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lydamorehouseAs many of you know, I am a member of the International Pen Friends. I also collected addresses of people who like exchanging letters via a strange cultural phenomenon known as Friendship books. So, occasionally, letters will arrive to my house from virtual strangers around the world.
Today, I got a letter from the Czech Republic.
There is a line from the letter that really struck me about the difference between how Americans learn languages vs. the rest of the world. My new friend writes, "My first pen pal was a Russian girl. I was about 10 years old and I remember that my mum helped me to create first sentences in Russian." IN RUSSIAN. At ten, I was still learning English, you know?
One of the reasons that I joined IPF a few years ago is because I had a vague memory of a writing assignment in fourth grade (or thereabouts) where we all practiced formatting personal letters, snail mail. Our teacher gave us each an address taken from an International Pen Friend list and had us write what I now call 'letter of introduction" to a potential friend. No one ever suggested that we learn to write in the language they were speaking at home. Instead, we were just supposed to be learning a little something about another country and practicing letter writing. Because I was probably ten years old, it never sunk in that the other person WHO WAS MY AGE was reading a foreign language in order to reply.
I wasn't even offered a foreign language option until MANY YEARS LATER, in junior high school, where my choices were: Spanish or French.
I foolishly picked French because I thought a senior trip to Paris sounded cooler than a senior trip to Barcelona. No one ever suggested to me that maybe Spanish would help me speak to my fellow Americans... and a decently large portion of the rest of the world, as well. Although my French teacher was actually Canadian, so I guess there was that. (True fact, when we did go to Paris in high school Reagan was president and so when people asked us if we were Canadian, we just said: YES. Our accent had people guessing that, anyway.)
To be fair to me, I practiced my French in all sorts of weird ways, including recreationally using it while carrying on a massive missive LARP-fic with my friend Mary, with whom I was pretending to be the Scarlet Pimpernel. (We passed notes in our classes. Bonus, when it was in French, we got in less trouble because our teachers assumed we were doing some assignment for another class.)
However, despite all that (and several years of college French) none/very little of my French has stuck with me. I would be hard pressed to write to a French pen pal in French right now. In fact, I often start out my letters of introduction with an apology. I'm sorry that I am an American and can only write to you in English.... and then I usually promise to make it up to my new friend by being entertaining as FUCK.(Though I don't usually say it that way because the IPF group is a surprisingly conservative lot.)
My point, though, is that there is something WRONG about how we learn languages as Americans.
Obviously, we should be starting languages earlier, but also... I was never given a good reason to know another language. Mostly, when people tried to sell me on language acquisition they would say things like, "Well, you're going to need to pass a language requirement in university, so you might as well." Or, "Well, if you stay with it, you get to go on a senior trip." I mean, that last one worked to keep me going, for sure. I was all about wanting to travel to Paris. But having gone, I then had no motivation to keep up with it. One thing all the experts agree on is that as soon as you stop practicing another language, you start losing it.
I guess I wish I were given the opportunity my new Czech friend had. The sense that--at TEN--if I could learn someone else's language I would be a better friend.
I don't even remember where that first pen friend was from--was it France? (Oh, that would be ironic~) Shawn remembers having a Japanese pen friend and that rang some bells--like maybe I had a Japanese pen friend too? There was a time--I think popularized by the comic strip Peanuts--when pen pals were kind of the rage among my set. But, I was an obsessive saver and chronicler. If a letter came from a pen friend, I probably would have saved it somewhere. I have letters from the boy I met on our trip to France who was from Georgia (another great irony of my life--I went to France and met a high school boy from... not France, but Georgia). But, I kept a daily journal / diary from sixth grade on, so you'd think I'd have mentioned something. Ah, well.
Meanwhile, I am still struggling to try to learn Japanese.
Although speaking of pen friends, I have one who turned me on to a new app called "Drops" that I really like. It's a vocabulary builder. A component I've been missing.
Today, I got a letter from the Czech Republic.
There is a line from the letter that really struck me about the difference between how Americans learn languages vs. the rest of the world. My new friend writes, "My first pen pal was a Russian girl. I was about 10 years old and I remember that my mum helped me to create first sentences in Russian." IN RUSSIAN. At ten, I was still learning English, you know?
One of the reasons that I joined IPF a few years ago is because I had a vague memory of a writing assignment in fourth grade (or thereabouts) where we all practiced formatting personal letters, snail mail. Our teacher gave us each an address taken from an International Pen Friend list and had us write what I now call 'letter of introduction" to a potential friend. No one ever suggested that we learn to write in the language they were speaking at home. Instead, we were just supposed to be learning a little something about another country and practicing letter writing. Because I was probably ten years old, it never sunk in that the other person WHO WAS MY AGE was reading a foreign language in order to reply.
I wasn't even offered a foreign language option until MANY YEARS LATER, in junior high school, where my choices were: Spanish or French.
I foolishly picked French because I thought a senior trip to Paris sounded cooler than a senior trip to Barcelona. No one ever suggested to me that maybe Spanish would help me speak to my fellow Americans... and a decently large portion of the rest of the world, as well. Although my French teacher was actually Canadian, so I guess there was that. (True fact, when we did go to Paris in high school Reagan was president and so when people asked us if we were Canadian, we just said: YES. Our accent had people guessing that, anyway.)
To be fair to me, I practiced my French in all sorts of weird ways, including recreationally using it while carrying on a massive missive LARP-fic with my friend Mary, with whom I was pretending to be the Scarlet Pimpernel. (We passed notes in our classes. Bonus, when it was in French, we got in less trouble because our teachers assumed we were doing some assignment for another class.)
However, despite all that (and several years of college French) none/very little of my French has stuck with me. I would be hard pressed to write to a French pen pal in French right now. In fact, I often start out my letters of introduction with an apology. I'm sorry that I am an American and can only write to you in English.... and then I usually promise to make it up to my new friend by being entertaining as FUCK.(Though I don't usually say it that way because the IPF group is a surprisingly conservative lot.)
My point, though, is that there is something WRONG about how we learn languages as Americans.
Obviously, we should be starting languages earlier, but also... I was never given a good reason to know another language. Mostly, when people tried to sell me on language acquisition they would say things like, "Well, you're going to need to pass a language requirement in university, so you might as well." Or, "Well, if you stay with it, you get to go on a senior trip." I mean, that last one worked to keep me going, for sure. I was all about wanting to travel to Paris. But having gone, I then had no motivation to keep up with it. One thing all the experts agree on is that as soon as you stop practicing another language, you start losing it.
I guess I wish I were given the opportunity my new Czech friend had. The sense that--at TEN--if I could learn someone else's language I would be a better friend.
I don't even remember where that first pen friend was from--was it France? (Oh, that would be ironic~) Shawn remembers having a Japanese pen friend and that rang some bells--like maybe I had a Japanese pen friend too? There was a time--I think popularized by the comic strip Peanuts--when pen pals were kind of the rage among my set. But, I was an obsessive saver and chronicler. If a letter came from a pen friend, I probably would have saved it somewhere. I have letters from the boy I met on our trip to France who was from Georgia (another great irony of my life--I went to France and met a high school boy from... not France, but Georgia). But, I kept a daily journal / diary from sixth grade on, so you'd think I'd have mentioned something. Ah, well.
Meanwhile, I am still struggling to try to learn Japanese.
Although speaking of pen friends, I have one who turned me on to a new app called "Drops" that I really like. It's a vocabulary builder. A component I've been missing.