SELF IMPROVEMENT FOREIGN PHRASES

MONOLINGS ARE hardly the leading citizens of enlightened society. They are the folks whose tongues flounder along the tracks of only one language -the unfortunates who gasp in surprise when they discover that their chicken en mole smacks of chocolate and who refuse to frequent any restaurant where wine cannot be ordered by number. Monolings have a tough time on the road to success, shuffling through business lunches studded with worrisome French menus and conversations smattered with phrases tres bizarre.

With a little effort, it’s easy to learn enough restaurant smarts to get by, but few of our countrymen can claim comfortable allegiance to any language but their mother tongue. Some dismiss the problem with “Let them learn English.” And it is true that in many other countries such as Japan children learn English as a matter of course. But we can hardly flaunt the number of children in our own country learning Japanese -or any languages besides English. For years we have assumed, with dashing American arrogance and little regard for world literature, that our own language is the only one we need to know to remain on top of the world.

But this first generation of jet-setting businessmen has discovered otherwise. Knowledge of foreign languages is important for reasons other than deciphering haute cuisine. Interpreters understandably favor the interests of their homelands; and even if an interpreter is impartial, a complicated business deal is difficult to translate. As one local language instructor says, the most important language in the world is your client’s.

Dr. Philip Solomon, chairman of SMU’s foreign languages and literature department, says it’s ridiculous to be monolingual in these days of worldwide communication. “I think it’s horrendous in a land settled by so many different ethnic groups that it is hard to find a competent interpreter. When President Carter visited Poland, his interpreter did such a poor job that he made a mockery of the language before the Polish people.”

The recent bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon might have been prevented if more Americans working there had known the language, Solomon says. Had they been able to break their isolation even by reading local newspapers, they might have more accurately judged the temper of the people and thereby prevented the attack. Instead, Solomon says, the Americans never knew of the plotting going on right before their eyes.

The problem with language study in the United States is not so much that too few students are enrolled in classes, but that those who begin foreign language study do not continue it long enough to become fluent. But the job market may soon make language study more enticing. Demand is increasing among corporations for busi-nesspeople who don’t need interpreters but who can speak the language of the people with whom their companies trade.

For those of us who can’t begin our education again and who insist on learning a second language from day one, there are several adult language schools to consider. Collegiate study of a foreign language tends to be more well-rounded in grammar and reading than courses taught at many commercial language schools, but it demands more time than many working adults have to give. Solomon warns that any school that promises to teach conversational speaking without also teaching basic grammar will end up teaching a perverse distortion of that language.

Alan C. Servetnick, director of Dallas’ Berlitz School of Language, disagrees. He says that his instructors (all native speakers of the languages they teach) do not present the rules of grammar and teach without using any English. “You don’t need to know the rules; you learn what a coffee cup is by seeing a coffee cup,” he says. “We teach our students to think in their new language and have them speaking in the first class. Our primary goal is literate communication.”

Servetnick believes that intelligence and memory capacity have little to do with the learning of a new language, but that creative people -painters, actors, writers – tend to be better at learning new languages than doctors, lawyers and engineers who often find the process more difficult because they’ve been taught to follow rigid rules and formulas. But Servetnick says that Berlitz encourages its students to be childlike as they learn. “Children aren’t afraid to make mistakes. Adults are often embarrassed, intimidated and afraid of looking silly,” he says. Berlitz courses are taught one-on-one in hopes of eliminating inhibitions.

Seventy-five percent of the men and women who attend Berlitz do so for business reasons. More than half of those people are from large corporations that do business internationally. The basic course can be taught over 10 weeks or two years. The optimum length of study for a basic course is nine hours a week for 10 weeks at a cost of about $3,100. An intensive course can be completed in two weeks of nine-hour-a-day study. With this course (which costs about $3,500), you can learn enough of almost any language to get by, Servetnick says.

The Dallas Berlitz school employs about 30 teachers; between them they teach Spanish, French, German, Italian, English, Russian, Japanese, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Korean and several other more exotic languages. Cassette tape courses are offered, but Servetnick says he can’t imagine anyone learning a language with tapes alone. It is less expensive, he says, but it seems a little like “learning to drive a car by watching basketball.”

Jose Palomo began his American Institute of Languages in 1966 after working for six years as an instructor for Berlitz. He disagrees with the Berlitz method on several counts. His chief grievance is that Berlitz’s instructors give no explanation of structure or of grammar and use no English at all. Palomo disagrees with its policy that memorization is the only way to learn. “Memory works, but it often takes more time than logical learning,” he says. “With our method, students learn roots that are common to the language they are learning as well as to English. Since the Latin roots are often the same, this explanation can help tremendously.”

Students of the American Institute begin by learning simple vocabulary words, then move on to building phrases and constructing sentences. Vocabulary words are taught as they are at Berlitz: by displaying objects or pictures of objects. Most sessions last one and a half to two hours, and students are encouraged to record their lessons. Palomo says that it helps students to listen to their mistakes on tape later.

