Growing up in a small town in Connecticut, I didn't have much experience with diversity. For the most part, all of my classmates were white and spoke English. In middle school and high school we took language classes as a requirement towards graduation, but, along the way, the deeper value of foreign language courses went unappreciated. Before college, I had one bilingual friend, and when my teachers said I'd need to know another language as an adult, I, like all of my peers, ignored them. Sure, I liked my Spanish courses, and excelled at them, but I never tried to retain any of what I learned. Four years later, in my senior year in college, I seriously regret that indifference.
Throughout my four years in college, I've met people who speak a slew of languages, people who range from bilingual and trilingual, to speaking four or five languages with ease, and it excites me every time I get to hear them switch from chatting with me to talking to their parents over the phone in Spanish, or Portuguese, or Chinese. These people all grew up in a multilingual circumstances, speaking whatever language their families spoke at home while also speaking/learning English in school. A couple of them learned English when they came to this country. Meanwhile, back in my small Connecticut town, I know of almost no one who can string together more than a few sentences in another language than English. We live in such a diverse world, such a diverse and globalized country, yet we don't take the idea of learning foreign languages seriously.
Currently, there is no national mandate that foreign languages should be taught in any level of schooling, but, as of 2008, 93% of high schools across the country offered foreign language classes. While that number may seem to indicate that the US is doing well with its foreign language education, that statistic translates into a much more disappointing one once high school students reach adulthood. Less than 1% of American adults are proficient in a foreign language they studied in a classroom, and only about 7% of college students are enrolled in a foreign language course. In 2010, it was noted that of the minority of college students enrolled in language courses, 95% of those enrollments were for European languages. It's not hard to understand why that is, either. Most all of the education in the United States public schools is Euro-centric and foreign language studies are no exception. From my own personal experience, when talking to my friends about the languages offered at their high schools, the most common were French, Spanish, and Latin (a thoroughly dead language), and only once or twice did I hear about a school offering Chinese or another non-European alternative.
When I got to college, it was required that I take a foreign language to graduate, and I chose to try out Japanese. My boyfriend still teases me about it, but I stand by the decision. The language clicked with me more so than Spanish had, and I enjoyed the feel of it in my mouth. I also especially loved being able to keep up with my professor when she began to speak only in Japanese when teaching as well as being able to read the script on the page. For all of those unfamiliar with the language, Japanese has three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. When taking my year long course, I had to memorize both the hiragana and katakana alphabets as well and a number of Kanji symbols,and by the second semester, I could only write in hiragana. The experience was rewarding, and helped me to understand a little more about the importance of learning languages. Sometimes, in the language your most comfortable with, you'll come across moments when you can't express what you need to in words. This happens in every language, but with the more you know, the more you can say. There are words that exist in other languages that don't have an equivalent term in English and vice versa, and with each new language acquired, you relearn your world and how to express it verbally to someone else. You learn about your culture and the cultures that other languages belong to.
The other day, my friend asked me if I knew about a new nifty piece of technology. It was a handsfree earphone that can directly translate words you hear to whatever language you want, and while my first response was about the price of such a device, my second was,
“Even still, it's better to just learn the language anyway.”
Technology can do a lot to aid in day to day communication, but there is a reason for the phrase “lost on translation”. Some things can't cross over from one tongue to another easily, but if one were to speak both with ease, there would be no issue. The mind would not be bound to one framework.
