Americans are famous for saying they aren’t good at learning languages. They tend to give me the same joke: “I’m lucky if I can speak English.”

The many people who say that always think it’s funny.

No wonder language software companies tell Americans that learning language is fast, fun and easy. How else will they get them to buy?

I suggest our citizens encourage themselves by noticing how many languages people in other countries learn. Take the African employee I met in a hotel lobby in St. Louis. He and his family have four languages in common. To illustrate to you how ordinary this is to them, I asked him if he also spoke tribal languages. He hadn’t thought to mention dialects.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I know four of those because my friends speak them.”

Seven languages and dialects…and English. And Americans joke that they’re lucky if they can speak English. Americans can learn to speak and understand something besides English. It helps to look at modern language primarily as something you use rather than as a subject area.