You're Taking Russian at Ole Miss? What, Are You Crazy?

Why do some people love studying foreign languages, and others would rather have a root canal or clean the kitchen?  I remember fellow college students who groaned in agony when they were confronted with the dreaded language requirement component of their education.  Whereas, I cheerfully signed up for Russian 101--believe-you-me, not a popular class at the University of Mississippi at the time.  It felt more like a graduate seminar, with around five or six intrepid students sitting around a conference table, all there for various reasons.  I remember it like it was yesterday.  Fun.

Having been brainwashed that college courses needed to be 'relevant,' I tried to convince myself that I'd use my Russian when I became an interpreter at the United Nations offices in New York (or in the event that I should ever marry a Bolshevik).  Well, I did end up living in New York awhile, but I never set foot in the UN.  Such are the dreams of a naive young undergrad.  I also managed to convince myself that such obscure courses as 'Peoples of Africa' and 'Native American Studies' were also somehow 'relevant' to my career plans.  Such an imagination I had back then!  Fun.

Still, I never really lost my enjoyment of learning languages.  There's just something thrilling about using different words to express oneself.  Of being able (at least every now and then) to understand what someone from a far-away culture has to say, and sometimes knowing that they understand what you are saying in their language.  There is something powerful and exhilarating about the ability to carry on a conversation with thousands of people who would have otherwise been unavailable to you.  In a word, I guess it makes me feel smart.  Perhaps computer programmers feel this, in a way, since coding is basically a language. Speaking, listening, reading, and writing in a different language requires you to think in a different way.  That's why languages borrow phrases and concepts from one another.  It's that old  je ne sais quoi.

Speaking in a second or third language requires catching on to entirely different cadences, vocabularies, and sounds.  When I speak in Italian, or French, or Spanish (I've long ago forgotten the piddly Russian I knew) I feel for a moment like an Italian, Frenchman or Spaniard.  It transports me to a different world.

I don't know if I will ever become truly fluent in a foreign language; I'd like to think that.  But if not, the process itself keeps me inspired.  So, back to my Spanish audio CDs.  There's trabajo to be done. 

Here's a brisk Spanish song called Las Moscas (The Flies) by the great Joan Manuel Serrat: