Not Meant to Be Bilingual

I'd love to be bilingual, but I just don't think it's in the cards for me at this point, unless I end up moving to a foreign country in the future. A few years ago I would have said, "unless I end up marrying someone who is from a different country or speaks a different language", but as it turns out my wife is just as blandly White American as I am, possibly even more so.

This is sad and ironic for someone like me who has essentially made their life's work studying and working with language. Although I deal more specifically with langauge handicap rather than individual languages, but even so.

My parents both spoke nothing but English. My paternal grandmother knew Finnish and Swedish as a child but didn't really use them much past the age of 18. She made a few half-hearted attempts to teach me a few Swedish words, counting to ten, that sort of thing, and she did the same with Finnish.

Swedish is a Germanic language and somewhat related to English, so a lot of basic words are easy to remember--katt, bok, hatt, kaffe, that sort of thing. This is not the case with Finnish however, where statments like "how are you?" translate into something along the lines of "Koskimaavariuu pu vaaritanianienen koski alla komovallahalla kokamensauri o?" Finnish is also a highly inflected language, which means that a word is spelled and pronounced differently depending on what part of speech it's being used as. Latin is similar, but as far as I know Latin has something like six or seven basic declensions: object, direct object, possessive, agent of an action, etc. Finnish, I'm not kidding, literally has something like 23 basic declensions. So the word for 'cat', depending on how it's used could be something like 'kissa', 'kisso', kissom', 'kissavo', 'kissari', etc. My grandmother always stressed how important it was to get the declension right, otherwise people will think you're an idiot and not be able to understand you correctly.

Even more frustrating about Finnish is that there are many, many different dialects of the language, depending on which part of the country, or even what town you're in. There is a standard dialect but--get this, no one actually speaks it at home, it's only used for official governmental purposes. Also, the population of Finland is about 5 million and save for a few small communities in the Midwest that I'm not likely to ever go to, no one else in the world speaks Finnish. "Yksi, kaksi, kolme"... "One, two, three"-- is more than half of the Finnish I still know.

When I took German in school, my familiarity with Swedish helped, but I had a bad tendency in class to start saying something in German and then unintentionally throw in a Swedish or Swedish-sounding word, thus confusing everyone, including my teacher. "Ich heiBe John, und mein storsyster heter.. I mean, meine alter Schwester heist..." and so on.

I took Spanish in school but that was a joke. I think I (not so) secretly resented having to take Spanish because bascially every kid I went to school with spoke Spanish at home except me, and I felt I had an unfair disadvantage as a result. I was also burdened with (and I don't think I'm being unfair here) two horrible Spanish teachers in junior high and high school. Just through exposure and hanging out at friends' houses I know a lot of words and basic phrases, but I can't put together a real sentence in Spanish to save my life.

My stepfather's mother knew some Gaelic because her father spoke it, but to me it was always more of an academic curiousity than something worth learning for any practical reasons. I still know a few words and phrases that she taught me, but I've never encountered anyone else in my entire life who knows how to say anything in Gaelic, including people I met when I was in Ireland.

I also took a semester of Japanese when I was in college. What a nightmare that was. I remember how to say "How are you, my name is John, pleased to meet you"--"Hajimemashite, wastashiwa John desu, dozo yoroshiku" and that's it. I remember we spent almost the entire semester learning how to write in katakana and hiragana, which are two of their writing systems. I imagine some of it might come back to me if I picked it up again, but off the top of my head I remember just about none of it.

So my best bet at this point would probably be to learn Spanish, but unfortunately the interest just isn't there. After that would be Swedish and German, and most likely German would be the sensible choice between those two. So maybe I'll work on being more proficient in German, but to what end? What's my goal? When I went to Germany I tried to practice my German but everyone's English there was better than my German so every conversation ended up being carrying out in English. Do I really care about being able to read Hesse in the original, or listen to Mozart's operas without having to read a translated libretto? Maybe I do care a little bit, but maybe I don't really care that much.