Learn a Foreign Language. It's Good for You!
Studying a second language has all kinds of benefits, including being great brain exercise
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Brenda Starr (not her real name) is a local news reporter at a top television market in California. She took Spanish in high school and college, four years altogether. She says she's retained little of it.
"As a journalist in California, it is very limiting," she told me. "I often do stories on immigrations, Latino communities, etc. and wish I could converse fluently in Spanish."
My old college roommate, Jeff Eskin, an attorney in Las Vegas, studied German for three years. He learned enough to be able to work in a restaurant in Munich the summer of 1972.
Jeff recalled, "Most of the patrons were pretty patient with me. Only once did (someone) get pretty upset with me. I guess I screwed up her roast chicken order. Never really knew what we said to each other. I believe she spewed a few German expletives."
Today, he says, he can say "hello," "good morning," "thank you," "goodbye," "do you speak English?" and the always useful "I love you" in German, but not much else.
Michele Gran of Global Volunteers, in Tanzania
Michele Gran of Minneapolis is co-founder of Global Volunteers, a community service organization with projects all around the world. Before leading its inaugural program in Peru in 2002, she prepared by taking a Spanish course and studying privately with a tutor. As she puts it, she attained moderate fluency speaking the present tense. Since then, even that has largely evaporated.
"Because English is the language of technology, commerce and opportunity, I've never been blocked in my international travels speaking only English," she said. "However, I've certainly been limited in my travels to Spanish-speaking countries, especially when working with children and families who don't speak English. I regret that I've lost so much of the limited fluency I had, because my communications would be so much richer and certainly clearer if I could speak Spanish."
The three of them actually got farther than most Americans, many of whom never study a foreign language or study it but never gain enough knowledge to actually converse. An estimated 20 percent of native English speakers in the United States are able to hold a conversation in a foreign language. Just one percent of Americans are deemed proficient in another language that they studied in a U.S. classroom. THe vast majority of bilingual Americans learned the second language from family at home. By comparison, 56 percent of Europeans can speak at least two languages.
In many countries, study of at least one foreign language is compulsory in school. Just eleven states require foreign language in public schools.* Many colleges have no language requirement. At the college I attended in the 1970s, the foreign language requirement had been dropped. After having taken French for eight years, I considered this a lucky break. I promptly and stupidly stopped studying French. Bad decision, a tendency of certain 17-year-olds.
Years ago, when I was an avid tennis player and fan of the professional game, I noticed that almost all the foreign tennis players spoke English very well, but few American players could speak a foreign language. Two exceptions come to mind. After winning the French Open in 1992, Jim Courier gave his victory speech in French. And in 2013, Serena Williams addressed the crowd in Italian (reportedly including some Spanish words) after winning a tournament in Rome. In both cases, the audiences were as surprised as they were appreciative.
As a 2019 Washington Post headline posed the issue: Half of the World is Bilingual. What's Our Problem?
Teresa Pac, now a professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, wrote an article in 2012 about the history of the English-only movement in America. She asserted that English-speaking colonists quickly -- and sometimes brutally -- to establish English as the official language (de facto) of the new land.
"Anglo-Saxon elites identified the languages of encountered populations as a social problem, fearing these populations as politically formidable and restricted, or even completely eradicated the use of their language," Professor Pac wrote. African slaves and their descendants were forbidden to speak their native languages. Slaves who spoke the same language were separated from each as way to extinguish it."
The new Americans took severe measures too against some indigenous people.
The 1867-1868 Indian Peace Commission was created by Congress to make peace with "certain hostile tribes" and convince them to move to reservations where they would be "civilized." Among its proposals, that indigenous children be required to attend reservation schools "where their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted."
There was greater tolerance for German, once the second most widely spoken language in the United States . There were sizable German-American populations in several states and hundreds of German language newspapers. Even some public schools were taught in German. It took anti-German fervor during World War 1 to put an end to that.
I believe the lack of interest by Americans generally in foreign languages is deeply rooted in history and geography. This new majority English-speaking land was far from any neighboring country that could be easily traveled to where another language was spoken (other than French-occupied eastern Canada). It was also founded philosophically on a rejection of Europe that was implicitly disdainful of foreign influence. We were a new country that would do things on our own, in our own way, speaking to one another in our own language. Physically isolated and stubbornly independent.
Steph Koyfman wrote in Babbel magazine. "We wanted to do it all by ourselves -- to not need England or anyone else. Our cultural attitude has been one of 'no thanks, I'm good' since the very beginning. If this seems like a contradiction for a country of immigrants, you're right."
