Yesterday I met a Brazilian woman in a coffee shop in D.C. This was my chance to show off my Portuguese! But after "Oi! Tudo bom?" I had nothing left, which stung. Back in 2010, I'd regularly have full dinners in Portuguese with my grandmother's Brazilian caretaker, who didn't speak English. At the coffee shop, though, it was clear that I'd lost the ability to speak the language. And, as an effect, I lost a potential new friend. It's very hard to actually be friends with someone if you can't speak that person's native language.
Portuguese is not the only language I once spoke either conversationally or fluently but have subsequently lost. The same has happened with French and Spanish. In 2011, I lived in France for a year and got to the level where I could express myself easily and where the French didn't have to slow down or avoid slang with me. Last week at the Embassy's Bastille Day party, I couldn't last 2 minutes before reverting to English.
And in 2007, during a Spring Break trip to Chile in my senior year of high school, I'd go out and speak Spanish all night with native Chileans. Three years later, in 2010, the skill was still there--on a trip to Amsterdam I served as the translator between my friend who could only speak Portuguese and another friend who could only speak Spanish, explaining one time that 'perezoso' in Spanish is 'preguiçoso' in Portugese (and 'lazy' in English). Now the Spanish is gone, as I sadly learned by trying to communicate with a taxi driver in Madrid last October. I couldn't even figure out how to say I wanted to go to the airport. Quiero ir al aeropuerto.
The reason I've lost these languages is that it's hard to find conversation partners when not living abroad. The options have been to either sign up for a class, connect with an expensive tutor, or not do anything. The options have been bad, so I ended up being perezoso.
That's why I created a new option: A way for language learners to find native speakers just to chat with. It's a new iPhone app called Accint (which you can download here), where language learners can scroll through lists of native speakers for hour-long, in-person conversations. For their physical presences and native accents, native speakers can charge between $15 and $40. No lesson plans or any of that, just chatting about whatever.
What inspired me to create Accint was thinking about the cost of having learned, and then lost the ability to speak, three separate languages. I've estimated that losing the languages has cost me $127,000, and even more when intangible costs are included.
Here's how the accounting breaks down:
- With Spanish, I took classes for eight years at St. Albans School. The cost of a year's tuition is $35,000 right now, which means one class is $7,000 per year, assuming classes are what you're paying for. So (8)($7,000) = $56,000
- With Portuguese, I took a class for one year at Princeton. The cost of attending Princeton for a year is estimated to be around $60,000. So if you take 5 classes per semester, a yearlong class is $12,000. The following summer, I studied abroad in Rio with a Harvard program for $5,000. So Portuguese cost $12,000 + $5,000 = $17,000
- With French I took classes for 2 years at Princeton, which equates to around $24,000. I also lived there for a year, and the difference between what I made as a tutor (the only job I could get in France) and the healthcare consulting job I got when moving back to the U.S. was about $30,000. So $24,000 + $30,000 = $56,000
- Total Language Waste = $56,000 (Spanish) + $17,000 (Portuguese) + $54,000 (French) = $127,000
Regardless of what the tuition is for, clearly a lot has been invested in my language skills, skills which have attenuated significantly. But it's the non-monetary cost of no longer having these skills that makes it extra-painful, more painful than no longer knowing how to do integrals and derivatives.
For example, I couldn't get a job in the U.S. at a place like Google. My resume isn't strong enough. But if I still spoke Portuguese, I could apply to the office in Sao Paulo, where I might have a better chance at getting hired. And if I were to have gotten a job there, I would've made dozens of Brazilian friends, and I would've accumulated years of memories of everyday Sao Paulo life.
The example of once possibly maybe working for Google in Sao Paulo is intended to show that languages can expand the variety of experiences that a person might access. Learning and then forgetting a language is not only financially wasteful, but it also reduces the number of both jobs that a person might qualify for and cultures that an individual can experience in a vibrant way.
And isn't that why we learn languages to begin with? To be able to experience new cultures more deeply? Well with Accint you can maintain the language by finding native speakers to talk to in-person, in your own city. You can continue to experience these new cultures while no longer living abroad.
And if you're in the DC area and are a native French, Spanish, or Portuguese speaker, if you sign up and advertise, you know who your first student will be :)