Australians and Americans should not be learning foreign languages?
Chris Berg argues in The Age that Australian students’ interest in Asian languages is declining because English is already the world’s lingua franca. He makes an excellent point about the lack of an instrumental motive for English speakers to learn another language, but I think he grossly underestimates the cultural understanding gained through language education:
If we want to appreciate Asia better, our expansive immigration program is already far more effective at building cross-cultural understanding than the memory of a few broken words of Mandarin learned at school.
One may have a practical, instrumental reason to learn a language, but no one learns a language by itself. Language comes attached to culture, and even if students don’t remember more than a few words of broken Mandarin (or Korean or Spanish or French) they come out of language classes more culturally sensitive, and perhaps more aware of the effort it takes for immigrants and people around the world to learn English! Furthermore, with Australia’s “expansive immigration program,” the country is only becoming more and more diverse. The cultural knowledge gained in language classes can be used at home, not just in hypothetical business trips to China.
The same argument against learning languages other than English seem to appear in every rich, English-speaking country (with the possible exception of Canada, with its bicultural past and hope for a multicultural future). On Monday, Catherine Shu pointed me to a “debate” at the New York Times website asking if learning a language other than English is worthwhile. The many benefits of multilingualism have been expounded over and over, and yet this is still an issue for “debate”? Quite an embarrassing reflection of American (and Australian) ethnocentric pride, if you ask me.
Black-Korean dispute in Dallas
Black-Korean tensions in the US are in the news again, this time in Dallas:
The customer, complaining that the price of gas at the station was much higher than at other stations, demanded he be able to buy gas by smaller amounts than what the owner set as the minimum sales unit. The owner refused and told him to go to another station, to which the customer responded by telling the owner to go back to his country. The owner responded by telling the customer to go back to Africa.
That triggered a boycott of the gas station by the black community in the region, followed by them speaking out against Korean and other Asian immigrant communities.
Robert Koehler thinks that the Korean embassy’s involvement in this dispute is only making things worse:
This latter move I find rather disturbing—having foreign diplomats get involved makes the Dallas Korean community appear even more “foreign” than they probably already feel, and it’s not the Foreign Ministry’s job to tell American citizens what to do or lecture them about “examining their relationship with other communities.”
The problem is that to learn a foreign language is not for everybody, and if there isn’t some inclination, there won’t be any results in the medium run, but it is also or mainly a market and a crutch for the book business. So what is known or believed about it has long become messy.
I personally don’t believe that learning a foreign language isn’t for everybody. Take a look at (non-English-speaking) countries with high levels of English proficiency like the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries. We might acknowledge that the dominance of English lessens the need for English speakers to learn other languages, but that doesn’t mean that all students wouldn’t benefit from exposure to another culture and another way of thinking.
For people in the North of Europe English is easy to learn. I am from SWitzerland, and though the words are not similar, the grammar is. Spaniards who after learning for 10 years stop practising, will forget absolutely everything, because the English language cannot find any echo in their inners, whereas I know many SWiss who had between 4 and 7 years of English and then never did anything again, without however losing the basic ability to put together a correct sentence.
For Latins it is a waste of time and for Latin children it is mostly torture.
My primary language was German. By now, my English is slightly better than my German. Online I have met quite a few people who switched to English without moving to an English speaking country.
My first language is very different than English, but I still managed to learn English. I really wish everyone would know English one day so we can all communicate directly. I think it would bring a lot more understanding and knowledge to this world.
However, I am now dating a Korean man, and even though we communicate in English I still feel the need to learn Korean language. You are completely right that learning a new language also brings with itself cultural sensitivity and a better understanding.