I’ve anticipated having to answer three compelling
questions, so here are my answers:
1. Yes, it is Friday and my column is running.
2. No, you did not oversleep.
3. No, it’s not a good idea to read this while walking. I
tried this yesterday and accidentally wound up in a strange room
where people took my BruinCard and gave me a different card
instead, one apparently from an entirely different school.
Today we’ll be talking about foreign languages
(translation: not English) as well as taking an objective, balanced
view of UCLA’s own language programs.
There was a fascinating news story on how CIA Director Porter
Goss has declared America’s aversion to other cultures has
spilled over into a complete apathy for learning other
languages.
This has created a problem in the U.S. led war on terror ““
in the sense that American intelligence operatives are having a
tough time decoding secret messages intercepted from USAC.
No, I mean, the messages are from enemy terrorist bombers, who
defiantly refuse to “fight fair” by writing in
non-English languages, such as Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu and
Chinese.
The article also states that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., is
convinced that only 9 percent of U.S. citizens speak more than one
language.
This I find incredibly hard to believe. For example, I just
received a telephone bill from my old phone company, and they claim
I owe them $3.63 for a “Federal Communications Security
Fee” and a “State Fraud Overcharge.” The rest of
the bill is completely unintelligible and obviously in a language
other than English. In fact, the message may not be of human
origin.
In addition, I attend UCLA in my free time, so I often hear
people conversing in all sorts of languages.
Just yesterday, I heard a group of young men speaking in what
was obviously a foreign tongue, in which they repeated the word
“Counter-Strike” often. There weren’t any girls
with them.
So we can see foreign languages are indeed all around us and an
integral part of our lives.
In response to this growing trend, UCLA has developed a system
where in order to graduate, you have to take a few quarters of a
non-English language.
I think this is a fine idea, and have long been a supporter of
Bruins learning other languages. Some of my loyal readers may
remember that in one of my recent columns, I recommended that
everyone take the “Elementary Azeri” class on the
grounds that the professor sent me an e-mail reminding me that it
was available for enrollment. (As it turns out, he sent me another
e-mail, but it was identical to the first, so it’s obvious
he’s not reading my column.)
I didn’t get a chance to take Azeri though. I started with
Spanish because I thought I remembered a lot of Spanish from high
school.
As it turns out, I really only remembered the words to the song,
“Oye Como Va,” which as it turns out means
“Listen How It Goes,” which doesn’t really make a
ton of sense once you think about it.
So I bailed out of Spanish and landed in the exciting, romantic
and snooty world of French.
I thought speaking French might add a special, mysterious vibe
to my already interesting personality, and I had visions of meeting
an exotic French woman at parties, making an unexpected connection,
and sealing the deal by fluently expressing my thoughts and
emotions in French while she threw up on my shoes.
Fortunately that didn’t happen, and I think it’s
because my French book was absolutely obsessed with a character
named Zinedine Zidane.
Every sentence was either hailing his exploits (Il est bon) or
describing him (Il est grand) or using him to tell time (Il est
trois heures). So my romantic escapades were pretty much reduced to
“Connaissez-vous Zinedine Zidane? Il est grand.” At
which point she usually said, “Au-revoir” and I said,
“Zut!”
All that aside, I feel both the Spanish and the French
departments suffer from an outdated approach to teaching language.
(Every TA I ever had, in case any of them read the Daily Bruin, was
fantastic.)
Often we spent much time learning either common phrases or just
memorizing how to convey certain ideas without learning the
patterns or actual rules behind them.
I often noticed the curricula (that’s Latin) would be much
more effective if we were able to study the proper reasons behind
forming sentences using the various parts of grammar instead of
just parroting random sentences.
I also think it’s a great idea to have as much class
content as possible be exclusively in the language studied, but the
French and Spanish classes went a little overboard in insisting no
English be spoken. The busywork was also a tad overdone.
Most of this is department policy, and I think it wouldn’t
hurt them to re-evaluate the effectiveness of these policies.
Granted, I no longer take foreign language classes (unless you
count calculus), so any changes wouldn’t affect me anymore
…
But that didn’t stop me from getting the SAT format
changed, now did it?
Gracias para leer, et ayez un grand week-end.
If you speak more than one language, or just use
freetranslation.com, write to Kaney at akaney@media.ucla.edu. Send
general comments to viewpont@media.ucla.edu.