All the way through grammar school and college I struggled with not being able to be any good at learning any languages, especially foreign ones. From the get-go I was a lousy speller, even in English. I’ll always remember, much to my chagrin, when my friend Leon, a first rate English professor,  was helping me write a scholarly philosophy paper. He said, as politely as possible, “I don’t think the word “metaphor” ends in an “e”.    

     In high school I took two years of Spanish and barely passed. In college I took two years of New Testament Greek and although I found it fascinating, once again barely passed. Then, when I took New Testament Greek in seminary things went much better, but it was only after all the second time through. Also, while in the seminary I took a year of Hebrew, which was much fun but did not in any way become something I could make use of, either in reading not in speaking.

            Finally, after spending many months over several years, living in Greece, I got a good simple basic familiarity with the wonderful language, but am nowhere fluent, etc. I can still do word studies and run down specific expressions, etc., in the dictionary,  but I am hardly a real Greek reader or speaker. I can stumble through the menu at my favorite Greek restaurant. I’ll admit, things did go better during the months I lived there, but I am nowhere near being a Greek speaker.  

In graduate school, after a couple of months of study with a Berlitz teacher I managed to pass a simple French test, but involved translating an essay about Madame Currie and “radioactivite.” Several years later, while working on my Doctorate degree, I had to pass French again and this time things went better, but I still can neither really speak nor write French at all. I had studied German for two years while teaching a college, and some of it has actually stuck in my brain, but the most positive result is the ability to read and order from the menu at German restaurants. I did manage to pass the German test while studying at Duke for my Doctorate degree.

Then, worst of all, I met my wonderful wife, who is from Finland and speaks and reads several of the above languages. Over our many years together, which have included over twenty trips to Finland, I have worked at and managed to get a minimal grasp of Finish. I can nowhere succeed at maintaining anything like an on-going conversation, but I manage simple questions and answers, etc. I should explain to the reader that Finish is really nothing like the languages we English speakers are used to dealing with. It’s fun and I love it, but it is extremely complex.

         To make matTers worse, Mari is essentially functional with both French and German, and managed to acquire a basic, rough grasp of simple Greek while we were living there. When we were there she could manage to ask directions, etc. , and then she would translate the Greek person’s reply. My only level of respect stems from my ability to also read and write the beautiful language a bit. Even here, she does better with the accent, etc., than I shall ever do. 

            I shall conclude with a brief mention of our year spent in China, where neither of us had much of a sense of what was being said and almost no ability to participate in conversations. I was teaching English to college students whose English was at an intermediate level. I asked a young woman in the class to help me with my Chinese and we did so twice a week for the whole first semester. As usual, I never really got any good at it, but Mari picked up a lot of useful, short expressions which served us well when we traveled and shopped.

            What confounded me the most was the way my students would write Chinese. Not only are the figures more complex than anything I had ever seen, except perhaps for Hebrew, but they often had little dots and marks in them that were almost imperceptible. When the students wrote in Chinese on the class whiteboard for me I simply could almost not tell which figure was which. I was mystified as to how they could ever have learned the differences between them. Unsurprisingly, they were mystified as to how I was unable to recognize the differences.

The obvious solution was for them to pick English-type names like Jane, Bob, and Mark.  Some got more creative, choosing names like “Sky”, Sweetie”, and Power.” All of this did nothing for my insecurity complex about being a complete ignoramus with regard to the Chinese language, but as I got to know these young folks throughout the year I came to realize that in spite of our linguistic differences we could come to know and understand each other by struggling with each other’s languages. It was a wonderful year, in spite of my inability to really learn Chinese. I remember that the wonderful noodle soup was called “mien tiao”.