TITLE: Speaking in a Second Language
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 29, 2020  2:26 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
From
<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-business-seminar-zhen-academy/">
   this enlightening article</a>
that was being passed around a while back:

<blockquote><em>
 Talking posed a challenge for me.  While my Mandarin was strong
 for someone who had grown up in the US, I wasn't fluent enough
 to express myself in the way I wanted.  This had some benefits:
 I had to think before I spoke.  I was more measured. I was a
 better listener.  But it was also frustrating, as though I'd
 turned into a person who was meek and slow on the uptake.  It
 made me think twice about the Chinese speakers at work or school
 in the US whom I'd judged as passive or retiring. Perhaps they
 were also funny, assertive, flirtatious, and profane in their
 native tongue, as I am in mine.
</em></blockquote>

 When people in the US talk about the benefits of learning a second
 language, they rarely, if ever, mention the empathy one can develop
 for others who speak and work in in a second language.  Maybe that's
 because so few of us Americans learn a foreign language well enough
 to reach this level of enlightenment.

 I myself learned just enough German in school to marvel at the
 accomplishment of exchange students studying here in their second
 language, knowing that I was nowhere near ready to live and study
 in a German-speaking land.  Marvel, though, is not quite as valuable
 in this context as empathy.
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