YES WE CAN... learn languages

None of my grandparents spoke English natively, but all of them learned. They came from four different countries: Austria, Latvia, Romania, Poland. Yet all of them spoke at least two languages in addition to English-- Yiddish and one or two of these others: German, Lettish, Russian, Polish, Romanian. My grandparents were not particularly well educated-- except for my father's father, none of them finished high school. You don't have to be hypereducated to acquire a foreign language.

Despite my training in applied linguistics, I often despaired of learning to speak foreign languages. It's not that I didn't try. As a child, I took Hebrew in an after school pogram. I made good grades in high school and college French and could even read Camus and Moliere at one time. I can read New Testament Greek, to some extent. But I could never communicate in any language I tried to learn, until now.

Slowly, painfully, I am learning to speak 汉语 (Chinese). For a speaker of English, it is extremely difficult. The language is tonal; this means that the relative pitch of pronunciation alters meaning. Chinese has no alphabet, but has thousands of interrelated symbols like this one （pronounced "ni hao") which means "hello": 你好。Its grammatical and idiomatic structure are very different from ours. But with persistence, one learns.

Languages are learned best through exposure and practical use. When I enrolled in a Chinese class based on rote memorization, my brain rebelled. I have been more successful working with software and weekly lessons with a Chinese graduate student. Ever so slowly, I am learning Chinese.

Joe does better with Chinese writing system than I, though I can discriminate some character's It's a question of learning style. We leave for 北京 (Beijing) on May 28, a week from Friday.

Below, my favorite software packages: Rosetta Stone and Communicate in Chinese by 大山 (Da Shan).