[PRCo] Re: Languages

[Fred Schneider]

Yup.   I was standing in my family room one evening.   Besite me was  
Frits van Dam.   He was watching the news from home on the  
television.   I could tell from the look on his face that he  
understood every single word about the Moluccan terrorists back home  
in the Netherlands.

I asked Frits how many languages he spoke.   He said, "...only  
English and Dutch fluently."   He then elaborated, "I can get by in  
French and German."

I later learned that by "fluent" Frits meant he could use either  
English or Flemmish (Dutch) interchangeably as mother tongues.  He  
had no need to go back to Dutch to think through anything if he was  
working in the English mode.   His wife and at least one of the two  
daughters are equally fluent in English.   Frits' definition of  
getting by in French or German meant he could read, speak, understand  
spoken French or German in conversation but once in a while he had to  
revert to English or to Dutch to ponder, "what does that word  
mean?"    My idea of getting by ... renting a car, filling the gas  
tank, order dinner, getting a hotel room, translating the weather map  
off television, translating photo captions in a railfan book, reading  
highway signs across Europe, reading the hodink marks on a timetable,  
recognizing the mens room sign, etc., well Frits can also do that in  
Finnish, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Spanish and a few other  
languages.

I felt embarrassed.  He suggested I had no reason to.   And, like you  
said Jim, he explained that I could go 3,000 miles on my language  
while he could only go 50 miles on his.  But I still felt embarrassed  
enough to do something about it.   I spent a lot of time since then  
studying both German and French and it has made vacations a lot more  
fun.  And maybe some day I'll also get to Spanish.   But languages  
get harder as I get older.



> .
> There's another misconception    ----    Euros learn another language
> simply because of that Ol' Saw:
>
> """Necessity is Mother Of Invention!"""       NOT  because citizens of
> U.S.A.  any less intelligent.
>
> Euros step out of their house and someone is talking another language
> --  not uncommon for one part of the  ""country""  to speak a  
> language 
> totally different from another part of the country.       And the
> countries are no larger than our average State  --  Most Of Them   
> --  so
> another language is available Just Down The Street Across The Dotted
> Line! :-) ! ;-) ! :-D ! :-P ! =-O ! 8-) !       3-Thousand miles  
> Pond To
> Pond here, go north and they still Spik Ingrish  --  Sous is another
> matter.       Not Necessary to learn another language here    ----
> Mother  was  Thrown  Out  With  The  Bath  Water!!!!!!!
>
>
>