THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE-LEARNING GENE?
"How many languages does he speak?", she gushes, admiringly, as if this were a matter of the Foreign Language Fairy Godmother waving her magic wand and intoning, in her own inscrutable language, "bibbity, bobbity, boo!" The true answer: "he speaks a number of them, none very correctly, but nobody seems to mind, especially not here in Italy." I am going to stick my neck out and say something outrageous like, "some people have the foreign language-learning gene, while others do not." Now that could be high sacrilege, coming as it does from a French prof. who has been reinventing herself as an Italian. But I am not suggesting that to be missing that gene condemns anyone to befuddlement. That is entirely up to the would-be speaker. The foreign-language gene can only get you so far. To speak a new language takes a willingness to risk making mistakes and the energy and discipline to observe and mimic native speakers, to read and watch even the ...