Re: Learn a new language

[Kevin Cheek <cheek1 -at- sbcglobal -dot- net>]

> >My question...has anyone ever made the effort to learn even a
> rudimentary
> >level of language used by your peers and if so, what was the
> effect on them
> >toward you?

I have a couple of related stories:

First, I worked construction to pay for my living expenses in
college. At one job (where I worked nearly a year), I worked with a
man who had been in the states from Mexico for 24 years, but had
never learned English. We worked together for almost a year, and
taught eachother our languages. I think I learned more Spanish than
he learned English. It helped in two ways:

1. I developed a very good communication with that worker, and we
could work very efficiently together.

2. My unpleasant, red-neck foreman would usually put me in charge of
the largely Spanish-speaking labor crews because "You can talk with
them Messicans."

Then my second job as a Technical Writer was for a small Indian
software start-up. We were producing an object DBMS for which the
main interface was a largish (600+ classes, perhaps 3000 methods) C++
API. The managers were almost all from Mumbai (still called "Bombay"
then) and primarily spoke Hindi and Marathi. Most of the programmers
were from Madras, and were fairly strident Tamil nationalists. They
spoke Tamil and WOULD NOT speak Hindi. Therefore, I had to learn C++
very thoroughly, because most of the office conversation took place
in a hodgepodge of English and C++. 

By the way, back to the (much beaten dead horse of a) topic of
technical knowlege. Before taking that job, I had never read a line
of C or C++ code. However, I had a strong knowlege of database
structures. By the time I left that job two years later, I had
written a 1000+ page C++ API reference and programmer's guide, and I
had become a passable novice C++ programmer. I learned more in that
two year job than I had learned in six years of college. I hold that
the ability and willingness to learn is vastly more important than
any piece of technical knowlege.

-Kevin Cheek


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