English as a foreign language

One of my passions is language, obviously, but my passion for foreign languages in particular is a little strange.

Strange, because I am passionate, but not particularly adept: I spoke Russian reasonably fluently 30 years ago, but am radically out of practice.  I’ve picked up passable Spanish over the last couple years, but no one would accuse me of fluency.

Still, the passion endures.

The challenge makes me passionate.  The opportunity to talk with people I might otherwise ignore makes me passionate.  And the lessons that can be learned through cultural and linguistic anomalies makes me passionate.

The ESL program at our neighborhood church invites immigrants, mostly, to gather weekly with English-speaking volunteers.  The singular goal is to improve their usually halting acquaintance with English, which they are acquiring as a Second Language (hence the ESL).

In learning English, these brave souls tackle a variety of skills.  Invariably, idiom is the most difficult to master.

“Let’s call it a day,” said the ESL instructor, closing the paper-bound text filled with drawings, pictures and translations.

“What else would you call it?” asked a student from Tibet, clearly puzzled ... sparking a 10-minute discussion of five simple words.

Each immigrant/student present clearly understood each of those five words separate and apart from the phrase; it was the phrase that stopped them in their tracks.  There was no phrasing, in the various cultures represented, equivalent to “Let’s call it a day.”

And yet, each had a ready translation for “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”  In Spanish, for example, it is said that “It is better to have one bird in hand than 100 flying.”

Our new Tibetan friend even realized the similarity to “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.”  Be satisfied with what you have.  Don’t be a dreamer.  Don’t put the cart before the horse.

Writers struggle constantly with the challenge of “being understood.”  To several generations of high school students by now, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury seems to require a translator no less urgently than War and Peace in the original Russian.

Even in English, the writer is faced with selecting some appropriate combination of formal and idiomatic language to best express his creative thought.

The study of foreign languages invites the welcoming inclusion of foreign cultures.  The aspiring writer who openly “grazes” on alien customs and unconventional ideas has found a pasture rich in excellent brain food.

Graze passionately.

Next: More thoughts about English as a second language

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]