Why Americans Don't Speak Foreign Languages

It seems to me that Americans have a bigger struggle with foreign languages than people from most other countries, even if we have studied a foreign language in school. I can't count the number of times I have heard people say something like, "I took three years of French in college, but I don't remember a word," or "I studied German for a few years, but I could never really *speak* it enough to carry on a real conversation." And usually, these people got good grades and even enjoyed their professors and their courses, so it wasn't a question of them not doing the work.

Why is this? 

I suspect there are several factors at work. (Also take a look at this article from 2010 which covers some of the same territory, but which I read after I wrote my own thoughts about the subject). 

First of all, with languages, as with many areas of study, if you do not use it, you will lose it. In the US, you don't really have many opportunities to converse in a foreign language unless you are studying it in a classroom setting. So even if you do acquire a decent level of conversation skills, you will lose them over time unless you go out of your way to maintain them.  

Reading in the language will help you to keep your skills, but it's not the same thing as hearing and speaking the language. Foreigners learning English have more opportunities to be exposed to the spoken language, because of the widespread popularity of music, TV shows, and films from the US and other English-speaking countries. 

Second, foreign language instruction in other countries usually begins at a much earlier age than here in the US. From what I understand, it often begins in elementary school, while in the US, courses are not generally offered until middle school. While there has been a move toward making some study in a foreign language a requirement for graduation from high school, this isn't yet a national standard.

Third, time constraints require teachers and professors to focus more on reading and writing than on speaking and listening. When I studied languages at school, the first year was spent on learning (not necessarily mastering) the pronunciation, acquiring a basic vocabulary, and then an incredible amount of time on grammar. 

Don't get me wrong, I like grammar as much as the next person, in fact probably more. I am as much as visual learner as an auditory one, so I need to *see* the structure of the language by looking at things like verb conjugations, or in the case of Russian and other inflected languages, noun and adjective declensions. This sort of thing also appeals to my highly structured (some might say rigid) mind frame.

The second and third years of language study usually consisted of even more grammar, along with a major emphasis on the literature of the language we were studying. They would start us out with special anthologies geared specifically toward native speakers of English, with handy glossaries and if we were lucky, side-by-side translations or word lists keyed directly to the page we were reading. These books also usually contained long lists of questions about the text to check our comprehension, and we'd be required to write complete sentence answers to them.  That part wasn't as much fun. Sometimes, we'd discuss the literary selection in class, but that is not the sort of spoken language practice that prepares you to order lunch in a restaurant or ask where the nearest ATM is. It also does not prepare you to be able to quickly understand what a native speaker is saying.

Finally, we would be set loose on the genuine article: books or stories written in the language and published in the mother country, without any teaching notes or other aids as we plowed our way through, with only a dictionary at our sides. We would be expected to write long essays about what we had read, in the form of literary interpretations modeled on what you would do in an English or American literature course. We might be asked to write about how the author's life experiences were reflected in his or her writing, or to compare two different works by the same author, or to compare two works by two different authors, and so on. Again, there's nothing wrong with any of this, but in my case, I ended up being able to write a fairly long paper in a foreign language about the intricacies of a particular work of literature, yet unable to carry on much more than a basic conversation. Your passive vocabulary (words that you've looked up in a dictionary when writing an essay) may be pretty good, but your active vocabulary probably leveled out some time during the first or second year of instruction. 

One underlying question with all of this is why does foreign language instruction seem to be such a low priority in the United States? The obvious answer is that Americans do not learn a foreign language because we do not *have* to learn one. It's possible to travel all over the world with no knowledge of another language except English, armed at most with a phrasebook. 

Finally, there is this question: Is this necessarily even a problem? I believe that it is, because in an increasingly competitive global economy, American students are going to be at a disadvantage. Perhaps even more important, we tend to have a better understanding of a country, its people and its culture, if we have had some exposure to their language.  

But don't just take my word for it. This recent article from Forbes states that "in a shrinking world this (language deficit) reality constitutes a threat to our national security," and goes on to say that only "18% of Americans report speaking a language other than English, while 53% of Europeans (and increasing numbers in other parts of the world) can converse in a second language."

Assuming that the 18% figure includes people from bilingual homes, the number of Americans who have learned a foreign language in school would be even lower.  

As long as I'm standing on the "Learn a Foreign Language Now!" soapbox, here's another link to an article whose title is "Why Your Next CEO Shouldn't Be American." Hint: it has to do with our language deficit, and includes this interesting note: "research shows that we behave more rationally when we think in another language." Why? "The researchers think that the foreign language creates greater cognitive and emotional distance from our hard-wired biases."

Now I can point to research to prove that I'm more rational than my monolingual friends and family members. I'm sure they'll be very impressed.