Say what?

I'll admit it: I wasn't careful about what I wished for. Disregarding old wives' tales, I'd heard my friends complain quarter after quarter about how difficult their classes were. With words like "O-chem," "P-chem," and "thermal physics" swirling around my head, which seemed to attach a sense of importance to the student speaking, I began to long for a class of my very own to complain about.

Now I'm stuck in third-quarter Spanish and experiencing for myself the feeling of mentally running as fast as I can without moving anywhere. I am one of the privileged who gets the honor of walking into a class that makes me question my intelligence daily. On the good side, I'm gaining great respect for those who have mastered fluency in multiple languages.

English is regarded as one of the most difficult languages to learn in terms of its endless exceptions to every grammatical rule, odd pronunciations and multiple meanings of the same word, such as "read" as in "I want to read this book now," and "read" as in "I read that book last night." Add the constantly changing vocabulary of slang and contractions, and it's no wonder other countries with multiple official languages require English classes to begin in elementary school.

Japanese and Chinese are also extremely complex for those native to the Roman alphabet. Japanese alone has four forms, one with 26 characters, two with 46 characters and one with symbols numbering in the thousands that represent complete ideas rather than sounds. In addition to the millions of letter combinations, the penmanship or formation of each character is a work of art in itself.

Even Spanish -- one of the most easily pronounceable languages due to cognates that look and sound the same as in English -- has verb conjugation forms for multiple tenses: present, imperfect, preterit, conditional, etc. Half the time spent in class is focused on teaching different verb forms, and I can personally vouch that it's difficult to keep them separate.

The UW's status as an internationally recognized institution, however, speaks volumes of the language abilities of its students. Eighteen foreign countries are represented on campus; therefore, a large percentage of UW students are, at minimum, bi-lingual, as most classes are taught entirely in English.

It blows my mind that as I struggle to learn to say, "I would like to become a scientist," in Spanish, English as a Second Language students listen to lectures on mechanical engineering and are able to understand the technical terminology. Not only that -- they can discuss the material in multiple languages, a trait that makes them even more attractive to potential employers, considering how globalized the economy has become.

Walking a mile in someone else's proverbial shoes is obviously a great way to understand a different perspective, but more importantly can temper your own ego a bit. Americans have a reputation for intolerance of people who have a less-than-perfect grasp of the English language, but I'm hoping this will change. As long as universities force reluctant foreign language students like myself to step outside our linguistic comfort zones, others will realize it's not how, but rather what you say that counts.