Jon Hunstman’s insistence on trotting out bits of his Mandarin here and there (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPb-5AZuzXo) has provoked a lot of commentary and no small amount of ridicule about his proficiency, and whether it really rises to the level of fluency. A better question, and one which gets asked much less often, is what exactly does fluency mean? It is also a lot harder to answer in any definitive way.

I’ve come to this subject from the perspective of somewhat unusual personal experience. Due to life and career choices, in the course of things to one degree or another, I’ve come to speak a lot of languages: English, French, Spanish, bits and pieces of various Akan dialects (Twi, Baoulé, Nzima), Haitian Creole, Japanese and Chinese.

With every one of these languages at some point I got well beyond the phrase book level. Even now, I speak almost as much French in any given day as I speak English. With both Chinese and Japanese, after prolonged and very deliberate effort, I was able to sustain genuine friendships and do my work, meaning not just function in an everyday sense, but conduct extended interviews in the language. And after years of disuse, I was pleased to have been able to revive my once reasonably supple Spanish on the fly as a Rube Goldberg solution to needing to work and function in a Portuguese-speaking environment. This came recently during nearly two months of solo reporting in Mozambique. Hell, I even learned a good bit of this new language, and attained a decent comprehension level as I stumbled about with my crude Portañol.

But just what is fluency? In the end, it is a slightly foolish term, and one can (should?) feel foolish using it. Language learning is an endless process, and one’s comfort and degree of articulateness, never mind literacy in a foreign language is a dynamic and ever-changing thing.

I conducted nearly all of the many field interviews I did for my forthcoming book on the Chinese in Africa alone and in Chinese, and in the thick of it rarely had language problems of any kind. In the five months I’ve been back in the U.S., though, the Chinese space in my brain has shrunk dramatically, almost alarmingly so. No, I haven’t forgotten how to speak by any means, but my level has steadily gone down from disuse and from removal from a situation of immersion.

I remember a lunch I had with a Chinese friend right after my return from Africa in early September. “You sound amazing, so natural,” she said, to my delight, as we carried on in Mandarin. When I saw her again just a few weeks ago, I was already much less confident. In fact I was stunned and embarrassed to have to ask her in English to remind me how to say something relatively basic that I knew well but suddenly couldn’t summon in the middle of a sentence.

With Japanese, things have been even worse. I mixed a couple of Chinese words into a straightforward conversation with a baffled Japanese person in New York the other day, and didn’t even realize until it after I’d walked away, when I played the conversation back in my mind. I studied Japanese first, but I use it much less now. This “splicing” error used to happen a lot in the opposite direction, and it drove my early Chinese teachers crazy.

(On the other hand, many of my Africa interviews were transcribed for me by students or friends in Chinese, and reading them, while quite time consuming, has not been a problem. In fact, it was a lot of fun.)

Last summer, I got to use my Akan in Ghana again, managing to at least bluff my way through many situations (for most people, comprehension decays much less rapidly than speech) and to ingratiate myself to people in many others. It is a near universal rule that people almost always appreciate a sincere effort to speak their language. Unless I retire to a beach in Axim or Elmina, though, I’ll never really speak one of these languages again. Although I worked at them, I never studied them formally, and I’ve let them go for too long. The same is true for Haitian Creole, for which my exposure these days is mostly limited to song (which, it must be said in passing, is an underrated language tool).

For anyone wanting a sense of the process involved in language acquisition, I really enjoyed this article:

http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-howmuch.htm

As I listened to Mitt Romney’s victory speech in New Hampshire last night, I heard the clearest crystallization of a strain of American political discourse that has worried me for some time.

In Romney’s telling, Barack Obama is a socialist, who wants to transform the United States and make it more Europe-like. On the face of it, there’s nothing surprising about a campaign  line like this coming from a Republican contender.

Romney takes things one step further, when he says, “This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America.” (I’ve put the full quote at the bottom here.)

As someone who spent the last decade living in Japan and then China, it strikes me as more than passing strange that a nation’s political elite should demonize the idea of scouring the globe for the best ideas in governance, in economic policy and development, in environmental practices, etc.. A willingness to learn this in way, to continuously compare notes with peer competitors and rivals, and to adopts and absorb best practices, even when inspired by example from afar, is an essential part of the playbook of any successful nation.

Today, China, even with all of its problems, and with an authoritarian political system that lacks appeal on many levels, is perhaps the world’s most vigorous practitioner of this approach, which might be described as: continuously learn, adopt, experiment and adjust. This has been true since Deng Xiaoping’s time, and it cannot be a coincidence that China’s economy has been the world’s most dynamic during this period. (China’s political system, though very slow to change, is not immune to this phenomenon of emulation and influence from afar, either, although that’s a subject fit for another post.)

The posturing claim that this is un-American, or that good ideas must be homegrown, or that we and our ways are and must remain pure and untainted by outside influences is a form of cultural and intellectual nativism. And as both China and Japan each learned the hard way, and at great cost after long periods of smug self-sufficiency and intellectual closure, it is also a recipe for stagnation and eventual decline.

Paper money was invented in China, during the Song Dynasty, 1,000 years ago. (The first European banknotes appeared in 1661, five centuries later.) Needless to say, no one need feel less American for using the dollar bill. By the same token, no Chinese need feel any less authentic for going to work on the subway (a British innovation), or using the Internet (U.S.), or incorporating any other of a whole host of foreign inventions that together help make the modern world.

To pretend otherwise would be silly, which is why it’s time to put this silly but persistent motif of American politics to rest.

The Romney quote:

“Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America.

This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.”

Fantastic commentary by George Packer in the New Yorker about political journalism during the primary season. I’ve been thinking about the vapid entertainment quality of American campaigning a lot these last few months, and wondering both how it looks to the country’s present and future challengers, and what the impact of the emptiness of our discourse may ultimate be on our direction and destiny?

“In the tenth paragraph of a page A15 Times piece, Rick Santorum accuses Barack Obama of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” What are they? The article doesn’t say. The quote appears without explanation or comment, in an article entitled “Santorum’s Challenge: Broaden His Appeal Beyond Evangelical Christians.” Nor does the line show up anywhere else on the Web—apparently no reporter in the mob following the candidates through the last days before the Iowa caucuses thought it worth writing down, and no blogger thought it worth repeating. It was just a throwaway line, a hunk of spoiled red meat tossed at the crowd in a Sioux City coffee shop, no more newsworthy than saying, “It’s a great day to be an Iowan!”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/01/santorum-and-the-republicans.html#ixzz1iV9k2iaN