U.S. Lets Non-Western Language Skills Fade

Re “We Can’t Squander Language Skills,” Commentary, Nov. 5: My wife and I have adopted three older children from Russia. They are being offered the same choices of foreign languages as everyone else in school--French or Spanish. These children have a head start in their native language that would take years of intense work for most of us to overcome, yet the Culver City School District does nothing with this opportunity.

As a returned Peace Corps volunteer, I have been unable to find resources in L.A. for maintaining proficiency in Nepali. A classmate who served with the Peace Corps in Iran ended up speaking Farsi with nearly the proficiency of an educated native speaker and had a similar experience upon return. Pashto may not be taught in the U.S.; however, it has much in common with Farsi and with Hindi/Urdu and Nepali. Had we kept up our skills, my classmate and I could pick up a useful amount of Pashto in a matter of weeks.

In the Reagan-Bush years we were covertly involved in Afghanistan, saw communism crumble and fought the Gulf War. Now we are back in Afghanistan. What will it take to alert us to the importance of foreign languages, particularly those spoken outside Western Europe?

David Mason

Culver City

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Learning a language is not easy, especially when one isn’t aware of how important it is. In the U.S., because most people can speak English, they don’t need to care too much about other languages. Sometimes in school, a native English speaker will even put down and make fun of those who speak a different language. That’s the main problem: Immigrant students would also like to speak their own languages; to make them feel that they can’t speak English as well makes them feel disgraced. To help immigrants have the confidence in school and give native English speakers some interest in learning other languages, we need to teach all the children to be aware and understand the right way to treat the differences.

Chi-Chang Sun

Burbank