Americans are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages.
Dartmouth professor John Rassias – one of the truly gifted language
teachers – explains why in his op/ed piece in the Boston Globe:
This on-again/off-again cycle is rooted in a ”moat mentality." We have
been raised to believe that proficiency in other languages is
unnecessary, that others will speak to us in our language. We live
under the erroneous assumption that English is spoken throughout the
world. It is not.Combine these factors with the ”melting pot" syndrome of assimilation
at all costs still prevalent in some ways which long discouraged pride
in our knowledge of different ethnicities, and it’s not hard to account
for our overall indifference to language acquisition.
English is NOT spoken throughout the world. English ranks a distant second behind Mandarin CHinese in terms of number of speakers.
As a nation, we have paid a steep price for our linguistic ignorance. As Henning Hoff points out in Die Zeit , US foreign policy has been hijacked by ideologues and charlatans
with ZERO knowledge of languages and cultures we seek to engage and
influence. The results have been particularly disasterous with respect
to the Middle East:
Als die entführten Flugzeuge ins World Trade Center und das Pentagon
rasten, hatte der gesamte amerikanische Regierungsapparat ganze drei
Mitarbeiter zur Verfügung, die Puschtu beherrschten, die
Mehrheitssprache in Afghanistan. Nur eine Handvoll von Diplomaten
konnte ausreichend Arabisch, um sich in Interviews mit dem
Nachrichtensender al-Dschasira nicht zu blamieren.
German
language instruction in the US has been in a state of decline for
decades. In the 1960s nearly every respectable American high school
had a German language program. These programs have long since vanished.
