Follow-Up on Friday's Barry Farber Article

This past Friday I quoted Barry Farber, New York City's great WOR Radio conservative talk show host...he just passed away and I wanted to honor him.  However, he shares his name with a younger man who has built a career on motivational self-help programs and I fear that it may have been one of his quotes that I used.  Never mind, it's still a good quote, regardless who said it: risk is indeed often an essential element involved in making progress.  I've also been thinking more about the elder Farber's fascination about learning foreign languages and his imploring to take advantage of every opportunity to practice them.  Since I live in a predominantly English-speaking country, I don't have the benefit of immersion to quickly attain fluency...and maybe I don't need to become fluent in another language, anyway.  The other day Melissa and I were delivering Mother's Day gifts for our church to different members at their homes...we found ourselves conversing with a family from Iran and I could have taken advantage of this opportunity to speak greetings to them in Persian...I do know this one sentence pretty well...but I didn't.  Then, later, we stopped over for a dinner takeout from a downtown Cambodian restaurant...once again I know the same greeting in that language and could have spoken it to the owner but refrained.  I'm not studying Persian or Cambodian (Khmer) right now, but since I know people from those backgrounds and I like to study foreign languages, it seems appropriate to take a little time aside and learn a few phrases and practice conversing with them.  Now I am (off and on) studying Chinese and Spanish and do have opportunities with talk with native speakers...but of course when I do I'm going to pronounce things wrong, use the wrong words and make grammatical mistakes left and right.  But you can't make progress learning new skills without exposing yourself to the risk of screwing up, right?  Back nearly forty years ago I used to work at a Chinese restaurant in town and had several Vietnamese immigrants as coworkers...they welcomed me learning and practicing their language with them, but it's been a while since I've ever spoken it with anyone.  Well, I'm not getting any younger and recent events have shown that there's no telling what will happen in the future, so why not enrich my life by reaching out and practice foreign languages with others...