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Why
should YOU take a Modern Language Class?
By Naomi Pearson
“But I’m not majoring in Spanish/French/German (or other
modern language), so why do I even have to take two years of it anyway?”
you say. “I’ll NEVER use it!”
But how do you know?
One day you might have to scream, “ !Te paras!” to a
three-year-old Ecuadorian child running into the street after a ball.
It happened to me.
Or you might help a Haitian woman you overhear futilely
trying to ask anyone nearby where the emergency room entrance is, too
exhausted and worried about her brother to carefully choose her words in
English and therefore roundly ignored.
Something like that happened to my mother—and she’d only
had high school French.
Or you might run into tourists from Germany who decide that
you are the person to ask about the location of the restrooms.
Ok, maybe nothing that extreme would ever happen to you.
But you’d be surprised at all the ways you could find yourself calling upon
your training in a foreign language. Even though as soon as your language
requirement is fulfilled, you probably will try your best to forget the two
years you spent learning another language, many of the things you pick up
will always be a part of you and will be useful to you.
For years afterward, you will find that people who speak
heavily accented English aren’t as hard to understand as they used to be.
You may be more patient with your students, coworkers or neighbors who are
still learning English, because consciously or subconsciously, you remember
how hard it was for you to learn another language. You might even find
yourself picking up other languages more easily. You will be more confident
about venturing out of the tourist areas on your honeymoon in Paris, San
José, or Vienna.
In a more immediate timeframe, you might, perhaps during
your second year of language studies, actually fall in love with the
language and decide to take more classes just because you like it.
When I started college, I had no intention of pursuing
study in a foreign language; I was a physics major and I just wanted to do
my requirement and be done, even though I actually liked the language.
Somehow, during my second semester of second-year Spanish, I fell truly,
madly and deeply in love with it, and it whetted my interest in other languages,
including English, to a sharp edge. So when I transferred to Longwood for
my sophomore year and changed my major to English, even though I had
completed my foreign language requirement, I decided to minor in Spanish. I
finished my minor in two years, but that wasn’t enough, so this semester
I’m taking FREN 105: Intensive French, which covers one year of French in
one semester. I might take FREN 205 next semester, if there is such a
thing.
Maybe I‘m just a glutton for punishment.
I have found, however, that having access to words and
phrases in other languages has made me a better and more creative writer in
English. I am now aware of more poetic and powerful sentence structures
that are inherent in other languages than English. Because many of the
words that English has borrowed from French and Spanish have broader or,
sometimes, more precise meanings in their original language, I find it
easier to select just the right word to express my thoughts. And that’s
just how studying other languages has affected me academically.
As a Writing Center coach here at Longwood, I use some of
the most basic principles of my first two years of language study every
week, especially when coaching students whose first language is not English
and even those who grew up using non-standard English. As I look over their
writing assignments, I can recognize their use of sentence structures that,
while perfect in, perhaps, Spanish or French, would be considered incorrect
or at least unusual in English. I can see where they have been tricked by
false cognates, just as I had in my first year of college-level Spanish.
So you see, aside from the national call for
foreign-language teachers, the government’s recruitment of bilingual
applicants and academia’s effort to produce more globally minded graduates,
studying a language other than English can simply bring you personal
enrichment in other ways that you may never have considered.
Especially when you want to impress your significant other
or initiate a conversation with that international hottie.
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