Slow Communication

Too long for here

I wouldn’t be quite so pessimistic as Prof “Pullman” (as one poster per forum inevitably seems to call him) about being able to choose a language related to the region you end up going to. People aren’t always sent willy nilly to random parts of the world.

Does it help to have had classes in a different language than one you end up having to use? I can think of languages in which I have had very little instruction (Spanish) and none at all (Dutch), which I find I can understand quite accurately in written form; Italian (a few classes) and Portuguese (none) I find a bit harder to decode; one course in Slovenian, which I usually attended in a state of inebriation, gave me a few clues to the Slavonic languages. My dishwasher by some fluke of logistics had evidently been intended for the Belgian market, but between French and Flemish installation instructions I had no problem setting it up. I do suspect all this – even the willingness to stare at a text for a minute or two in the hope that some sense will emerge – has something to do with having been taught 3 languages other than English at school.

A good question would be whether this could be better achieved by a general linguistics 101 / language awareness course, maybe with a bit of “global communication in simple English” or by courses in specific languages. I would make the following bet. A course in just one foreign language during one’s entire formal education is next to useless; Linguistics 101, etc. could probyly do better. But being exposed to 3 or 4 foreign languages would be better again, and I have an idea why.

To understand the differences between languages in terms of explicit linguistic descriptions, you would need to get a grasp of the grammar of your first language not too far short of the contents of the Huddleston & Pullum student book. This is simply too much to ask of undergraduates majoring in some other field who have not been bitten by the linguistics bug – quite apart from being too much to pack into the lecture time of that Lingustics 101 course. However, being confronted with a few different actual languages feeds the different structures of those languages, if in a slighly garbled form, into your brain. And there they lie, perhaps never consciously thought of or further analyzed, but that is not to say they are doing nothing. Even in the young adult brain, in which the ferocious Chomskiyan computer of early childhood has long since been run down, they leave an impression of the fact that languages differ, and a few inklings of how.

I might just as well have landed up in Spain; I was trying to get a grant there before the job in Germany came up. I can’t say for sure how easily I would have learned Spanish; but with Irish, French and German to some extent under my belt, I’d have had quite a few relevant concepts in hand.