For a Leg Up in Job Markets

Don't Be Clark Griswold

“The Tower of Babel” (1563) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (from Wikimedia Commons)

As an economics professor at the University of Richmond (2001-2007), I advised undergraduates on how to navigate job markets—particularly in business, economics, and finance. I often stressed the value of mastering at least one foreign language. Below are some anecdotes I regularly shared with students and faculty—which ultimately led to my becoming director of the university’s foreign language immersion program, where I radically altered the program’s structure.

In 1983, I was hired by Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase) to be the bank’s economist for Sub-Saharan Africa, despite the fact that I was a mere grad student in economics, with no background or significant studies in either banking or Africa. In my interview, my soon-to-be-boss asked what I knew about Africa. I told him I was a map freak. “Give me a blank map of the continent, and I can tell you the name of every country—and what each country was called during the colonial era.” He had seen from my CV that I had been a small-town newspaper reporter, and I handed him a stack of my writings—none of which had anything to do with banking or Africa. He asked whether I could speak French, and I said «Oui. Je ne parle pas couramment, mais je peux converser assez bien.» (“Yes. I’m not fluent, but I can converse pretty well.”)

I got the job, despite the fact that other applicants had substantial experience in banking and in dealing with Africa. Maybe twenty years later, I asked my former boss why he had hired me, given the far more experienced applicants with whom I was competing. He said:

Three reasons. First, I knew there were approximately seven economists in the United States capable of writing a complete sentence in the English language, and I wanted one of them. Second, because you could speak French, and that was essential for dealing with West Africa. And third, because you had no expertise on Sub-Saharan Africa, and I was sick to death of everyone who did.

I’ll focus here on reason #2: foreign language skills. I’ll add that just a few years earlier, my wife, a trained artist with a freshly minted master’s in library science, was hired by Columbia University as a fine arts and architecture librarian in large part because, unlike other applicants, she had a working knowledge of French, Spanish, and (especially) German.

It’s often noted that Americans have a disadvantage in international trade and finance because, compared with our friends from abroad, Americans often exhibit a profound lack of foreign language skills. There are at least three good reasons for this debilitating monolingualism and one bad, but remediable, reason. The good reasons are:

---

First, English has no close kin among languages. The closest language on earth to English is Frisian, and it’s not all that close. Take the opening of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

In Frisian, via Google Translate, the passage becomes:

It wie de bêste fan 'e tiden, it wie de minste fan' e tiden, it wie de tiid fan wiisheid, it wie de tiid fan 'e dwaasheid, it wie it tiidrek fan leauwen, it wie it tiidrek fan ûnleauwichheid, it wie it seizoen fan ljocht, it wie it seizoen fan tsjuster, it wie de maitiid fan hope, it wie de winter fan wanhoop.

Recognizable? Had you shown me the latter, I might have guessed the source from the opening: “It wie de bêste fan 'e tiden, it wie de minste fan' e tiden,” and from the general rhythm of the prose. I would have understood “it,” “hope,” and “winter” and not much else. “Seizoen,” maybe? But, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it easily. In contrast, write the same passage in different Romance languages, and they look pretty similar:

• French: “C'était le meilleur des temps, c'était le pire des temps,”

• Spanish: “Fue el mejor de los tiempos, fue el peor de los tiempos,”

• Italian: “Era il migliore dei tempi, era il peggiore dei tempi,”

• Portuguese: “Foi o melhor dos tempos, foi o pior dos tempos,”

• Catalan: “Va ser el millor dels temps, va ser el pitjor dels temps,”

It’s pretty easy to be multilingual when you start out with a Romance language. Same with Northern European languages and lots of other language families around the earth.

