Monolinguality

If I remember rightly, SBS TV started in Australia in March 1981. SBS TV is the Australian Multicultural TV network - it runs mostly non english language programs though it's agnostic; they also run American movies that no one else wants to pick up!

Until SBS TV started I'd never felt the need to know another language. The desire? Yes! The need? Never.

I started listening to German opera in 1973 with Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Sometime in 1975 I started enjoying Berlioz, defiantly French! 1976 and Shostakovich's Stepan Razin in Russian. 1977 Weill/Brecht Der Dreigroschenoper and 1978 Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahahogonny!

All of which led to the desire to understand at least one (for me) foreign language. I chose German and spent years reading various German/English lexicons - culminating in a course in 1979 at Monash University (the only course I passed ). If a German speaker talks slowly enough I can understand what is said - when I reply I know I massacre the language - I can't get my head around the grammatical structure though I can always pick a native German speaker using English.

Then along came SBS TV. In 1983 I learned to love Russian films made during the thaw (see previous blog entries). Likewise Italian and Serbian films, all of which I prefer to listen to in the original language with English subtitles. To be honest, if a film is set in Scotland or those parts of England where they speak a dialect I'm not familiar with I'd still rather it was presented in the native dialect and, if need be, I'll pick up the gist using subtitles. What's important is the sound! (I”ll always remember the 1973 broadcast of the Russian version of War and Peace with American accents doing the overdubs. It just sounded silly. And who can forget Tom Hulce as Mozart? I wish I could!)

As you're probably sick of hearing by now, my job requires me to visit various Asian locations. This week I've been in America, Korea, Japan and right now I'm back in Korea. Tomorrow I'm going to the Philippines. As far as I'm concerned, the yanks have no excuse. We speak almost the same language and read the same printed matter - so if they can't understand me it's sheer laziness (I'm getting monumentally tired of having to cope with American aural laziness).

In Korea and Japan it's a different story. I'm amazed at how carefully and how hard they try to understand what I'm saying. I'm also humbled by how much they know of my language when compared with how much I know of theirs. They might only have a vocabulary of 100 English words, but that's about 98 more words than I have of their languages. If my travels over the last three months have taught me nothing else, they've taught me immense respect for Asia. I need to take some language courses.

And in the Philippines? I've probably met 300 different people in that country over the last half year and every one of them, every one, can speak English. That impresses the hell out of me - especially as the official language is Tagalog!