Uneasy Rhetoric

It’s a shame I didn’t discover the 12 Monkeys / 12 singeries things until the end of November. These kinds of things get me writing, if nothing else.

The December Monkey is a variation on an old theme: “What would you do if you had a free year, all to yourself, to dedicate to whatever you wanted? Assume money was not a problem — you’ve just received a $60,000 Monkey Grant.” The short answer: ramp up my language learning.

Before I get into my answer, I’m going to make one very big assumption - that at the end of the year I would not suddenly find myself unemployed. This is important because it will inform my answer. If I knew that taking such a grant would mean that I would be unemployed at the end of the term, then my activities would almost certainly focus on something that would directly improve my employability and job prospects. On the other hand, if I assume I would return to an income at the end of the year, then I will be able to focus on something more personally enriching, although also potentially monetarily enriching.

I would ramp up my language learning. Growing up, I had always wanted to learn French. When I was just a kid, my parents gave me a French/English/English/French dictionary for Easter one year (beats the heck out of chocolate eggs). It wasn’t very useful because I wasn’t taking any classes, and didn’t think to look up language tapes at the Library. Come to think of it, I probably thought of it but realized I didn’t have a tape player. By the time I did have one, I was already taking language classes in school.

I had early, enforced exposure to Spanish (5th and 6th grades), but, perhaps foolishly, I rebelled against it and took French and Russian in junior high school and then another eight years of French in high school and college. Of course, I never used my French except on two short trips to France and in the occasional letter to a francophone friend.

As a result, the speaking and writing ability I so laboriously built spilled quickly out of my brain. I continued reading French, and could often understand it if it was spoken slowly, but by my early 30s my being a rare bilingual American was more myth than reality.

If given the opportunity, I would spend an entire year relearning French and learning Spanish. To do this I would naturally have to live in a place where I would have easy access to both French and Spanish speakers (or, I could live in France and take Spanish lessons in French!). This means that, in addition to learning both languages, I could take some time to travel through Europe and see places I have always wanted to see: Athens, Prague, Berlin, London, anywhere in Wales, and so on. I figure this would pretty much blow my $60k wad of cash. Actually, it would probably cost a lot more than that.

And I’d probably try to pick up a few words in Welsh, Catalan, Italian, German, and Russian along the way.

Sometimes it’s nice to think big.