New Friends

For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languages I'd studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others.

It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of "No more languages, thank you!" That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies "Sorry. That's not my table!"

I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn't. In the 1980's immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portugese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all — not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.


	New Friends For the next thirty-five years I stood my ground and resisted taking up any new language. The languages I'd studied up to that point included Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portugese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Chinese (Mandarin dialect), Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I happily applied myself to building competence in those languages and turning a deaf ear to all others. It was tempting to tackle Greek; so many Greeks I could have practiced with were popping up in my daily travels, but I clung to my policy of "No more languages, thank you!" That policy was misguided; in fact, swine headed. I was like the waiter standing there with arms folded who gets asked by a diner if he knows what time it is and brusquely replies "Sorry. That's not my table!" I could have easily and profitably picked up a few words and phrases every time I went to the Greek coffee shop and in the process learned another major language. But I didn't. In the 1980's immigrants to New York, where I lived, began to pour in from unaccustomed corners of the world, adding languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Bengali, Pashtu, Twi, Fanti, Wollof, Albanian, and Dagumbi to our already rich inventory of Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Yiddish, Portugese, Greek, Polish, and Hebrew. I abandoned the policy. Now I want to learn them all — not completely, just enough to delight the heart of an Indian or African cab driver who never before in his entire life met an American who tried to learn his language.