Language And Stuff

So, last night I was part of a conversation that involved English, Swahili, and Swedish, with different participants knowing different languages from amongst that set. It got me thinking a bit about language.

Back when we all did pre-service training for two months, the bulk of the training was studying Swahili – we studied it for approximately a full working day each day, and usually had to do homework or studying on our own at night. We did this for two months.

Since then, I’ve been using Swahili a lot. I teach a lot in Swahili, a lot of the times when I meet people they don’t know English, and in general when speaking with Tanzanians, I try to use Swahili as much as possible.

I’m at the point now where, most of the time when I want to say something, I can. I might not know one specific word, and instead have to explain what a thing is rather than just saying the word for that thing, or maybe I’ll say something that’s not quite what I mean but the other person can figure it out, but I can usually say at least a simplified version of what I want to say. A lot of this comes from the fact that I tend to discuss the same few topics over and over – whenever I get to talking about other subjects, I have a lot of trouble.

Additionally, my vocab is still very limited. Although I have enough words to say basically what I want, I can only say most things in one way, when there are several ways to say it. When I listen to native speakers speaking Swahili, if they’re not simplifying their vocabulary  for my benefit, there’s always a ton of words that I haven’t heard before, or at least that I haven’t learned yet.

Swahili is apparently one of the easiest languages out there. I can see why. The grammar seems to be pretty simple compared to other languages, and the vocab is definitely much smaller/simpler than other languages I know at all.

But after two months of intensive training and several more months of daily use, I’m still nowhere near fluent. And from what I can tell, I’m not way behind the other PCVs here or anything.

I’m not complaining or anything. I’m really satisfied with the progress I’ve made so far, and am continuing to make.

However, I got to thinking a bit about the immigration issue in the US, which is so heavily debated and whatnot at the moment. One of the things I’ve heard mentioned a lot, and which I used to fully agree with, is that if you move to the US, you ought to learn English.

Learning languages is pretty difficult. I’ve just gone on about Swahili, and English is way more difficult than Swahili. And I was helped by having Swahili be a major part of my job, so I got free intensive two-month training to start it off. And now I live amongst a lot of people with whom I need to communicate in English daily. And I have it pretty easy, work-wise – I get free time every day and have more than enough money to eat and get by.

A lot of immigrants into the US aren’t nearly so lucky on so many fronts. Firstly, English is ever so much more difficult than Swahili – in terms of grammar, in terms of vocab, in terms of spelling and pronunciation, and in terms of the wide variety of commonly-used phrases whose literal meanings are not their actual meanings. Most non-English-speaking immigrants to the US don’t seem to need much English for their jobs, and certainly don’t have anyone willing to give them serious training on it for free. Many of them move to communities where their native language is the dominant language, and so don’t have much opportunity to practice English without going out of their way to do so. And a lot of them, as I understand it, are very poor and have to work way more than a normal job’s worth of hours in order to provide for themselves and their families.

So, I’m feeling a lot more sympathetic now to people who move to the US without learning English. And really, they tend to get jobs and become productive members of society, even without English, and as I understand it (though I’m not 100% sure on this point), their kids tend to learn English, so I’m thinking perhaps it’s entirely excuseable and not actually much of a problem.