Jules CP-2

On Monday I had my second meeting with Jamal, and this time I decided to introduce him to one of my favorite conversation spots in Tally: Black Dog Cafe. For those who aren't familiar, Black Dog is this quaint little coffee shop right next to Lake Ella (on Monroe St. between 7th & Tharpe). I especially enjoy stopping by on Wednesdays, when they host the local farmer's market and frequently feature live music. Because a lot of exchange students don't venture too far from campus, I'd highly recommend holding one of your meetings at this local establishment.

After grabbing some chai and finding a seat on the porch, I asked Jamal how he felt about the rise of English as the "Language of the World". This is a topic I'm very interested in, because I wonder how other cultures feel about needing to learn a new language while native Anglophones don't have to put forth that effort. Jamal didn't really say how learning English made him feel (per se), but instead he kind of shrugged and said something to the effect of, "Well, that's just the way things are, and I want to be able to communicate with people from around the world so this is what I have to do." He then recounted a joke that seemed wholly apropos: "What do you call a person who speaks 3 languages? -- Trilingual. How about someone who speaks 2 languages? -- Bilingual. What if they only speak 1 language? -- American." I chuckled and kind of shook my head in dismay. How do you all feel about spreading English across the globe? What are your conversation partners'/tutees' perspectives on this issue?

This conversation kind of segued into the topic of, "what would be the ideal international language?". Have any of you heard of Esperanto? According to Wikipedia, it was created with the goal of being an "easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages". Sounds like a great idea to me. I wondered if Jamal thought that Esperanto would be a good global language. He said that while it sounds great in theory, in practice it's just not feasible because so many people already speak English, and so many scientific and news journals are published in English, whereas only a tiny fraction of the world's population speaks Esperanto. So basically he was citing the way things are, and not necessarily the way things should be, as the basis for his opinion. I'd like to see what Stéphane, my other conversation partner, has to say on the subject. He's from Côte d'Ivoire, where at least 7 different languages are spoken but the only official language is French.

Of course Jamal and I talked about all kinds of other interesting topics-- he truly has a keen grasp on the English language and only has a few minor pronunciation issues. I complimented him on his accent, and he said that native Farsi speakers have it easier than others because Farsi contains so many phonemes (these are basically the sounds that are the building blocks of words, like "sh" and "b"). In Farsi they have 32 letters, and there is a phoneme for almost every sound except the hard "th" (as in 'thirteen' and 'theory'). They have a phoneme for the soft "th" (as in 'bother' and 'therefore'), but he has trouble with phrases like "thank you" that contain that hard "th". We took turns practicing our pronunciation, he saying, "thank you" and I saying, "Afghanistan" (the "gh" doesn't really make a "guh" sound but more of a Hebrew "ch" as in "Chanukah"). We must have sounded really quirky to our neighbors at Black Dog!