[PRCo] Languages

[Fred Schneider]

> Pepa Kalousek wrote:

> Yes, you are right.    Understand, please, that I speak
> English only a little.......

To which Jim Holland responded:
        Same here in tht U.S.A.    ----    Very Few of us speak
English    ----    mostly American    ----    which would make
the basest of Englishmen cringe!    We definitely have trouble
with the language so we are in the Same boat  --  TrolleyCar  --
there!

Gentlemen, this made me jump on my soap box.  Boris, you should never
apologize for speaking "English only a little."   You do a most
commendable job for someone who spent much of his life in an area where
Russian was the recommended second language.  You should never apologize
to any American because you have vastly exceeded the foreign language
capabilities of almost all of the non-Spanish heritage population of the
United States.

I have taken German three times and forgotten most of it three times,
and I think the fact that I can only get my hotel, get dinner, read the
instructions on a streetcar ticket machine, or complain that the waiter
forgot the silverware to be exceptional among Americans.  My wife does a
much better job that I do ... she still remembers her college French.  I
took high school French, and ten years ago, two semesters of college
French, and I've forgotten it all.   And yet I keep trying.  I've
already started to try some Russian so I can better enjoy the CERA trip
next spring.

Sadly, we have dropped foreign language requirements in most colleges
and universities because highly learned students back in the 1960s told
the professors and administrators that foreign languages were
irrelevant.  My wife taught in a school district which dropped German
instruction because the son of one of the school board members failed a
test ... that was sufficient reason to drop the course and fire the
instructor.  If I want to take a language course, I need to find a
college or university that might offer it, usually only during daytime
hours and I may have to drive 35 miles to find what I want in one of
more than a dozen schools in central Pennsylvania.   Too many Americans
in much of the United States complain that people from Puerto Rico,
Mexico or Columbia are not forced to speak English -- they absolutely
don't want to be told or reminded that people born in Puerto Rico are
given a United States birth certificate and they travel on a United
States passport and they are part of us.  I don't know that I've ever
bumped into a machine shop or transit shop foreman in this country who
could speak a foreign language ... we're lucky if some diplomatic
people, professors, a few thousand airline stewardesses and pilots, and
so forth can handle it.

But somehow, the Swiss manage to get along with four national
languages.  Should you want a job as a concierge or desk clerk in a
higher rates hotel in Switzerland, you will not get the job unless you
speak at least (at a minimum) German, French, Italian, and English.  The
doorman (who also swept the sidewalk) at the Bellevue Palace Hotel in
Zurich in late August spoke all those plus Spanish and Portuguese.

If you should want a job as an information clerk in Central Station in
Den Haag, the capital of the Netherlands, you will not get it unless you
can field five languages ... English, Flemmish, German, French, and at
least one more.  And you also need to be able to recognize many others
so that you can relay a customer to the clerk who can handle them!

If you were born in Germany, in any other city and area other than
Hannover, you would be bilingual by the age of eight, speaking High
German and your local dialect.  (In Hannover, high German or Hoch
Deutsch is the local dialect.)  And by third grade you would be starting
on German.  Should your test scores funnel you into an academic high
school, you will get at least seven years of English and probably one
other tongue.  Not surprising is it that Daimler - Chrysler adopted
English as the corporate language ... a whole lot easier for the
Mercedes people to use their English than to demand that Chrysler
executives learn German.

The French (those people that we ridicule for not speaking our language
or going to war with us), have more than 30 dialects of French.  In
addition to that, by trying to institute a conversation in French, I've
found one whale of a lot of French men and women who will come back to
me in English.

Boris ... please do not ever apologize for your linguistic skills.