Bad at languages?
<p>I had a very international childhood &#8211; lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona).  The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen. </p>
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<p>OK, maybe 2.5 languages would be a better count; I never thought I was very fluent in spoken French, though I could read it well enough (in the late 1960s, when the available English renditions of the <cite>Asterix</cite> comics were pretty bad, I translated them myself for fun).  I was a crib bilingual in Spanish, though, and my Italian became passable. </p>
<p>This had some interesting though minor effects on my later life. One is that, like many crib bilinguals, I am much better at hearing and correctly reproducing phonological features outside the inventory of my native language than most monolinguals.  (There&#8217;s recent research showing that crib bilinguals organize the language-processing circuitry in their brains slightly differently.)</p>
<p>When I traveled in Asia I found this gave me a useful knack. Chinese and others who deal with Westerners often take Western nicknames to, er, make themselves pronounceable; I, noticing this, developed the habit of asking them for their real name and then pronouncing it back at them.  This invariably produced delighted smiles.</p>
<p>(Note: This doesn&#8217;t work in Japan, Japanese phonology is too simple. You need to go somewhere that pronouncing the language is actually difficult for English-speakers.)</p>
<p>OK, so, crib bilingual, spoke three languages besides English, good ear (like Frodo) for foreign sounds. Here&#8217;s the funny part.  <em>I thought I was bad at languages.</em></p>
<p>The handful of polyglots in the audience are now laughing at me, I know. As well they should; I didn&#8217;t begin to get a clue until I tested out of my French-language requirement at college.  Um, that was six years after studying it and not having used it at all.</p>
<p>But I didn&#8217;t really clue in until I started doing my second round of traveling as Famous Internet Guy in the late 1990s.  And noticed that when I was with a group of monolinguals, I was pretty much always the one who clued in on street signs and bits of the local language the fastest.</p>
<p>I think it really hit home when I visited Warsaw for a Linux conference.  Polish is not closely related to any language I&#8217;d ever spoken, yet&#8230;after a day on the ground I was starting to get bits of it.  And the other visitors &#8211; weren&#8217;t.  Indeed, they behaved as though it never occurred to them that they could, as though the language barrier was impermeable without concentrated and effortful study.</p>
<p>Yes, go ahead, chuckle at my naivete. But it was a bit of a wrench when I realized that <em>they</em> were the normal ones. It&#8217;s my ability to absorb languages through my skin that is unusual in an adult. (Children, of course, do it routinely.)</p>
<p>The point of this rant is actually the question that preoccupied me for a bit once I thought through my observations and did a little research, enough to realize how very mistaken I had been. <em>How in the hell did I develop the belief that I was bad at languages?</em></p>
<p>Because what I found out, of course, is that this is the history and behavior of somebody who is really <em>good</em> at languages &#8211; a natural polyglot.  Crib bilinguals tend to be like this more than others, but it&#8217;s a tendency rather than a rule.</p>
<p>This, too, made a (minor) difference in my life.  By the time I visited Taiwan a couple years into the new century I was confident enough to set myself the goal of learning to hear and reproduce the tones in Mandarin Chinese during the few days I&#8217;d be there. And I succeeded, though that&#8217;s not really the point I&#8217;m driving at here.</p>
<p>No.  The point is, I did eventually figure out why I thought I was bad at languages for so long.  It was because I was bad at <em>language classes.</em> Found them boring, didn&#8217;t get good grades at them, got shut of them as soon as I could, and felt greatly relieved when I tested high enough to fulfill the foreign-language requirement at Penn.</p>
<p>So my conclusion is this: the foreign-language instruction methods in our schools suck horribly. I mean, really horribly. I think it must constitute something near a worst-case <em>definition</em> of suck when you take a crib bilingual with a good ear and a strong knack in one end and spit him out the other with a belief that he&#8217;s bad at languages so fixed that it lasts nearly thirty years. </p>
<p>What makes this funnier, in a way, is that I cultivated an interest in linguistics over those three decades and <em>still</em> thought I was bad at languages&#8230;</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t really know what can be done about this.  But I started reading <a href="http://www.fluentin3months.com/polyglot-project/">The Polyglot Project</a> recently, motivated by a conjecture that I&#8217;d find I&#8217;m more like those people &#8211; the sort who eat languages like bonbons &#8211; than like most monolinguals.  And indeed it seems that I am, but that&#8217;s not my point either.</p>
<p>My point is more like this: Jesus H. Christ and his bastard brother Harry on a pogo stick, why isn&#8217;t the educational establishment <em>listening</em> to these people?  What in the <em>hell</em> are we doing numbing childrens&#8217; brains to insensibility with the 413th repetition of a textbook drill about la plume de ma tante when it is utterly clear that immersion and motivation through native-speaker materials is both more effective and more fun?</p>
<p>I know, I know&#8230;our educational system is very broken in general, I shouldn&#8217;t be surprised at yet another symptom. I managed it, though; thus, this rant. The best I can hope is that it might set somebody to thinking.</p>
