Friday, October 21, 2011

Tongue In Cheek

              Even though I know it's possible and even easy for some, learning a foreign language - at its core - is such a fundamentally insane concept. English speakers are at a huge disadvantage with our mutt palate and our constant additions to rule exception lists. I'm not going to say we shouldn't try to learn any new language. Hell, if I were raising a kid right now they would only be allowed to watch Dora, Diego, and any other kid with a talking backpack out there who's parents are either earning their citizenship here or owning the ground we walk on from across the ocean. It's a survival game now. Tim James be damned, I don't want to live in a world where we all communicate by pointing at menus. We were given opposable thumbs and a beautifully complicated vocal spectrum for a reason. To rise above the other animals, and tell nature to suck it. 
             This is why I'm frustrated. I think we are obligated to our fellow man(men? humans? SEE! We can't even agree on the right forms of English anymore) to meet them in the middle and vice versa. But all of our lofty thoughts of everlasting peace between nations crumble when we open up a textbook, or see any foreign character (letters, not Apu) surrounded by it's own kind.Yes hombre, our curiosity of new worlds and visions of exotic swimsuit models who nearly faint at the provocative, yet silky, pronunciations we slide off our well traveled tongues fade fast when it dawns on us that we don't have the first clue of what's going on.
            But Humans, still animals, can get hostile when confronted with utter confusion and a sense of displacement from our natural habitat. Spanish classrooms can subjectively be worlds away from our comfort zones if we are held under scrutiny by a speaker with authority over us and a bilingual upper hand. You might revert to being the obvious pathetic, insisting you don't understand at that given time in order to put off the public examination for later or to drop the class completely (Flee). You might have studied the leader's strategy, weak points, and favorite prey so that when singled out you know some counter measures or how to divert their attention (Camouflage). It is sometimes even possible to find yourself comparable to the enemy in that, while out of earshot, either alone in your den or in the common den of your brethren, it was devised that they would hold as little power over you as you would let them, and maybe one day you would even replace your adversary's powerful grip over their hour-long-tri-weekly-reign (Fight). Those latter cases can't help but beat their chest in front of peers and bring into question the Alpha's true knowledge of the subject by loudly correcting mistakes or by enabling self empowerment in the lesser humans in the form of a whispered answer, tutoring in order to raise the survival rate of your own kind and to create more fighters who will do the same, or generating a mutiny mentality that would overwhelm the leader into bending towards the will of the masses if demands were reasonable enough.
The prize of early registration pretty much throws all this out the window  
              This could apply to any subject in any classroom, but I still have to come back to foreign language. There is something there that isn't animalistic at all. If you brought cats from China to America to live with native species there would be no need for a mediator between the two. Cat language is cat language. It's based on stimuli and would be the equivalent to the singular id functions of a human baby, who scientists believe can communicate across the border with each other in a similar way. Human's got the gift, and the sometimes curse, of double articulation. We no longer tonally or physically signaled each other, we got to be oddly and intricately specific about it. This lingual Big Bang scorched our simple throats making us look up from the watering hole and reach for the top shelf. Whole systems of vocabulary, rules, and idioms eventually appeared fueled by the unstoppable force of creativity. Our methods of interaction surpassed it's own utility, became an entity larger than it's creators, and it's this intangible, infinite, and amorphous system that never reboots, but is always updating, we must use as a vessel to transcend the boundaries of our inherent nature. That is, if "we" actually study for this approaching Spanish test instead of writing blogs....   

No comments:

Post a Comment