It's All Jibberish To Me

As you all know by now, school has started (if this has still not occurred to you then I apologize and you should just go back to sleep). This means school work, buying $500 worth of books that I will never use (mainly because I don’t know how to read) and those stupid introductions you have to go through on the first day where you have to name some interesting thing about yourself so your idiot teacher can try to remember your name. Seriously, some of these kids come up with the stupidest things to say about themselves. This semester we had one girl who admitted over the summer she had nothing to do, so she remembered every number 27 in the NFL. Another guy’s interesting fact was that he is from Colorado. Now, just to be clear, this class was taking place at the University of Colorado. Which is in Colorado. Where there are a lot of people from Colorado. This is like saying you like to drink beer at an AA meeting.

Anyway, my semester is already off to an interesting start thanks to one class in particular. The class - which consists of me, six girls, and some guy who sits there playing with a pocket knife - is a journalism class that meets once a week. Which is easy enough. But then we were told that we had to participate in a community service program on campus that tried to teach English to the foreign workers on campus.

Now, I have no problem with community service. I do my community a service every other day by not leaving my house. As long as the community service is something I can do, like mindlessly picking up trash, I’m fine with it. But teaching English to non-English speaking people is a little outside my skill set. Which is an understatement to say the least. It’s like saying calculus is a little outside the skill set of a gerbil. I mean, many people I know think I need English lessons of my own.

Never-the-less, there I was, sitting in a training session so I could be certified to permanently destroy some innocent workers chances of every learning English. Now, there were two groups of people in the room. There were the people who were in there because they know multiple languages and are majoring in Spanish and want to practice and genuinely feel for these workers and want to make the world a better place and cure AIDS and rescue Haitians from the rubble. Then there were the eight of us who were there because we were being forced to. And trust me; it was pretty evident who belonged to which group.

Now I’ve only had one experience with trying to learn a foreign language. I took Japanese for three years in high school, and left after those three years knowing less Japanese than a newborn horse. I blame this mostly on my Japanese teacher, Ms. Takizawa. Her teaching strategy was to never actually speak Japanese and just yell “Shut up Mitchell” every five seconds. And when she did teach us Japanese, it was always useless phrases, like “I love purple jackets.” As a straight man, I would never have a reason to inform a Japanese person that I enjoy wearing purple jackets. You never learn useful phrases in language classes, like “Where is your hospital? I think it’s infected” or “No officer, that is definitely not my cocaine.”

To be fair, I did spend most of those three years in class cheating, copying, sleeping, talking, eating, and doing everything but trying to learn any actual Japanese. This is because as an American, I feel it is not necessary to learn other languages. I think that is our right as the most powerful country in the world; other countries either learn to speak English or we nuke them off the face of the Earth. Besides, I personally don’t exactly like going to foreign countries, so why do I need to learn foreign language? In my experience, foreign countries are filled with, prepare yourself, foreign people. And I personally avoid any situation in which I might encounter French people. Besides, learning a foreign language is useless in the actual country. I’ve been to Japan three times, and never once have I been able to use my Japanese skills to know what they were saying. This is because people who actually speak the language speak it way too fast and make up their own words and never talk about their purple jackets.

So I think you can see why I’m a bit apprehensive about this whole tutor thing, and I haven’t even gotten into the part where I have to walk into campus for an hour tutoring session twice a week where I normally had the entire day off. All I know is that it is going to be an awkward hour of sitting there in silence while I point at the alphabet, which I will have inevitably written in the wrong order. So just a warning, if you encounter a worker on campus who seems to be speaking some form of broken English mixed with Japanese, give them a break. Maybe talk to them about their purple sweater.