to play a subtle but important role -- not to our advantage -- in the coming years of economic competition between the two countries. This is not to mention the millions of bi- and multi-lingual Europeans and Africans who speak English with native or nearly native fluency, besides any number of other languages. My colleagues in Brussels switched back and forth among English, Dutch, and French without blinking, and I remember Edgard from the Ivory Coast, who taught French at Maranacook years ago, spoke beautiful English, and knew four other languages besides French and English.

Yes, English is a world language at this point, that’s why everyone else is learning it. But soon we’re going to be like kids who don’t know pig latin; a lot of the rest of the world is going to be able to talk behind our backs while we can’t talk behind theirs. ;)

Not only that, being a nation of immigrants means that we have an immense opportunity within our own borders to encourage multi-lingual citizens. Why should my Italian ancestors have had to abandon Italian when they learned English? Why don’t we encourage immigrants to maintain their native languages across the generations when they come here, so that we would have a nation in which not only English, but Spanish, Portuguese, Somali, Arabic, and any number of other languages are also spoken?

For those of you who are tempted to say that immigrants aren't learning English these days, I read about a study that said that in Southern California, later generations of immigrant families are learning English at about the same pace and rate as my Italian ancestors. It just seems different now because there is a long-term constant supply of new immigrants who don't know the language. But their' children and grandchildren are learning English just like Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad and his siblings did.

Well, that was something of a rant after all. 'Nuf said.