Post Nouveau

I’ve always had a particular fascination with foreign languages. Sadly, though, I’ve found myself rather unwilling to actually learn any one. How does one even go about choosing which language he will devote his studies to?

Shall it be a Romance language? I’ve always liked how many vowels French seems to squeeze into words, but I’ve always felt as though Romance languages, in general, are simply far too common. I mean, perhaps in Europe knowing one of them would come in quite handy. But, really, the only thing learning a Romance language has ever done for any of my friends is instill within them a rather hefty misconception that they know the language they’ve been taught the last few years of their life. Why do I have such a gloomy view of language-learning? Well, you see, I distinctly remember a friend of mine ordering lunch in Française at a particular tres chic restaurant in Epcot’s French Pavilion. She really made an utter fool of herself because, as a senior in high school and thus having studied French for the last 6 years of her life, she was unable to properly order her meal. Her sentence structure was consequently critiqued by our snippy waiter (whose name, of course was Sebastion).

After having witnessed my poor friend betrayed by her ill-begotten language skills, I became quite proud of myself for choosing to study Latin. Granted, I had to spend 7200 hours of my life (not taking into consideration my frequent high school truancies) monkishly translating line after line of absolutely superfluous verse and prose, in the end, it had to be less painful than the humiliation and emptiness an inadequate fluency would bare (even though our classroom lacked fun posters of the Eiffel Tower or young fellows named Diego shaking maracas).

As far as Asian languages go, I could never write in pictogram matrices. Nor could I ever hold up a peace sign in every photograph I appear in. Nor could I ever wear a Hello Kitty backpack.

And that, my friends, was a Post Nouveau.