What The College Language Requirement Fails to Teach

My experience with high-school Spanish was a little like trying to remember to floss every-day. I knew it was supposed to be good for my all-around educational health, but I could never remember where to put “accentos”, vocabulary was an endless struggle, and however much I gargled and spat in class, I was physically incapable of rolling my ‘r’s. Despite my three tumultuous years in high school, I only succeeded in testing out of one semester for the St. Olaf 4-class language requirement. I bitterly fought my way through 111, 231, and threw a personal fiesta on May 16^th last spring when I stepped out of my 232 final. I never really understood the necessity of this education requirement and was always a little irritated that it stole three of my precious classes, but after a week wandering the streets of Copenhagen, the lilting exchanges between people seemed suspiciously alluring. Long strings of noise that sounded like complete gibberish to my English ears resulted in roars of laughter from the privileged recipient. When I opened my mouth to compliment a street vendor on her snazzy hairdo, I had to gulp back the remark and subduedly hand over the kroner for my strawberries with only a closed-mouth smile and nod. I didn’t even know the Danish word for thank you. Suddenly there was this code that locked rudimentary communication and I had a strong urge to break it. For once I wanted to learn a language. I’d unfortunately written off all languages through my experience with Spanish, but by being fully immersed in a new dialect the benefit of speaking and understanding was incredibly evident. This is what I’m sure the language requirement was trying to encapsulate and where it so grossly missed the mark. I don’t quite know how they would improve on this without forcefully sending students to different countries, but the more I explore the Copenhagen environment, the more I realize the blatant lingual benefits that can be achieved by simply spending time in a foreign country vs. inside a classroom. 

For starters, the collegiate requirement can’t encapsulate the way a language undergoes a transformation of instrumental to melody after spending some time in the new environment. Initially, hearing snippets of Danish conversation while walking down the street meant being bombarded by a symphony of unfamiliar sounds. After a few weeks of thirstily listening to dinner table and train-carriage banter, a few common words became recognizable, and the curling chorus that was once purely harmonious began to gain meaning and became remarkably lyrical. 

The American collegiate classroom also doesn’t fully demonstrate the intense variety of communication that's present in the world. One night in Norway, we were all bustling around the kitchen in Nels’s apartment, communally preparing a delicious Belgian recipe that involved couscous, stuffed peppers, feta cheese, and about 130,000 different spices. Alicia and Isaline were chatting in Dutch while Nels and Magdalena were conversing in Norwegian, and Simon, the guy from down the hall, was trying to teach Anders a few throaty phrases of Danish. Three different languages in one small, warm Bergen kitchen; it might have been an apartment floor record. And I’ve realized that English kind of bridges the gaps in communication between people, because it’s the meet-in-the-middle road that everyone can travel down and get by without too many potholes. I stood there with a spatula thinking that my language education had been kind of a cop out—everyone learns how to speak these beautiful, rolling dialects and it’s like we’re handed a master key to all language locks and aren’t ever forced to learn how each one individually functions. 

These different ways of speaking also have words or phrases with a meaning that English fails to express. One cliché example is the Danish word hygge, a word that describes cozy community time with friends, spent enjoying the good gifts of life. There isn’t an English word that quite captures the connotations associated with hygge, and that just makes me wonder how many feelings are we failing to transfer because we are limited to a single language. An idea in its pure form is so hard to replicate; it just bursts into unexplainable existence in a period of immeasurable time. We first try to build vocabulary to try and express these thoughts, but when English words fail to capture it, wouldn’t the next likely tool be language? If a different dialect can commune knowledge more precisely, shouldn’t we take advantage of this indispensible instrument by learning as many as we can? Listening to the Danes speaking English is beautiful because I can catch a glimpse of what their language is like. They use phrases that a native English speaker wouldn’t necessarily use, but make sense in a way that approaches description from a really unique angle. For example, my host mom always says “What a beautiful nature!” to describe an individual’s likes and behaviors. I guess I’ve just always associated 'nature' with reference to an entire group of people, or maybe to describe “the nature of a problem”, so the phrase initially took me a little off-guard.  But it makes complete sense; it’s almost like saying “What a great life!” but in a much more empowering way. Yesterday my architecture history professor said, “You may need patience because sometimes I can’t find the right words, but if you wait, I will look around and find them.” I really appreciated the format of her sentence; It made the hunt for language so dynamic, like piecing together a puzzle by searching with eyes of the mind.

The final aspect the language requirement fails to capture is the semantic surrounding a dialect—the sound of the culture. The language of bike bells and impatient bus horns. The steam of train doors closing and whir of momentum gain, as the wet landscape blurs faster and faster past droplet-flekked windows. The steady drone of street music saxophone, contrasted by the cascade of Tivolvi roller-coaster screams. It’s the sounds heard while roaming wet cobblestone streets, the melody the fills the spaces in between. Listen, listen closely, because the city is talking, and I think it must be expressing the most important message of all.