J'espère que je ne vous ennuie pas, parce que je vais parler encore au sujet des langues. (Oui, ça me prend trop de temps tous les jours pour y penser.)
Je me demande parfois si je regretterai de ne pas suivre des cours de français en université. J'ai déjà pris sept ans pour apprendre le français au collège et en lycée, mais cette année scolaire j'ai décidé d'apprendre le japonais au lieu de français.
Pourquoi? C'est vrai que je voulais apprendre le japonais depuis longtemps. Et je me dit qu'à l'avenir, la possibilité que je doive savoir parler français pour mon métier est très petite. Mais après tout c'est la même avec le japonais, et la langue de ma famille, le chinois.
Donc tout d'un coup je me suis rendue compte que c'est la même avec toutes les langues.
Quoiqu'on dise, en réalité on ne doit savoir parler aucune langue pour survivre ou pour travailler, surtout aux États-Unis. J'ai entendu dire qu'en Europe on doit savoir parler quelques langues si on espère avoir un bon métier, mais aux États-Unis (j'en parle parce que c'est le pays où j'habite), ce n'est pas nécessaire du tout. De plus, il est très, très facile d'oublier une langue après qu'on l'a appris, si on n'est pas obligé de la parler tous le temps. Donc c'est bon d'apprendre une langue étrangère, bien sûr, mais malgré tout, nos efforts pourrait devenir inutiles.
Si on doit déménager à un pays où les gens parlent une langue étrangère, on apprendrait cette langue par nécessité. Pourtant, il ne suffit pas d'apprendre une langue parce qu'on pense qu'on le doit. Par exemple, les enfants des immigrés chinois ne savent pas parler chinois, bien que leur parents les forcent à aller à l'école chinois, parce qu'ils ne s'interessent pas à apprendre le chinois. Le chinois est une langue vraiment difficile à apprendre, et l'anglais, pour eux, est suffisant.
Alors, est-ce que je dis que c'est inutile d'apprendre des langues étrangères? Non, pas du tout. Toutefois je crois que c'est la motivation avant tout--si on n'a pas de motivation ou d'intérêt, on ne peut pas apprendre une langue, parce que c'est très dûr et si on n'habite pas dans une environnement où on peut entendre la langue qu'on voudrait apprendre, on doit créer une telle environnement. Cela n'est pas possible sauf avec une vrai désire d'apprendre cette langue.
Moi, j'ai trouvé quelque chose d'intéressant avec moi-même: une fois avant arrêté de suivre un cours de français, je me trouve plus motivée de pratiquer mon français en l'écrivant et en l'écountant pour ne pas oublier la langue...
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Yup, here I am, talking about languages again. This was triggered by a conversation I had with one of my dormmates.
Sometimes I wonder if I will live to regret not taking advanced French classes in college. After all, I've already spent seven years learning French (starting when we had to chose either French or Spanish in middle school), but instead I decided to switch from French to Japanese. I've wanted to learn Japanese for a while, of course, even though it's not a so-called "useful" language to learn and unless I deliberately go to Japan to get a job, the chances of me having to use Japanese in the future are rather slim.
But the same could be said of French. And, in all honesty, the same could be said of learning any language.
Many people say that you should learn Spanish/Chinese/whatever to broaden your job prospects. I won't dispute that for business knowing multiple languages could be essential, but outside of that, translation, and interpretation (and getting a PhD in humanities, which I've heard often requires literacy in one or more foreign languages), you don't really need to know any languages to survive or get a good job. (I'm talking mostly about the US, because that's where I live, though I've heard that in Europe the case is somewhat different.) Obviously, if you have to move to another country and stay there for a long time, you'll pick up the language out of necessity (if you're motivated, that is), but otherwise learning any language is quite probably "useless." I say this because it's actually too easy to forget a language you've learned if you're not required to use it everyday, and so efforts to learn a language in a non-immersion environment could end up amounting to nothing.
It's not enough, either, to think that you "have" to learn a language. Let's take the example of children of Chinese immigrants who grow up in an English-speaking country and therefore learn English as their first language (assuming their parents have a good command of English as required by their social and professional activities, and are not living in Chinese-speaking community). Such children are often pressured to learn Chinese because they "should," because it's their heritage, because it's "weird" for a Chinese person not to know Chinese. Heck, I should know, because I'm one of them, and this issue can cause a lot of inner debates and uncertainties. But those issues usually come later in life; as young children, they will probably be forced to go to Chinese school by their parents. So what happens there? I can tell you that most of them, unless they were nearly fluent in the first place, won't learn much at all. Chinese is a hard language, and why learn it if you can get by with English? I'm not saying all students consciously think this, although a good portion do, but many just don't retain the language skills in the same way a student of French would probably forget a lot after a three-year hiatus in studying.
(Digression time: Bilingualism is more complicated than some people might think. It's not that you're either bilingual or you're not; there are many shades of gray, such as people who are partially bilingual, can understand and produce the sounds fine, but have a very deficient vocabulary and a not so thorough command of idiomatic expressions. They're stuck in the middle when it comes to language learning in a non-immersion environment. And it's not easy to become a bilingual child, either. There's a whole article
www.zompist.com/whylang.html here that explains it, among other things, if you're curious.)
So am I trying to say that, no matter what, learning another language is "useless"? No, not at all. My point is that no amount of time spent l is going to help you learn a language if you aren't truly interested and motivated on your own to do so. Taking a language class for seven years won't do anything if you have no interest in continuing. Thinking you should learn your heritage language is useless if, in your heart of hearts, you have zero incentive to actually use it. Because if you're not going to go to that country, you have to create an immersion environment for yourself while learning that language; you have to carve out some time in your busy daily schedule that you will devote to learning that language (as I said, learning languages is
hard for the most part), and none of this would be possible without dedication and devotion to achieving your goal of fluency.
Yes, I dropped French. But the strange thing is, now that I've done so, I have more interest in reading, writing, and listening to French (conversation opportunities are rather limited). The thing about language learning is that you have to do it for the language's own sake and not for anything else.
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Yikes, the English part was a good deal longer than I intended. O_o (If you're reading this, I hope you're not bored out of your mind by now?) I guess I got carried away by my own arguments; you can probably tell I've been personally invested in this issue ever since I was old enough to be sent to Chinese school. Yep, everything I said there came right out of my own experience.
I wanted to close with a quote from a wise person I know, but I don't think I remember it well enough to do it justice.
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