At 11:25 AM -0700 5/27/07, Carl Dershem wrote:
Henry E. Howey wrote:
I wonder how much of the "language fear" is sheer ignorance. I learned
Spanish at age 11. As a result, several other languages were later not
such a problem. I tend to feel guilty when I'm in a country with a
"minority" language that I don't know it.
I dunno, but I can guarantee that a lot of people here (and I live
about 20 miles from the border with Mexico) have no facility
whatsoever for language, and even with a lifetime of exposure do not
pick up more than a few words. And this excludes those who refuse
to try for whatever reason.
You may be lucky that you have little difficulty learning languages,
but a lot of people do have trouble, and I can think of more than a
few who are not even fully fluent in one.
My mother, on the other hand, was a whiz at languages of necessity.
Her father was Scots-American, her mother from somewhere in Eastern
Europe that was conquered by somebody else every 20 years and where
language facility was a survival factor. Her first language in the
home was Scots Gaelic, and English was a second language.
As foreign language supervisor in our school district, she would
interview prospective teachers in the language they were expected to
teach, which really threw some of them for a loop! And at a
conference where presenters wanted to demonstrate a new teaching
technique they had to come up with a language that none of the
foreign language teachers already knew. (They settled on Swahili!!)
Then there was my second viola teacher at Indiana, after Mr. Primrose
left. He was Swiss, I think, and like most educated Europeans was
fluent in several languages (including Hungarian) and functional in
several more. My lessons were in English, since his English was
better than my French, but not much! One of his other students
finally got across that while the upper arm was the upper arm, the
forearm was not the underarm!!
And during the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute, the Europeans
at mealtimes would collect their trays and switch languages as they
moved from table to table!
Americans! Babies!!!!
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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