My favorite joke when it comes to language – “What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.”
I’ve been around language my entire adult life (and so, yeah, I have a favorite joke about language). I learned Chinese Mandarin when I was 19 years old. I’ve lived off-and-on in a foreign country (the language of which I formally studied for over a year) for nearly 25 years. I’ve studied and travelled (and even translated in a pinch) in China.
And so people will sometimes ask me, “Are you fluent in Chinese? Are you fluent in Korean?” and my answer is (laughingly) “Not even close.”
My abilities in each of those languages is what I would call “passable.” I can get by. I’m confident that, if forced to use the language consistently for an extended period of time (let’s say, a month or so), I’d actually be much better. Give me a few months in China and I’d probably say “yes” to the fluent question. Maybe six in Korea – where I was completely cut off from anyone who speaks English. The thing about Korea though is that you’re never completely cut off from anyone who speaks English for more than a couple of hours.
We live in a big world, and sometimes I think Americans are kind of blinded to the rest of it. Much to our disadvantage. When you really think about it, the culture of those who live on the other side of the globe from us is incredibly different from our own. There are just things I’ll never understand about being Korean. And there are completely different things I’ll never understand about being Chinese. Or Dutch. Or Botswanan. Or even Canadian. But the fact that we see the world differently makes none of us any better, culturally. I know there are things Americans do that are unthinkable elsewhere. I know that I myself have stumbled around culturally on occasion.
Charlamagne said “To have a second language is to have a second soul.” That quote has stuck with me over the years. It’s so sharp, so deep. I would think even more so for Americans. I listen to a podcast where one of the presenters speaks English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German fluently (he’s from Belgium). To many Europeans, speaking more than one language is second nature – they think nothing of it. But for Americans, who isolate themselves by virtue of their stubbornness in insisting that the world get their (our) culture and language, the world is actually so much smaller than it really is. A second language shouldn’t be a passing phase to get through high school, it should be something with which each child grows up. Maybe if we understand more about the world around us, we can get to the business of understanding the people in it.
Or at least trying to.