The acquisition of language is truly a remarkable phenomenon and is one of the main traits that set humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. We tend to take our native language for granted, but encounter a wall of incomprehension when confronted with someone speaking a different language. When I hear someone rattling off in any other tongue than English, he or she seems like an incredible genius. The effect becomes very bizarre when I am watching a TV show and the "geniuses" are displaying behaviors that are anything but intelligent. My primary source of this on TV is my Spanish-language station Univision.
Univision has a good variety of programming on it, and I am glad that my local cable TV company chose to include it on their channel lineup. I tend to watch their morning show Despierta America and their late night news broadcast, usually still on the air when I get home from work. They also have campy comedy shows, reality/talk shows resembling Oprah Winfrey and Maury Povich, and many novelas (soap operas). It is in these genres of programming where I find the "genius bubble" frequently popping!
The final straw came recently when I was watching commercials and a Rosetta Stone ad came on, in Spanish of course. Genius after genius came on the commercial (speaking fluent native Spanish) relating what a great program of language instruction Rosetta Stone had been for them. Finally, they revealed the great product that most of those applauding this company were talking about: Rosetta Stone English! Suddenly I got real smug (for a few seconds at least) and reminded myself that to many I was the one who seemed like a genius. At least until people actually learned English and understood what I was saying!
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Indeed!
ReplyDeleteAnd Spanish (and French and Italian) is grammatically very similar to English. They become true geniuses when they also speak languages that are not similar. I know someone who speaks English, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and Mandarin.
German has three genders and four cases to get right — "the man" is der Mann, "of the man" is des Mannes, "for the man" is für den Mann; "with the man" is mit dem Mann; "the night" is die Nacht, "of the night" is der Nacht. It confuses me too much.
Then there are the non-Indo-European languages, where the differences go further. Hebrew is a Semitic language, from the Afro-Asiatic language family. Mandarin and other Chinese languages are from the Sinitic family. If my friend also spoke Hungarian or Finnish (and I know people who speak those and are fluent in English as well), we could add Uralic to the mix.
Me, I just dabble; I'm restricted to English for anything but phrases and food words, mostly. No genius, I.
Merde.
Je aussi: merde.
ReplyDeleteAlthough you already know from our high school years, Barry, how incompetent I am with foreign languages, I did become entranced with them back in 1974 and since then have dabbled as well with them, like you in your own way.
I've shared long ago on this blog how I used to work in a Chinese restaurant and actually developed my Vietnamese to a level where I could converse in it (somewhat) with some of my co-workers. That's the kind of foreign language experience that hits me where I live: talking with people, imperfections and all, and getting feedback from them!