Small(er)-Town Language Learners

Recently I have received fascinating e-mails from people who live in rural parts of the United States with much less diversity than, say, New York City, but who are nonetheless highly dedicated language learners with ambitious self-study programs.

New York City: Many Languages Spoken Here

What I found most interesting about their situations is that they persist in spite of the lack of support in their surroundings. I mean, here in New York there are many thousands of people roaming around who speak multiple languages as a matter of course in their daily lives. Even if they don’t speak multiple languages, most people I know wish they could. It is a value held dear by many around me.

So there is reinforcement, both practically and psychologically, for a language-learning undertaking.

For the people who wrote to me recently, that is not the case. They are iconoclasts. People around them don’t understand their drive, but it’s kind of like they can’t help themselves. And they go beyond the more conventional French-Spanish learning efforts, too, to include exotic languages in their personal curricula. I really admire that.

Another U.S. City: Not As Many People, or Languages, Here

The good news for many would-be language learners is, we have an Internet. (To the inventors, thank you.) If you are in a remote or linguaphobic environment, you can still turn on your computer and go to places like ConversationExchange.com or other sites (just search on something like “foreign language conversation exchange”), find a Skype partner overseas, and start speaking, say, Finnish or Xhosa. The web is a fabulous thing.

Living in New York, I can find all kinds of day-to-day reasons to study foreign languages, and if I want to try out my skills, all I have to do is just walk down the street or at worst take a subway somewhere. When people who have zero Urdu speakers around them still want to learn Urdu, I think that’s pretty damned cool.

And I just wanted to say that.