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Learning a Foreign language – Spanish? German? or French?

There is an old joke that goes like this. “If you speak two languages you are called bilingual – If you speak three languages you are called trilingual – What are you called if you speak only one language? – The answer: an American.” In most of the United States it is not a joke but rather the truth. Unless your parents speak Spanish, French, German or another language, you work for a translation agency or you teach a foreign language, you are highly unlikely to be able to converse in a language other than English even if you took a language course in school.

If it wasn’t for our recent immigrants (legal and illegal), an extremely low percentage of Americans would be able to speak a foreign language despite the fact that so many of our ancestors came from countries where they spoke Italian, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Swahili or one of the other of the world’s vast array of languages. Yet if you go to most regions of the world today, a high percentage of the population speaks at least some basic English.

In the United States we teach foreign languages in our schools. Why do our children lag so far behind the rest of the world in this area of education? The answer is simple. In most cases we begin teaching children a foreign language in high school. Most other countries begin teaching a foreign language (usually English) in elementary school often as early as the first grade.

At early ages most children can learn languages incredibly quickly. A friend of mine got married overseas and brought his new wife and her seven year old daughter to the United States. The daughter new only Russian but within six weeks she started school  and spoke English so well that her teacher and the other children did not know she was from another country until she told them.

Of course, you may ask is learning a foreign language really necessary especially for Americans who have their whole world spoon fed to them in English. Some argue that if the rest of the  world just spoke English everyone would be better off.  Maybe they are right and in some ways we look like we may be headed in that direction. Diversity can often be a pain. However, if all the flowers were red, the only fruit was an orange and movies were still in black and white, I believe the world would be a pretty boring place.

So take an online course on how to learn a language. Learn French, Italian, German, Arabic or japanese. You might get a job at a translation agency or simply be able to understand movies without having to read those annoying subtitles. Either way, your world may be less boring.