Re: Why Americans feel no compulsion to learn foreign languages

[mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy)]

At 9:35 AM 3/30/96, Dr. Dimitri Vulis is rumored to have typed:
[...]
> No, I think both of Tim's statements illustrate the typical Americans disdain
> for learning for knowledge's sake and the (still amazing to me) ability to
> express pride in their ignorance.  [...] It's as if though
> their challenge is to go through life learning as little as they can get away
> with (other than obscure sports statistics).

Well, I believe that Tim's original point was that Americans have little
to gain in practical terms from learning foreign languages, while others
are forced by necessity to learn English (and possibly other languages.)
So far no one has provided any convincing counter-argument to this point.

As an American who has learned a great many languages just for the sake of
knowing them I can assure you that this knowledge has turned out to have no
practical benefit to me in my daily life.  I can converse in French, German,
Italian, Indonesian/Malay, and can "get around" in Tamil, Dutch, Russian, and
Arabic. I can read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphics (okay,
so I was on a dead languages kick in college, sue me...) and know enough in
eight or nine other languages to travel anywhere in the world and be secure
in the knowledge that I could order dinner, read a train schedule, and find
shelter.  Big deal.  This knowledge is still of no practical benefit to me;
it does not help me do my job any better, it does not make my life
significantly better than Americans who are not polyglots, and in the past
year the only time I have had occasion to really use my linguistic abilities
was when I was able to deliver a particularly nasty reminder that some
Americans do speak more than just English to a pair of obnoxious French
ladies in the Los Altos Starbuck's coffee shop who seemed to think that if
the
natives cannot understand you then you have permission to make rude comments
about them loudly and in public...  For this ability I spent eight years in
class learning when to use the past subjunctive form of etre?!?

BTW, those who learn as little as they can get away with may not fit into your
ivory tower definition of true knowledge, but they are doing the important
thing: "getting away with it."  Every time I hear someone whine about
knowledge for its own sake I get the fealing they are just jealous because
they wasted time learning more knowledge than was necessary for the task
at hand... :)

jim