Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One: Online Version
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CHAPTER 11
THE FIRST STEPS IN LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Stranger in a Strange Land: Learning to Eat with Chopsticks
Despite all my years as a student of the languages and cultures of East Asia, I have never really mastered the art of eating with chopsticks. Although I have some degree of functionality with these implements, I usually throw in the towel and ask if a knife and fork are available. When I visit a traditional Asian restaurant at home or abroad, I cannot avoid the involuntary Euro-centric notion that Western eating utensils are more efficient than chopsticks. How can anyone eat with slivers of balsa wood?
Delving into a foreign language is kind of like being forced to eat with new utensils. You will observe that your new language accomplishes everything that English does, but it often employs different means---just as people in most Asian countries eat with chopsticks rather than knives and forks.
In Russian, if you are going to say, “I am an American,” you would say, “Ya Amerikanyitz.” Ya means “I” and “Amerikanyitz” means “American.” The verb “to be” is assumed, even though it is not specifically indicated by the speaker. In addition, you would only say Amerikanyitz if you are a man. A woman would use the feminine form, Amerikanka, to identify herself as an American.
How can Russians make sense of sentences that are missing verbs? Why do they need a masculine form and a feminine form of the word “American?” Can’t they just use a single word, like we do?
This is a reaction that you will have any number of times as you dive into foreign languages. Western European languages have more in common with English than Asian, Middle Eastern, or Slavic languages; but every foreign language uses at least some unfamiliar means to accomplish familiar ends. Your target language will seem to be full of unpardonable omissions on one hand, and mountains of useless baggage on the other.
These preferences are merely the result of our lifelong familiarity with English. English, too, has a number of attributes which bedevil foreign students. Consider irregular spellings, such as through, weigh, and vogue---just to name a few.
I don’t know what language you will be studying, but the following grammatical elements commonly vary across languages. As soon as you dive in, begin sorting out where your target language (the language that you want to learn) stands on these items:
Gender
The concept of a “masculine noun” and a “feminine noun” is limited in English. Expressions of a noun’s gender are primarily confined to words such as “actor” (masculine) or “actress” (feminine). Moreover, gender-specific nouns are an endangered species in English---especially American English. The trend over recent years has been to replace gender-specific words with a neutral equivalent. Rather than saying “salesman” or “saleswoman”, the all-inclusive “salesperson” is now preferred. Instead of saying “policeman” or “policewoman”, it is recent custom to refer to both as simply “the police.” (In fact, I have even heard that the word “actress” has fallen out of favor. Both men and women in the acting profession are now described as “actors.”)
The concept of “feminine” and “masculine” words is pervasive throughout many languages, including French, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Italian. In the countries where these languages are spoken, this linguistic gender distinction is not a source of controversy, perhaps because the reference to “gender” does not have an automatic social implication.
For example, the Spanish word máquina (“machine”) is feminine. The fact that máquina is grammatically feminine does not imply any associations between machines and women. Similarly, the fact that the Spanish word horno (“oven”) is masculine does not suggest that men should stay home and bake bread while the womenfolk go to work as machinists. This distinction simply governs the way in which horno and máquina affect other parts of speech.
“Red machine” is máquina roja. However, “red oven” is horno rojo. Because máquina is feminine, the word for “red” becomes roja, the feminine version of the adjective. Horno, however, is masculine, so it takes the masculine rojo.
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
