Spring 2002
It isn't just language class that the students will be losing
What the heck was a definite article? OK, I got that--it's "the." But why, exactly, was it der Hund (dog with a masculine definite article) instead of die Hund (feminine definite article) or das Hund (neuter definite article)? My 14-year-old mind guessed wildly, wrestling with the concept of gender. Because I am female, was it die Hund or was I supposed to know if the dog in question were female or male?
Hunched in a cubicle in the Albert Lea High School (ALHS) language lab back in 1964, I was in despair. I had enrolled in German, my first foreign language, and I had never met anything like this. A noun was easy, a pronoun, yeah sure, but tenses were kind of slippery and so were those cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. What in the world was a case?
Somewhere between hours of the language lab tapes--"Guten Tag. Hören Sie zu." (Good day. Listen.) and "Wiederholen Sie, bitte" (repeat, please)--I got it. The little convoluted dendrites in my brain literally shifted, like a muscle contracting for the first time, like the moment you catch the right balance on a bicycle and your training wheels lift up. I grasped another language, which made me understand my own language a thousand times more clearly.
I liked the sensation--learning is sensual, I found--so much that soon I enrolled in French as well. And beyond the lab, I began to make connections: mom's roast beef tongue with raisin sauce. Tongue, a relative of Zunge in German and lingua in Latin, the root of language itself; beef from the French boeuf like bovine. Our petite dachshund was a "badger dog," an animal of noble hunting lineage. Her name explained why she bit baby sitters and charged mail carriers. Words began to seem like rich bits of archaeology; I could glimpse the pictures and poetry in them, where they had traveled, and how they had altered over time.
Language classes gave me a lasting appetite for words and diverse languages, for travel, for conversations about other places, people and times. Had I never traveled, language would have been every bit as useful because it taught me empathy. Hearing the news about Germany or France, Thailand or Israel, or wherever I knew how to say "good morning" and "how are you" and "thank you" made me picture it on the globe, remember it on my palate, made me care.
Lately America came up against a shortage of translators--raise your hand if you speak Farsi or Pashtun. And long before that we had become the laughingstock of the First World. What is a person who speaks three languages called? Trilingual. What's the term for somebody who speaks two languages? Bilingual. And what do you call someone who speaks one language? American.
Printed by permission of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Excerpted from a Feb. 17, 2002 opinion piece about the deep cuts in the school budget in Winegar's hometown and the elimination of French from the curriculum (leaving Spanish as the only foriegn language).