American TV, the World’s English

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I am pleased that Jason Blake, who teaches English at the University of Ljubljana, is becoming a regular contributor to this website. As an English speaker living in Slovenia, Jason is particularly sensitive to questions of language. In the following essay he triggers memories for me when he talks about how television, which we normally see as detrimental to reading, becomes a virtue (maybe) when it fosters language acquisition. My own brothers and I grew up without a television, but I remember a magical sabbatical year in Paris when we had one. I particularly remember enjoying Mr. Ed, a sitcom about a talking horse. It had been mildly amusing to see a talking horse in the States. I found it hilarious to see a horse talk French.

Along the same lines, Jason tells me that he finds the sitcom King of Queens much funnier when he watches it dubbed into German.

By Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana

North America has a tough time dealing with foreign languages, which is embarrassingly ironic for nations of immigrants. Just four decades ago, educational experts were saying that children should ditch their native Hungarian or Japanese or Italian and speak only English. Something about words bumping into each other in the brain and blocking the path to the tongue. Like many theories that lend themselves to comfy analogies, this was rubbish.

Now they’re saying the opposite, basically arguing that the brain is a muscle and that pumping two languages at an early age strengthens it. As Joseph Hall writes in a recent Toronto Star article, “rather than being a detrimental assault on an infant brain, as was long held by many in the field, early bilingualism gives children distinct advantages later in life, especially in reading…” Researchers now claim that learning other languages later in life does wonders for our minds and memories because it keeps the brain supple, even if complete bilingualism after childhood is extremely rare.

That learning or maintaining another language was ever considered detrimental baffles me. A man whacked a golf ball on the moon before we came to our scientific senses and realized that speaking more than one language is not unnatural. Much of the world’s population, whether literate or not, switches idioms on a daily basis for purposes of trade and survival.


In the Anglosphere, where one often has to travel hours to cross a linguistic border, the use value of foreign languages – like the use value of literature – is not always evident. This might be a good thing, since too much use value, even in modern language education, can lead to one-dimensionality. Over dinner a few months ago, an American linguist specializing in Slavic languages deadpanned: “They only cared about Russian when I was in university. They were training us to be spies.” Until three weeks ago, when eleven suspected Russian secret agents stole the headlines, I thought we had that business all behind us.

In Graham Fraser’s 2007 Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won’t Go Away, the journalist (and now Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages) writes, “Canada’s English-language universities treat French as a foreign language whose literature should be studied by those preparing to be French teachers.”

Insert “Latin” for “French” here and you see little difference between the dead and the living languages. We should learn French so that another generation can learn French, so that…

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin stars a Russian émigré who flubs his way around American academia in broken English. Pnin is a multilingual rendered a fool because English is not among the languages he has mastered. The novel also contains a certain Professor Blorenge: “Two interesting characteristics distinguished Leonard Blorenge, Chairman of French Literature and Language; he disliked Literature and he had no French.” For Blorenge, French necessarily belongs in the classroom, since he can’t actually speak it in conversation. And in any case, in America there’s no clear brass tacks need for it outside of the university.

One of the great pleasures of teaching English literature in Slovenia is that the prickly issue of use value is put aside. There may be a need for a “Defence of Poetry” here, but not for a “Defence of English.” English is so widespread that nobody questions its utility, especially when your country’s idiom numbers only two million speakers.

Regardless of how unsuccessfully I may teach a literature course, I know that come semester end my students’ vocabularies will have improved and that they’ll have had a chance to speak English in a somewhat natural environment. (I say “natural” because English is my native tongue – there’s none of the necessary role-playing that exists when my Slovenian wife speaks in English to her Slovenian pupils.) When I grade essays on Hemingway or Larkin, students seem most interested in feedback on style, vocabulary and grammar. Most importantly, they will use their foreign language outside the classroom, which is not a given when one studies Italian in Illinois.

Another pleasure is that students come to me from high school with an already-solid knowledge of English, meaning I can teach the same way I would in a North American college. For the most part, the English taught in schools is Received Pronunciation, known to me in my pre-Slovenian days as “she’s trying to talk like the Queen.” Textbooks are almost exclusively Made in the England (not least because England has done a darn good job of convincing the ESL world that theirs in the real English).

And yet nine out of ten freshman students speak American English. Many arrive at the university already sounding like native speakers. Obviously not all young Slovenians are stellar in English, but almost all do lean towards American (read: MTV) English.

A case in point: last week I took my visiting sister and her family to Kartuzija Žiče (j is pronounced like y, ž sounds like the g in “giraffe,” and č the same as ch in “cheese”), a former Carthusian monastery tucked away in the lower Slovenian hills. This charterhouse, the first outside of Romanic lands, was established around 1160 – or some 330 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It is old. Many of the glorious medieval manuscripts on display there also pre-date the New World.

