I recently offered some reflections on what might constitute convincing arguments for foreign-language instruction in universities. Keep in mind that I am supposed to be restricted to about 500 words per post. I overrun shamelessly, but not unboundedly. So I can’t address all aspects of a topic.
My critics are under no such restraints: One commenter alone wrote over 2,000 words of angry polemic. And most seemed not to recall that I am a proponent of foreign-language instruction: a humanities academic whose primary interest is in language, sharing the liberal-internationalist-humanist sympathies of many Chronicle readers. Allegations that I defend anti-intellectual American monolingualism and global rapacity (one comment accused me of “privileged ignornace” and “monoligual brute force”) look a bit silly to those readers who actually read what I wrote.
Some cannot forgive my dismissal of vapid metaphysical Whorfian relativism. The words-are-a-window-into-other-cultures stuff has enormous public appeal, but it doesn’t seem intellectually serious to me. Incidentally, I never said that I “gained no insights into French or European culture, no new ideas, by studying French” (the paraphrase by one careless reader); I said that mere learning of French words, tout court, brought no such insights. Reading Balzac or Camus is a different matter. But that’s an argument for studying literature, not specifically for taking language classes.
My point was that those seeking to defend language instruction in times of financial stringency (when small-enrollment classes are so vulnerable, and untenured language lecturers so easy to terminate) should ditch the wonder-of-words drivel and think of some arguments that make sense.
I can’t answer all the crude insults and clueless denialism here. But let me return to one factual topic on which I will not be backing down. I mentioned writing systems, and to the fury of some, queried the value of widespread instruction in written Chinese. Well, I’m not presenting some wacky personal opinion here: I’m listening to experts.
Victor Mair, at Penn, remarks (in an e-mail I quote with permission): “It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25.” Mair thinks that “if the Chinese would wake up and permit pinyin to function as part of a genuine digraphia, then I would say it might make sense for maybe 2 percent of the population to learn up to third-year level of Mandarin—strictly romanized, mind you. But there are exceedingly few teachers who are enlightened enough to teach it that way.”
And if you won’t listen to a first-rank American sinologist, then read Lu Xun. (In translation, of course.)
One denialist commenter would not even grant the simplicity of Finnish orthography: “If you can master all the diacritical marks of Finnish in one day, you’re ready for a reality show!” Please. Finnish has two letters formed with the diaeresis mark, ä and ö. They represent the vowel sounds [æ] and [ø]. End of diacritics lesson.
Suppose you just want a modest text-to-speech capability in Finnish: the ability to read aloud any sign you see in Finnish so that a blind Finn could tell you the meaning. I can teach you myself. I will need about an hour.
The wonderful Korean hangul is actually not too different: set aside a day, and you can learn to read Korean aloud, well enough to be intelligible. (Read the chapter on this elegant and easy-to-learn alphabet in Geoffrey Sampson’s book Writing Systems.)
But if you want the same capability in Chinese? Set aside five or six years for hours of mind-numbing daily memorization and writing practice. I am not exaggerating. You need to command thousands and thousands of visually organized word-level symbols. (If you stop at one thousand you will be totally stymied by about one word in 10.) The extraordinary complexity of the character system is a huge drag on literacy, education, and the economy in China.
It is wonderful that America has expert academic sinologists who have put in the necessary years to become fluent and erudite in the subtleties of this awful system, regardless of the huge cost. I salute them. Just don’t tell me it is smart and cost-effective to include written Chinese as a typical undergraduate subject so we can trade with China. The huge and growing importance of China in the world is not an argument for widespread inclusion of written Chinese (as opposed to basic spoken Mandarin) in college curricula.
What I said last week was that if we want arguments in defense of foreign-language classes in colleges and universities, we are going to have to turn away from wonder-of-words sentimentality, and recognize some hard truths on topics like whether learning to read Chinese is a sensible and practical goal. I will return to this topic with some more positive suggestions for good arguments. If you’ll all just stop shouting at me.