Karl Marx, Me, And Learning English

While attending graduate school in the U.S. over a decade ago, I was occasionally asked how long I had studied English before coming to America. I always hesitated before answering. If I told the truth (ten years, six of which in grade school and four in college), then I would desperately want to end the conversation soon. Five-minute of talking in English seemed to be the utter limit I could handle without looking either dumb or anti-social.

I was neither. But, then, how could I explain that, despite of the decade-long effort, I still spoke the broken English beyond repair, and wrote nothing original but “on the one hand…on the other hand”?

As far as I could tell, my case was typical, at least among Chinese. Many had studied English longer—and harder—than I, but most of them weren’t much better off. I figured, unless acquiring second language is harder than studying rocket science, which many of us seemed to have no problem with, there must be something awfully wrong with the way we learned.

As my own experience tells, in retrospect, I would say everything went wrong. When I first studied English at the sixth grade, I was eager; ever since I watched the TV coverage of Deng Xiaoping’s first visit to the United States, I became obsessed with everything associated with America. My eagerness, however, faded quickly. And six years in a row, English came in the second subject I hated the most, after the ultimate champ, Socialism Studies.

To be fair, it’s no fun to study any subject at school in China—teacher always made sure we suffer as the sign of the progress. But I expected that English was taught at least differently from, say, Algebra. I was wrong. All of my teachers followed the same philosophy that's as old as the Confucianism: the only way to instill something in student is to drill the same rule over and over until his brain spins.

My English teacher was fond of this in particular, and she did it with an immense zeal. Man, let me tell you, solving a thousand algebra equations was one thing; working on subject and verb agreement a thousand times was totally insane. Yet, she was never tired of it.

Even if I survived the teacher, I had no chance to stay sane with the textbook. Half of the texts were mad repetitions like “This is a sheep. That is a sheep. These are all sheep”, substituting sheep with other animals and starting all over again; another half were filled with such a masterpiece like “How Karl Marx Learns Foreign Languages”.

Imagine if you had Socialism Studies and English class in a row, twice a week, and six years in duration. Could Karl Marx have fared any better, I always wonder, if he had gone through what we did?