This is not a diary about football. If football is what you are looking for, then you will be disappointed.
No, I am writing about how I have celebrated National Foreign Languages Week this week, and why more Americans should experience other cultures.
Follow me below the fold...
National Foreign Language Week this year is March 5-11. The celebration was initiated and sponsored by the honorary society Alpha Mu Gamma beginning in the mid-1950s. This year’s theme is "Languages: The Key to Common Understanding."
The Foreign Languages Department at the university where I work sponsored a Poetry Reading on Monday, then Foreign Films the rest of the week to celebrate NFLW (with English subtitles! and for free!). Because I had this week off from classes at the school I attend, I had the time to view half of the movies shown. Below is a list of all the movies they showed and short reviews for the films I watched.
- LaDoublure (The Valet) in French: A funny movie where a rich businessman tries to convince his wife that he is not having an affair, by sending his mistress to live with a poor valet for a week.
- Electra (Electra) for Ancient Greek: A film adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy "Electra" by a giant of Greek films, Michael Cacoyannis. The film follows Agamemnon’s daughter Electra after his death as she and her brother Orestes struggle to get revenge for their father’s death.
- The Edukators (The Edukators) in German
- Yellow Earth (Yellow Earth) in Chinese
- The Weeping Meadow (The Weeping Meadow) in Modern Greek: This is part I of a trilogy now being made by the great Theo Angelopoulos. This film shows the history of Greece in the first half of the 20th century by tracing a family of refugees from Odessa to a village they built near Thessaloniki, through the inter-war period, Metaxas Dictatorship, WWII, and tragically, the Greek Civil War.
- Waterboys (Waterboys) in Japanese
- Paradise Now (Paradise Now) in Arabic
- Bolivar Soy Yo (Bolivar Am I) in Spanish: An actor who has been portraying Simon Bolivar in a TV series becomes unstable when the director tries to kill off his character in a non-historically accurate way. The actor tries to bring to fruition Bolivar’s dream of Great Colombia, but is blocked by those around him who can’t tell if he’s insane or merely playing a part.
The four movies I watched had audiences of fewer then 10, with only Bolivar Soy Yo around 10 people (the instructor of a Spanish class bribed her students with bonus points for attending the movie). Students have many demands on their time – classes, midterms, work – yet I was disappointed so few students attended the foreign films. To be able to fully engage in the world, people in the United States need to experience foreign cultures.
I think the theme of NFLW hits the nail on the head – "Languages: The Key to Common Understanding". In order for Americans to understand and be sensitive to people in other countries, we have to experience other cultures. Some methods for experiencing other cultures may be traveling abroad, learning a foreign language, and watching foreign films.
The importance of traveling abroad and experiencing another culture first-hand can not be overstated. Nothing can beat living in another country, fully engaged in the culture, for learning about another culture. I have been lucky enough to travel to Greece the past few years for study and research, and I always look forward to the Greek pace of life. Traveling abroad is expensive, but it is still the best way to gain understanding of other cultures.
Learning a foreign language is a less expensive way to learn about another culture, and is often required for college students. Unfortunately, foreign language requirements are often seen as only a way to acquire marketable job skills, or at worst as a waste of time. As one of my undergraduate professors told me, learning a foreign language in college is a way to teach students how to think in a different way, not necessarily to make them fully fluent in the language (to be fair, he was teaching me Ancient Greek, not usually a conversational language). The focus on college being where students learn "job skills" such as a marketable foreign language, shoves aside any emphasis on learning about another culture.
Perhaps the easiest way to experience another culture is to watch a foreign language film. Unlike documentaries made to show another culture that are etic (an outsider’s view), foreign language films are an emic (insider’s view) way to experience a culture. Foreign films are an inexpensive and easy way to experience, or get others to experience, other cultures.
So next year for NFLW, think about having some friends over for a foreign film or two and experiencing another culture.