Obama’s Language Mandate: Why It Feels Like Hungarian to Me
Some further comments on “learning” a foreign language:
If you “start learning” another language at the college level, forget it. It’ll always be a struggle for you. Exceedingly few will ever reach a reasonable level of SPOKEN fluency.
The time to really learn a language in a permanent way is as early as possible and certainly before the age of 13. After that age, I don’t know, something happens to the human brain that mitigates against eventual fluency.
(It is quite common for CHILDREN in Africa, for example, to be fluent in several languages before they’re 10 thanks to their environment.
And have you ever heard “President Mugabe of Rhodesia….I mean Zimbabwe… speak English? Flawless…but that’s because he was educated in a Jesuit school).
The Japanese are notorious for their seeming inability to pick up even simple phrases in another language especially with a passable accent. The Chinese, on the other hand, believe in their heart of hearts, that no
language exists OTHER THAN Chinese.
If one of the reasons for learning Latin is to “train” the mind, then English speaking students should really study Hungarian, which, as I’m sure Ms.Grabar knows, is exceedingly difficult for English speakers to acquire. It would “train” the mind far better than Latin.
Of course, if you really are adventurous, you should study one of the Native American languages such as Ojibwa or Sioux.
As a group, they are unimaginably difficult for ANYONE to acquire even minimally. Try Navajo grammar, for example. It is at least 1000 times more involved and more nuanced than anything found in the European continent – or even the Asian continent.
