Submitted by: Robert S. Kirsner
In the Daily Bruin on May 12, Spencer Dunn asserted that taking foreign languages in college is a waste of time and stated that he might use a computer program like Rosetta Stone to learn one, should he ever want to.
One can, of course, argue against Dunn’s position. The longer you wait to learn a foreign language, the harder it gets ““ and for good neurological reasons.
Second, even if you can learn a foreign language with a computer program, you miss the interaction with real human beings in the classroom.
But none of this would cut ice with Dunn at this stage. The only way to convince him would be to make him take Spanish and ship him to Argentina or Spain for five years without contact with any Americans or anything in English. Only then might he realize what he missed out on by not really learning Spanish.
And then there is the matter of understanding other cultures. I can argue from my own experience that you can’t really understand even a tourist-friendly country like the Netherlands (which superficially resembles the U.S. and where many people speak English) unless you are fairly fluent in Dutch. Otherwise, you are forever entombed in a kind of touristic Disneyland, cut off from all the newspapers, talk shows, literature, film, politics and comedians.
But in complaining about the language requirement, Dunn is simply being American. On American TV news shows, you never hear Vladimir Putin speak Russian or Chancellor Angela Merkel speak German.
Instantly, they are drowned out by the voice of the interpreter, lest Americans be contaminated by foreign sounds. (On Dutch TV, foreign speakers are subtitled in Dutch and you get to hear them speaking in their own language.)
Perhaps the most telling, recent demonstration of Americans’ fear of foreign tongues is the 2008 “reimagining” of the classic 1951 science fiction film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
In the original, after a UFO has been detected on U.S. and British radar, you hear alarmed news broadcasts from around the world in Hindi, French and, only finally, in British and then American English.
The alien Klaatu has his own language, which he uses to communicate with his robot guardian, Gort, and later with his home planet.
And crucially, as exquisitely discussed in Vivian Sobchack’s book “Screening Space”, it is a human woman, Helen Benson, who saves the Earth by learning a sentence from Klaatu in Klaatu’s own language and speaking it to Gort after Klaatu has been killed by the U.S. Army.
None of these aspects of language remain in the 2008 version. All the alarmed news broadcasts are now in English. Benson (now recast as an exobiologist) speaks only English. Today’s audience does not get a chance to hear useful phrases such as “Gort, berenga!”
In fact, the only foreign language in the entire movie is Mandarin, spoken by the new 2008 Klaatu to Mr. Wu, the other extraterrestrial sent to Earth 70 years earlier to observe how badly humans treat each other and the planet.
The cultural subtext for American viewers will now be obvious. Foreign languages are only for aliens, not Americans, and if you are not an alien you really don’t need to learn one. Indeed, it might even be un-American to do so.
Kirsner is a professor of Dutch and Afrikaans in UCLA’s department of Germanic languages.