A related aspect of American culture is our putatively fierce anti-elitism (which is not at all the same as our proclivity for admiring and envying wealthy people). By tradition, many Americans are suspicious of intellectual and academic elites. We put a premium on leaders having the common touch. In politics, it is practically a prerequisite to be able to demonstrate -- or convincingly fake -- being a "regular person," someone you could have a beer with, someone we can relate to personally.
An American politician who makes a public show of speaking a foreign language opens himself or herself to ridicule. When John Kerry ran for president in 2004, he stopped speaking French in public. Kerry, who is fluent in French, used to answer questions from French reporters in their own language. He knew enough that that would not be a good look when running for president of the United States. One Republican critic even attacked Kerry for looking French.
Presidents Bush and Chirac photo credit: Getty Images
In 2002, President Bush held a press conference with French president Jacques Chirac. In a follow-up to a question he had just asked Bush, the NBC White House correspondent David Gregory posed a question to Chirac in French. Bush looked startled, then annoyed.
"Very good," Bush interrupted. "The guy memorizes four words and he plays like he's intercontinental." Gregory continued with his question in French, further agitating the American president.
"I'm impressed," Bush said sarcastically. "Que bueno! Now I'm literate in two languages."
It's considered so unusual for a native-English speaking American to be fluent in a foreign language that when it occurs, it's notable. The New Yorker magazine once ran an article about Kerry's French and compared it to that of actor Bradley Cooper (Cooper supposedly spoke better colloquial French, which he learned as a student in France). Earlier this year, it was noteworthy that the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spoke fluent French.
One reason for our language deficit is that American students don't have to study a foreign language. It isn't required in any state in the country. And many colleges similarly do not require it. As of 2014, twelve states had more than one in four elementary- or secondary-school students studying a language other than English. Nationwide, the figure was just over 21 percent. In Europe, nearly all primary school students were studying another language. In predominantly francophone Quebec, Canada, public school children start studying both French and English in first grade. Today, about 45 percent of Quebecers (Quebecois) are considered bilingual, double the percentage in the early 1960s..
A question that often arises is: on a practical level, does it matter if an American can only speak English? English has become the world's lingua franca. Pretty much wherever you go in the world -- or at least, the top tourist destinations -- you can find someone who speaks English, sometimes even better English than we native speakers.
My buddy Ron Christian said he would like to speak Spanish (he studied German for two years) but concedes not knowing another language "is no real limitation for me as a practical matter."
Constance Schultz also wishes she spoke fluent Spanish, but she told me via Facebook, "Not knowing a second language limits me on occasion. I am a substitute teacher. But on an everyday basis, it is not functionally necessary."
So, yes, of course, you can exist and happily speak only English. But there are considerable advantages to studying and acquiring proficiency in a foreign language. On a practical level, the more languages you speak the better your job opportunities in many industries. It also enriches travel experience. Even just a rudimentary knowledge of the local language -- hello, please, thank you -- is helpful, and it communicates respect and an openness to a different culture. On a trip to Morocco a few years ago, I used the limited Maghrebi Arabic that I had crammed before traveling. I no doubt butchered the pronunciation, but local people were at first startled and then seemed delighted.
It's also believed that learning a foreign language is great exercise for the brain with cognitive benefits and possibly even some protection against dementia.
"The cognitive and neurological benefits of bilingualism extend into older adulthood," wrote Viorica Marian and Anthony Shook, researchers at Northwestern University. "Bilingualism appears [my emphasis] to provide a means of fending off a natural decline of cognitive function and maintaining what is called 'cognitive reserve.' Cognitive reserve refers to the efficient utilization of brain networks to enhance brain function during aging. Bilingual experience may contribute to this reserve by keeping the cognitive mechanisms sharp and helping recruit alternate brain networks to compensate for those mechanisms that become damaged during aging."
They concluded, "Older bilingual people enjoy improved memory and executive control relative to older monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits."
There are signs of progress. More Americans than ever take language classes. New apps and on-line services such as DuoLingo and Babbel have brought access to language instruction to your smartphone. I also sense a growing realization that knowledge of Spanish in particular is useful as a way to communicate with our fellow Americans for whom Spanish is their first or dominant language. In my informal survey of friends and Facebook followers, I heard from many people who described, often passionately, the advantages of knowing another language.
"In the U.S., it is not functionally necessary to speak any language other than English," wrote my old grad school roommate, James DeGraffenreidt. "(But) it greatly limits English speakers' ability to experience the complete human interaction that results from hearing another person express himself in his native language."
Alejandro Martinez, Sr., said, "Learning another language is knowledge. And knowledge is power."
I think it's time for me to give it another shot. Una vez más.
* National K-12 Foreign Language Enrollment Survey Report 2017
cover photo credit: Getty Images