The American Institute offers a basic private course (75 hours) at $20 per hour. Semiprivate and small group lessons cost from $8 to $12 per hour per person, depending on the size of the class.

Richard Lorenz and Pierre Conhagen of Inlingua School of Languages say that they and 90 percent of Inlingua’s instructors are former Berlitz employees. Con-hagen, director of Inligua, was a vice president with Berlitz; Lorenz, Inlingua’s director of marketing, was a director with the company. They say that the two schools are the only professional language institutions in the world.

The biggest difference between the In-lingua program and the Berlitz program is that Inlingua’s courses are flexible, says Conhagen. Each of Inlingua’s 200 schools is independent and able to construct its own curriculum. When General Dynamics had to send technicians to Egypt, Inlingua devised a special survival kit: a course in colloquial Egyptian and Arabic.

Conhagen says it is a matter of “plain courtesy” to learn a country’s language when you plan to do business there. But helping employees feel comfortable with a new culture and language is just as important for a company’s personnel department. “Texas Instruments is one of our largest clients,” Conhagen says, “and they automatically give their imported employees 200 lessons of English. They know that when they’ve spent $50,000 to bring a family to a new location, they can’t afford homesickness.”

Inlingua instructors agree to help students fulfill goals without setting strict time limits. “You tell us what you want, and we’ll tell you how long we think it will take you to learn it,” Conhagen says. “Thirty lessons won’t make you fluent – any school that tells you that is guilty of highway robbery.”

Inlingua courses use a textbook assembled at the Inlingua Institute in Bern, Switzerland, along with tapes highlighting the course of study. The instructor may teach the name of an object first and then help a student learn to describe it.

“Anyone can learn a language,” Con-hagen says. “It all depends on a student’s motivation and expertise in his native tongue.” A basic knowledge of a new language requires at least 80 lessons, Inlingua instructors say, at $18 per lesson. Private, semiprivate and intensive study courses are available.

French Linguistics, a 7-year-old school that teaches only French and Spanish, emphasizes conversation and complete sentences, says owner Janne Jeannin. This school’s courses are supplemented by reading and writing and are structured similarly to Inlingua’s -private, semipri-vate and group lessons are available. Jeannin says that group lessons are most effective for those who are not in a hurry. Intensive programs are also offered, and students may make tapes of classes. The school has enrolled about 160 students, one-fourth of whom are studying for business purposes. Jeannin says she wants to keep her school small and is more interested in teaching travelers than businesspeople. At French Linguistics, lessons are offered in one of four yearly sessions. A 10-week session costs $115; semiprivate lessons are $32 per hour; 10 private lessons cost $200.

The method taught at the 3-year-old Lozanov Learning Institute in Dallas was brought to the United States in 1973. It is the most controversial of the language teaching methods we observed. Lozanov’s methods are not restricted to language teaching but are well-suited for teaching memory improvement and success motivation. The U.S. Postal Service has used the method to teach workers zip code information.

“Suggestology,” as this method has been called, emphasizes relaxation, infan-tilization (which instructors define as “the state you enter when you play a game”) and interaction. A brochure states that students will “learn quickly, effortlessly and pleasantly and have confidence in [their] ability to speak and understand a new language.” This is possible, according to an Aramco Services Co. employee who studied the method for his company, because instructors develop “tension-free mental states in their students.” The environment the instructor aims to create “embodies truth, beauty and goodness,” according to Aramco’s report, and “the teacher dispels fears that the classroom environment may contain deceit, ugliness or evil by attempting to make it as completely enjoyable, unthreatening and ego-secure as possible.”

As one of the first class activities, each student chooses another identity and occupation. Most lessons allow time for relaxation, two concert lessons (dialogues are presented against a classical musical backdrop) and elaboration (when students speak the words they have heard during the concerts). The concert lessons put words into a student’s mind, but the words must be “activated,” institute director Carrie Jane Loftis says. “Listening alone won’t do it.” During the “activation” or “elaboration” time, students use music, art, games or role playing to further embed the lessons in their minds. Sometimes students use modeling clay to learn; other times, games such as hangman, blackjack or Monopoly work best.

Grammar is explained as an aside in the Lozanov classes -in English, if need be. “One of the basic reasons this course works is that students use both sides of their brains, making long-term memory easier,” Loftis says.

The Aramco report puts it this way: “[Lozanov] takes advantage of the modern neural-physiological finding that long-term memory is a function of the whole brain…. It attempts therefore to include both emotional (subcortex) and rational (cortex) aspects of behavior in the learning process…. In keeping with [that] theory.. .learning activities… are never undertaken in isolation from other activities that traditionally have been looked upon as irrelevant to, if not distracting to, the learning process.”

Lozanov reports that most students can learn the basic structures of a new English-based language and 2,000 lexical items in 75 hours of instruction. The administrator guessed the best conventional methods would use 120 hours to teach the same basic structures and 900 lexical items.

Half of a beginning course at Lozanov includes nine hours per week of lessons for four weeks and costs $300. Instructors say that after 72 hours a student should know 1,800 to 2,000 words of an English-related language and be able to use those words in present, past and future tenses.