At Žiče, you can walk into the ruined, roofless abbey, look at the settlement’s intact walls that match the natural contours of the valley, and question the need for fortification towers in a place so far from civilization. North American to the bone, I get off on old things, and so did my visitors from Toronto. It was easy for us to envision monks in their white habits, perhaps even a hair shirt or two, collecting herbs and distilling liqueurs here.

Many restorative herb products, including a full range of liqueurs, are available in Žiče’s apothecary (it’s really just a gift shop built into the ancient quarters, but how often do you get to use that A-word these days?). The shop has an impressive range of ancient monkish solutions for whatever ails you.

Ducking under a stone doorframe built for shorter generations, I expected a scene out of Romeo and Juliet. I was Romeo in search of beer liqueur, my quirky poison of choice on that day. Here are all of the apothecary’s lines in that play:

Who calls so loud?

Such mortal drugs I have; but Mantua’s law
Is death to any he that utters them.

My poverty, but not my will, consents.

Put this in any liquid thing you will,
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight.



The Žiče apothecary was a young woman, probably still a teenager, who addressed us in entirely idiomatic American English. She capably explained what the various herbal teas, herb-based ointments, and shiny rocks could do for our health (“This is good for ‘women’s problems,’ this for digestion, and this for bruises.”), apologized for the state of the herb garden that lay beyond the stony entrance to the grounds, and offered us booze samples. Her spiel, delivered in almost flawless grammar peppered with “gonna’s” and “like’s,” was less coy than the apothecary’s, but by no means pushy.

I couldn’t get over her accent and was sure she’d spent a year in the States. “Where did you learn your English?” I asked.

“Cartoons.”

I’ve heard this a few times. A Montreal-born friend claims she learned her excellent English not in school but from The Simpsons. I play hockey with a bunch of guys who are fluent in Croatian despite only two years of classes (they were in school when Slovenia gained independence and the new state instantly dropped “Serbo-Croatian” from the curriculum). When I praised the school system, one said, “Get real. We learned it from watching Croatian cartoons and reading Croatian comic books!”

It’s common, easy and probably even correct to blame television for a decline in reading skills and general language ability. A quick hit of sitcom is easier than even Harry Potter. Outside of America, television deserves some credit: hordes of young people have learned fluid (if not fluent) English primarily through fluffy entertainment. Apparently many young Slovenians have also picked up a fair amount of Spanish thanks to the telenovele series that dominate the afternoon airwaves. This is a far cry from the traditional route of verb charts and vocabulary lists.

George Mikes’ 1946 How to Be an Alien is a comic rendering of his life as a Hungarian in England. People tell me this book is hilarious, and I might agree were it not so similar to my life in Slovenia. In the section “Language,” Mikes says, “Do not forget that it is much easier to write in English than to speak in English, because you can write without a foreign accent.” Here he hits on a common misperception among native speakers: we confuse a convincing accent with ability. Mikes jokingly drives home the point: “Anyway, this whole language business is not at all easy. After spending eight years in this country, the other day I was told by a very kind lady: ‘But why do you complain? You really speak a most excellent accent without the slightest English.’”

In literary terms, this is the old form and content interlacing. When a young person has picked up a convincing accent, it can become form versus content. Consider this playground exchange between me and a young boy who had heard me speaking English with my daughter. He delivered his lines with explosive enthusiasm:

“What is your name?!”
“Jason. What is yours?”
“Give me your money, now!”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I live in the jungle!”

The boy’s cartoon-accent was flawless, and not until the second response did I realize that this was form without meaning, just a series of memorized sound bits. To some extent he had learned this gibberish naturally – through the ear. This was real-life theatre of the absurd that would slide easily into the last few minutes of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. It is no fluke that this passage was inspired in part by clumsy language textbook dialogue:

Mrs. Smith: In real life, one must look out of the window.
Mrs. Martin: One can sit down on a chair, when the chair doesn’t have any.
Mr. Smith: One must always think of everything.
Mr. Martin: The ceiling is above, the floor is below.
Mrs. Smith: When I say yes, it’s only a manner of speaking.
Mrs. Martin: To each his own.
Mr. Smith: Take a circle, caress it, and it will turn vicious.
Mrs. Smith: A schoolmaster teaches his pupils to read, but the cat suckles her young when they are small.

In a few years, that playground boy will probably string his phrases together into a coherent grammar, perhaps becoming as proficient in English as the Žiče apothecary. As someone who believes that learning another language is intrinsically good, I’m tempted to applaud language acquisition by any means. But I have in-the-gut reservations. For how can it be that hours of television are bad if they’re in your language, but good if they teach you another language?

My daughter, whose English has begun to sound more natural since she’s started watching cartoons in her father’s tongue, would say, “Cartoons are good! good! good!” But at what cost? Yesterday this bilingual four-year-old shocked me with, “Books are boring! I want cartoons.” To be fair, she was exhausted and in the mood for instant gratification.

Jason Blake is author of Canadian Hockey Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2010).

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