How many languages do you speak?

[DFW]

61. Ja wiem, ja wiem

But if I have to converse, it's really only the nine I mentioned above. I get a few smiles with my few words of the others, but I can't hold a conversation in any of them. I can even say a word or two in a few others (Kurdish, Hungarian, Arabic), but not even enough to know what is said in return.

Still, even a few words mean that you know about their language and you cared enough to learn a word or two. People rarely expect that in Americans because they rarely GET that kind of respect from Americans.

But I DO have some fun at times. At the hotel I usually stay at in Brussels last week, there was a new employee at the check-out counter. A colleague of hers, who is from Macedonia, and with whom I speak my few phrases of Croatian, was at the counter, too. I asked the new woman where she was from, and she said Sweden. I said, OK, well, then she could speak Swedish to me. Me, being a dumb American, she just laughed and said "yeah, right, I don't think so." Her Macedonian colleague assured her I could indeed speak Swedish. She still didn't believe it. I told her to say something in Swedish. She asked "what?" I said, tell me in Swedish that you don't think I can speak Swedish. She did. I then answered, "Varför tror du att jag inte kan svenska? Jag pratar svenska flyttande!" (Why don't you think I know Swedish? I speak Swedish fluently!) She nearly fell over backwards, and said she had never heard an American speak Swedish fluently and practically without an accent before. I told her, yes, you probably did, but you never realized it was an American because you were so convinced we were incapable of learning your language. THAT gave her food for thought.

We Americans are not more stupid than people from other countries, just mostly too arrogant to think we need to learn other languages. Maybe many of us don't NEED to, but other languages give you a free window into other cultures you never get otherwise, expansion of mental horizons, if you will. For that matter, if I had never learnd German, I would never have met and married the woman of my dreams. That alone was reason enough! We raised our daughters bilingually (I only spoke to them in English, and my wife only spoke to them in German) on purpose so they could automatically be at home in two languages and two cultures, and it was well worth the effort.

Even if you don't NEED to learn another language, everyone SHOULD.