There are reasons language is taught by parents, schools and higher institutions. Communication is important. Some students learn all the details of a language without becoming fluent. They may recognize the names of arcane verb constructs but if they can’t hold a conversation in the language, they have to some degree failed the course even if they aced the exam.
The purpose of language is communication. There is a value to speaking, even badly, in a foreign language. If you have definite limitations but must cope in a foreign language then you can partially use sign language and you can also point to the desired object.
If you are living overseas and need to have more complicated communications daily, speak like Dick and Jane in the old primers: use present tense for everything, inshort sentences with no clauses. Hopefully you will soon graduate to the next version of limited language skills, which is to find shortcuts such as “I am going to” and other verbs which take an easy-to-remember infinitive. In my novel, “Skyscrapers,” both my CEO’s are bilingual. It will be obvious to readers that Ellie Smith is, as a Mexican immigrant; but Vern Webb had to speak Arabic in order to import drugs to New York, which a reader can guess from his former close partnership with Jehan al-Shiraz and the mention of time spent with the Berbers.
Every language has oddities. Foreigners trying to speak English have a major hurdle with the words containing “ough.” It’s not hard to recognize visually, and you could learn such words from a dictionary, but if so, you would not recognize the spoken sounds of “cough,” “through,” “bough,” and “though,” in ordinary conversation. Another stumbler is the double verb “make do,” which is hard for foreign-speakers because the two are one word in some languages, such as the word “faire” in French. So a foreigner understands “make make” or “do do” from this construction. (And of course, is further unprepared for what “do-do” means in English when it is not spelled “dodo.”)
Fluency is when you can go to a cocktail party, encounter people you don’t know, and keep up with their various accents and their fast pace and their jokes and idioms and current slang. This is a level most of us never reach in a foreign language, but it is the measure of fluency. A lower but very admirable level of fluency is business fluency, in which one is working in one’s own business but in a foreign language: the vocabulary is more limited, so you can use simple sentences and short-cuts to communicate effectively and seem intelligent. But the real test is always the cocktail party, where there’s a lot of background noise, some people have lisps or foreign accents (never the same accent you have), and everyone speaks very fast, often in partial sentences, idioms, throw-off lines or current slang.
Why learn a language to that degree? Because it stretches your mind. You think differently when you think in a foreign language, as your mind processes connections and links that are unique to the other language. You may perceive links that seem new, and distinctions that seem strange. English-speakers have trouble knowing when to use the subjunctive tense for verbs, having never had to distinguish between actuality and uncertainty in verbs.
When the Hmong came to America after the Vietnam War, their worst language difficulty was that they did not have a concept of time built into their language. “Class will meet tomorrow at three PM” was an unintelligible phrase, and if you don’t have that structure in your brain, it takes some time to build it.
But language is, after all, just a structure built around sounds, created for us to communicate with each other. Some animals have rudimentary language, and a few are somewhat sophisticated (such as dolphins or elephants) but humans have mobile tongues and jaws. They have developed brains capable of classifying, identifying, and communicating everything they want to about their world. Speaking one language gives a person one window onto the world. A second language adds a second window.
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