What language did President Obama use when he was going to school in Indonesia? If it was not English, is he still fluent in it? Does he speak any other languages?
God help him if he does.
Obama lived in Indonesia and attended school for a few years as a child. Children have a remarkable ability to learn languages quickly. They also retain the language better than adults. I learned this the hard way as a 40 year old trying to learn Spanish. Kids learn languages very quick.
I would think Obama learned some of the language from schoolmates. How much he retained is something only he knows.
There is an undergraduate language requirement at Columbia (at least there was when I was there–Obama graduated a few years after I did) and while it falls considerably short of fluency, my French got me through several months of living there. Obama must speak some language with a fair amount of proficiency.
I’ve heard he speaks Muslim.
He must be fluent in his native Kenyan.
He must speak jive at least, right?
Shheeeetttt!
(Golly!)
He still speaks at least some Indonesian - he addressed the crowd in that language the other day, there was a report on NPR noting that he learned it when he lived there as a child. I would imagine he’s not particularly fluent though (I doubt he has had much opportunity to converse in that tongue over the last few decades).
Didja learn it?
The BBC reporter talking about his speech in Indoneisa said he addressed the crowd in Indonesian and speaks that language fluently. Wikipedia says he’s “converstaional in Indonesian”.
Here’s a blog post about Obama’s Indonesian. He seems to have retained at least enough for small talk, though like the blogger I suspect people are using a pretty generous definition of the word “fluent” when they say Obama’s fluent in Indonesian, I can’t find anyone who actually knows him well making that claim.
Still, I’m surprised . I’ve known a few people that were raised in foreign countries and spoke the native language fluently as children and have now lost it completely. Maybe there are enough Indonesians in Hawaii that he still had some exposure after he came back to the States.
Also, almost completely irrelevant, but flipping around that blog I found the surprising fact that Colin Powell speaks fluent Yiddish. Apparently as a kid he worked in a baby-supply store in the Bronx that catered to the local Jewish population.
I’m one of those people. English is the third - though not final - language I learned, but the only one I (now) speak fluently. There are cassette tapes of me chattering away at age three, which amazed me when I heard them years later, since I couldn’t understand a word I was saying. It was … disconcerting.
Children’s brains are like sponges, and they soak up languages quickly, yes. What almost no one tells you as the corrollary is that they lose them almost as quickly. I assume the brain figures, “Eh, I don’t need this crap anymore. When was the last time I used this vocabulary?” and deletes the info.
It must be possible. I spoke Serbo-Croatian when I was little, but I lost it after starting school.
I have also know three Filipinos who grew up in suburban Manilla. They were from upscale families. Anyway they went to English only schools over there.
I remember saying, "How is it possible for you to be born in the Philippines, go to school there and come to the USA after your 18 and not know ANY Tagalog or any other Philippine language.
But they didn’t. I thought they were faking but other Filipinos I worked with that did speak Tagalog or Ilokano confimed it was possible.
And you can definately forget a language. I haven’t spoken Serbo-Croat for 35 years, and I am totally lost now.
Same here. Tamil was my primary language as a child, and I even recall once observing that it was the language of my inner monologue, but now, I can’t do much more than follow snatches here and there. It’s sort of embarrassing, really.
I studied French in Middle School, and never had any exposure to the language after that. Then, 40 years later, I went to Paris for the first time. I was amazed at how many words came back to me, *once I was surrounded by the language. *I had forgotten genders and verb tenses, but a lot of basic vocabulary came back. Until I came home, when it all disappeared again. I’ve been back to France 3 more times, and it still works the same way, I remember words while I’m there, and forget them when I get back home.
My colleague was 16 when he left Germany in 1939 (so he is now 87, about to be 88). Although he can still speak some German, I was surprised to hear him speaking English with a visitor from Germany (who, to be sure, was entirely at ease in English). I asked him afterward and he said that after 60 years he just didn’t feel very fluent speaking German. Since he speaks English with some accent (although not strong), it means that there is really no language that he is fluent and speaks without accent.
As for Obama, you would have to ask an Indonesian he has spoken to.
So with the OP answered, can I plug a question of my own? What about other POTUSes, what languages other than English (if any) did they speak?
Although what constitutes fluency is such a wide area that we could have quite the Great Debate on it. As far as I am aware there is no definition.
As an example, I’ve lived in Sweden for eleven years. I work in Swedish. I recently had a stay in hospital where I did all my communication with the staff in Swedish. I, however, do not consider myself to be fluent as I know I have massive gaps in my vocabulary and grammar. I “get by” extremely well, but that IMHO is a world apart from fluency.
There is no such thing as speaking without an accent. That ‘absence’ of accent is in itself an accent.