---

Second, the United States is so large that many of us spend little or no time outside its English-speaking bounds. If you live in France, it’s pretty surprising if you haven’t traveled a few hours to Britain or Germany or Spain or Italy or beyond. My parents were erudite and fascinated by the world. Dad lived to just shy of 84 and Mom to 93, but neither ever owned a passport or crossed the U.S., border, even to visit Canada, a few hours away. That’s even more amazing when you consider that Dad was a soldier throughout World War II—rising from buck private to first lieutenant.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that my father was nearly sent to Germany during World War II because the higher-ups at Camp Lee, Virginia had heard—wrongly!—that he was an expert speaker of German, French, and a bunch of other languages. In fact, he had a cursory knowledge of high school French and nothing more. But, he had a sharp ear for accents and a gift for comedy, and he used to entertain friends on the base by pretending to speak all of these other languages. Some higher-up had heard him performing and drew the wrong conclusions. When my father explained this, the officer requesting his transfer was explosively angry, accusing him of trying to get out of a European assignment by lying. Dad had to perform his comedy routine to calm the officer down and persuade him that he really did not speak any other languages. (The comedian Sid Caesar regularly pulled the same trick to hilarious effect.)

---

Third, English is so widely spoken as a second language that we have the luxury of traveling abroad, bumbling our way through country after country using nothing but English and getting along just fine. This is a staple of comedy, portrayed well by Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) and family in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. There’s a nice video of the Griswolds in a French cafe, but I won’t link to it here, as it’s a tad racy at times.

---

But the fourth reason for Americans’ language deficit is not so forgivable—and it’s remediable. At least as recently as my tenure at Richmond, foreign language instruction in the United States was traditionally designed to be as boring and unpleasant and unnatural as possible. Loads of memorizing lists of verb conjugations. Translating and discussing obscure foreign poetry. (Poetry can be hard enough to parse and comprehend if it’s written in your own language.) And endless scolding and marking students down for trivial grammatical errors—halting their discourse in front of classmates so that every conversation is like driving down a pothole-cratered roadway.

When I became director of the university’s language immersion program, I enacted radical changes. Rather than hiring professors to run the sessions, I hired eager students from French-speaking countries to chair the French sections, and likewise with sections in Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, etc. My prime directive to instructors was for them to find ways to make the lessons entertaining. Conversation was to focus not on translating arcane poetry, but rather on chatting naturally about things that interested them. Business students talked about business, art students talked about art. They all discussed politics, sports, movies. I didn’t care what they talked about as long as they talked. Their readings were from straightforward newspaper articles, not from complex, high-brow literary texts. Students were to be applauded for speaking with some fluency rather than halted and publicly criticized for using the wrong conjugation.

For those teachers, students, and parents interested in exploring these ideas, they were summarized in my article, “Comment Dit-On «Standard Deviation»?: An Effortless Business-Language Curriculum.” I’ll add two caveats. My involvement in foreign language education ended fifteen years ago, so I can’t say whether pedagogical techniques have improved since then; my occasional interaction with undergraduates since then suggests not, however.

Promisingly, for self-motivated students, the high-tech world has produced an array of superb language training systems that are widely available on the web. (Here’s a recent top-10 list.) If formal college language training is not up to snuff, a dedicated student can turn to these programs. Students can also make great use of web-based language translators, of which Google Translate is the most prominent. (Machine translation can become a crutch, but certainly doesn’t have to.) The accuracy of machine-based translation has improved enormously since my involvement in language education ended, and the sheer number of languages now available in an instant is astonishing:

Summing up, colleges and universities today can be absolutely awful at preparing students for job markets. For motivated students who wish to bypass that unfortunate fact, I can recommend nothing more highly than to start early and obtain a solid grounding in at least one foreign language. Parents take note.

---

Bonus: Language Riddle

For those of you who find languages entertaining, here’s a riddle for you. I’ll give the answer at the bottom of my next Bastiat’s Window article and tell you which program I used to generate it. In the meantime, readers are welcome to discuss this passage in the comments section below and, if you solve it, to share the answer.

I took a famous 20th century quote and translated it into Old English, which was spoken 1,000 or more years ago. This quote is entirely inappropriate for an ancient language, which is what amused me about producing it. I don’t speak Old English, so I can’t swear that it’s grammatically perfect, but from my limited knowledge, it looks pretty solid. HINT: The third word begins with a letter not found in Modern English (þ). It is pronounced as a voiced “th” as in “that” or “those.” The final word ends with another obsolete letter (ð) that is equivalent to an unvoiced “th,” as in “path” or “birth.”

To solve the riddle, I suggest that you start by sounding it out loud to the best of your ability. Dramatically, perhaps. If need be, you can try web translators, though it might be a bit slow. Share your thoughts and discoveries in the comments below. Happy translating! :)

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.