The advertisement began with a photo of seven, grim looking, suit-and-tie males, ready to pounce on anybody foolish enough to interrupt their exclusive domain. The caption to the photo posed a dare:You had to pass a lot of hurdles to get this far. Now you have just 25 minutes to get your point across – in their language.

How clever. An ad for learning foreign languages using ACCELERATED LEARNING, whatever that means. Yes, for only $297 plus shipping and handling, which nets you a bunch of tapes, you can speak and understand your new language within 30 days – or your money back. Sounds great, sounds ingenious, sounds impossible.

But what choice do we have? According to the authoritatively sounding ad:If you want to succeed in the global economy, high school language skills just won’t cut it. Then, to further scare us into action, the ad claims that an estimated 100,000 executives will learn to speak a foreign language this year. And if you’re not one of them, watch out. Because they are going to pass you by. Now, that’s heavy.

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Anybody who has ever attempted to learn a foreign language knows that within 30 days you might progress far enough to clumsily ask directions to the nearest tourist trap. But to speak and understand a language after a month, forget it. Just read Mark Twain’s essay on that awful German language. Twain struggled for weeks with such a hideous manner of speaking, but he never mastered the art of placing verbs at the end of sentences and stringing together endless sets of nouns to concoct titles for government officials.

Back in 1980, Senator Paul Simon, future professor at SIU, wrote a marvelous little book entitled, The Tongue-Tied American. I loved that book, with its diverse examples of how Americans were hopelessly behind in learning foreign languages. Our failure to learn languages frequently led us into deep do-do, like trying to sell a car in South America with the name Nova, which, of course, in Spanish means no go.

However, over the years, I have tempered my zeal for escaping tongue-tied status. Perhaps that is because I simply have doubts about the urgency for most of us to learn foreign languages.

Florence Chong, a journalist from Singapore working in Australia, wrote a few years ago that it is simply wrong to assume that to succeed in business in Asia, English-speaking business people should speak Asian languages. While no one would argue against the personal value of being able to speak and read another language, it’s misplaced to assume that knowing a language will translate magically into improved trade and business.

Chong added that in Asia, as everywhere, the bottom line is that if there’s a dollar to be made and two people can look each other in the eye, a deal will be struck. Most prominent business leaders in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, for instance, do not speak English. They use interpreters and have managed to build up huge business networks in the United States and in other parts of Asia.

The real drawback, however, to taking crash courses in foreign languages lies in the mistakes that will usually be made when trying to use this hastily obtained knowledge. As Chong noted, Speaking or understanding just part of a language can be embarrassing and detrimental when doing business. Asian languages, like English, have their nuances and colloquialisms which escape all but the most fluent speakers. More than knowing the language, the key to doing business in Asia is empathy with business contacts. Simple etiquette and common courtesy are important in developing an honest business relationship, concluded Chong.

With due respect to the ad for ACCELERATED LEARNING of foreign languages, I find the crash course technique of learning languages unrealistic. It resembles a crash diet. You’ll have initial success because you’re starting from square one. But once you reach square two, with 50 more to go, the futility of continuing usually prevents a successful outcome.

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Speaking a foreign language well is a life-long pursuit (the same could be said for speaking our native tongue well). It just will not happen overnight. And, as Chong aptly noted, if we are learning another language for business reasons, we might do better to focus on empathy and cultural sensitivity.

SIUC graduate student, journalism