I’ve always regretted not being bi-lingual. I took Latin in high school, which has been enormously beneficial, but I never spoke it, and I’m really only monolingual. That’s sort of a natural advantage that kids of immigrants have. I don’t know if my half-Iraqi nephew and niece are fluent (they probably just know some words), but I’m sure they’re getting some benefit from hanging out with their mother’s family.
I’d also note, on the education bubble front, that eliminating the requirement of a language for a college degree was an early sign of it.
Old joke- If someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, and someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call a person who speaks one language?
American.
Doug,
You beat me to the punch. I didn’t realize that was a common old joke. I heard it first in the Philippines.
~Jon
I first heard it in its original, Russian, version 🙂
It’s often a good icebreaker when traveling abroad. The concierge at a hotel in Cancun laughed long and hard at it… I should memorize it in several languages, just for the irony.
J’adore le fait que je puisse parler le francais, et je suis en train d’encourager mon neveu. Cela vaut vraiement la peine. (I love the fact that I can speak French, and I’m in the process of encouraging my nephew. It’s really worth the trouble)
My French has served me in so many unexpected ways. Not just in my year in Strasbourg at ISU, but even when at one of my jobs we were looking at Chunnel debt and I was the only one who could figure out the French documentation and where the risks lay on the French side of the transaction. And those years in NYC on the Wall Street Desk at Banque Nationale de Paris. Good days.
Luckily, my undergrad major in international business & economics strongly encouraged and well nigh required a semester abroad (the acid test for whether you’re really up to the whole international thing). O mon Paris, ville ideale…
Plus, I can pretend to be Canadian when I’m overseas and actually pull it off.
It’s never too late to learn a foreign language (I still try to pick up more Russian and Chinese), and it’s so worth it!
Ken Murphy:
Where can when get training in Canadian French? I don’t have a chance of talking in France without a telltale accent, but I thought if I could get some back-country Canadian cadences right, I could be “interesting.”
There must be traces of it in the Cajun, Yooper (Northern Michigan) and some First Nation (Native American) accents.
“and I enjoy discussing with bilinguals the claims that switching between languages allows different personality traits to emerge within a single individual.”
Hmm.
We did have to speak it in class. When I said I never spoke it, I meant outside of class, conversationally. That’s the problem with Latin — very few people actually converse in it.
I had two years of Latin in high school, and we had to learn to speak it, as well. In college I took a year of German and a year of Russian, and ’05 I went back to school to try to learn Japanese. After 3 years of classes and a couple of years of studying on my own, I can hold my own in simple conversations, and read some signs and a menu, as well as understand some anime and read some manga. I don’t know how much learning a new language helps when you’re older (I started on Japanese when I was 47), but I figure it can’t hurt.
To all of my fellow Latin students: est fungus apod nos!
The Fungus Among Us.?
Funny,
Rand don’t you claim to speak conservative?
Rand,
Being bilingual is probably most helpful if you speak a second language that’s common enough that you get to use it on a regular basis. My being semi-fluent in Tagalog means that other than my Filipina sister-in-law, I never use my second language. I’m thinking of trying to study either Spanish or German to get a language I’m more likely to use more than once or twice a year.
One other thing I noticed in the Philippines (where most people speak English, Tagalog, and one or two local dialects) is that often people are a lot sloppier all around with language when they know 3 or 4 of them.
~Jon
I have considered learning another language. I know like 4 languages more or less well but since 3 are Romance languages it is a bit like cheating. I have to say learning English did change my mindset quite a bit. Especially once you get to the part where you learn to think in that language and can cope with mannerisms, slang, proverbs and the like. Once you start to learn humor in a foreign language that is probably when it starts to get interesting. I have tried Japanese and while I know a lot of words I cannot construct sentences correctly. It is damned hard to learn a language for which nearly all vocabulary has near 0% overlap with everything else you know.
Learning English was pretty liberating really. The mindset is much more alike my own than my original language’s.
As for Latin the more I read about it the more interested I get into it. Just the proverbs alone show the mindset is marvelous. Little wonder the Empire lasted that long. But not much use learning a dead language.
I think English and Spanish are probably the most useful languages to learn given the number of speakers worldwide. But if you consider business and GDP I should probably be learning Japanese or Mandarin by now.
Latin is a dead language,
Dead as dead can be.
First it killed the Romans
and now it’s killing me.
I’m somewhat multillingual: native Russian and English, a smattering of French and Italian, a few related others (Slavic and Romance). I enjoy them all and use some of them quite often.
But when it came to teaching my kids, after a great deal of soul-searching, I decided against it. You see, I have a lot of friends who went through this with their kids, and I got the ring-side seats to that adventure. What I discovered is that for most kids the effort/results ratio is awful – a huge amount of effort for pretty miserable results. Yes, there are some exceptions, but not many.
I decided that instead I will dedicate the same amount of energy and effort into teaching them something else: STEM, Making, History, Art (well, some sub-genres that I like personally :-)), Sports.
I’ll let you know in about 10 years how well that worked 🙂
My poor daughter-in-law does not speak russian which is the only language my ex-wife will speak in her presence. My ex wonders why her son doesn’t come around to visit. Having visited other countries I know one language they all speak… the hundred dollar bill.
In Turkey you could not walk around without being bothered by somebody trying to sell you something. So when a kid offered to shine my shoes I noticed his older (about 10 y.o.) sister standing by and asked if she’d like to make some money. Of course she did, so I said I’d pay her to keep all these others away. Worked like a charm. I’m pretty sure she knew some rather adult language but I enjoyed the rest of the day in bliss.
In Greece for about five or ten dollars I had a driver carry all my stuff and negotiate prices. That was also a good day, but that little Turkish girl was the best. Just call me the ugly American.
I still can’t speak Spanish after taking classes and having a spanish step father. Took classes for Russian as well. The only languages I can pick up are computer which underneath are all the same.