I'm curious as to why is it that whenever someone asks me what I do and I say that I'm in a French PhD program, they ask me if I speak French, or if I read books in that language. I get asked this question all the time. Shouldn't this be the one thing about what I do that people immediately assume to be the case?
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
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4 comments:
Oops, I've asked you this more than once and I'm your mother.
At least you know you're not alone.
One reason is that a lot of people who are going for PhD programs in foreign languages do NOT have
strong conversational skills in their language of
interest. Besides, for many reasons, Americans
do not seem to do very well in learning foreign languages. How many do you think can master the
imperfect or future subjunctive found in most Romance languages?
I don't think this is about "strong conversational skills." Unless I go live in France for years, and even then, I'm unlikely ever to sound French, but to not speak French would be a bit odd. And as for Americans not learning foreign languages, again, French grad students are hardly a representative sample.
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