American Attitudes

As I am working on my final paper for Dr. Kaplan’s class, one of the essay prompts inquires as to whether there are any habits or attitudes of mine that have changed since the beginning of this trip. Um, yes. There are probably about 20 that I could elaborate on but to save you from reading a two-hour-long blog post, I’ll stick to explaining one thing that really bothers me now that wasn’t so obvious to me before.

This trip has caused my attitude about Americans to change, and not necessarily in a positive way. I have had endless opportunities to talk with the Greek students at Deree (our college) and I am constantly amazed at how intelligent Greeks are. Every single student I have talked to is knows at least more than one language. Areti has studied English, Italian and French. Analia knows English, French, German and a little bit of Spanish. Kiara speaks Italian and English. I would go on but I think I’ve made my point.

Greeks seem to push themselves way more in the academic world than Americans do. During my conversations with Greeks students, I often found myself mesmerized by their intelligence and poetic way of speaking. It amazes me that they can learn so many languages while American college students struggle to even learn Spanish. And it’s not that American students can’t learn languages, we just assume that everyone else will know English. My frustration with this assumption reminds me of an excerpt from Dinner with Persephone, a book we had to read for class. “Being able to rely on the dominance of English may affect English speakers’ ability to approach and imagine other cultures- as if they were rich children, who have inherited such an enormous trust fund that they can choose whether or not to go to work” (pg 5).

We seem to expect everyone around the world to know how to speak English so we do not have to push ourselves and expand our knowledge by learning a new language. This really frustrates me about our American culture and I am just as guilty as the next person. I didn’t really learn anything in my high school Spanish classes because I always just assumed I could survive with English. Of course, this was also before I discovered that I have a passion and addiction to traveling so I had never really expected to leave the safety and comfort zone that is America. My trip to Guatemala had me kicking myself for not learning more Spanish during high school so I was inspired to take Spanish when I returned. But for the majority of students that I know, most of them cannot speak any other languages (except for a small amount of Spanish from high school).

And it’s not just college students, Americans in general have the mindset that we are the superior language and everyone else should take the time to learn our language. Gah, this just drives me crazy. Why should one language be dominant over another? Heck, we even took many Greek words and made them “American.” Each language has a history behind it and I wish that our culture could see how arrogant we can seem when we always assume that the other person will know our language.

Based on my interactions with multiple storeowners, waiters, and other Greeks I can tell that most Americans visitors or tourists do not take the time to learn even basic, survival Greek. I would say the majority of the time, that whomever I was talking with showed genuine surprise at the fact that young American college kids would take the time to try to learn their language. The key word here is try. This language is hard! There’s no “I” sound, the few Greek letters that are also in the American alphabet make different sounds and I cannot pronounce the deep throat-ey sound that some Greek words contain. Add in my slight Southern accent and in my opinion I butcher some of the conversations I try to carry on. If nothing else I’m sure it’s entertaining to the Greeks to hear my attempt anyways!

Learning a new language is a good way to embarrass yourself, but that’s just another way to grow! Using Greek has definitely taught me how to laugh at myself. When I get back to the States, my family and friends should probably be warned: I will most likely be using “Greeklish” (a combo of Greek and English) for a while, but maybe I can teach yall a thing or two! And we can start a new trend of expanding our language repertoire.