Going to a big university like MU instead of a small college comes with many tradeoffs.
MU gets big football games; the small college gets parking actually available on weekends. Small colleges have intimate class sizes; we get giant lecture halls, which almost always mean a teaching assistant, whose native language, judging by their typically thick accents, is probably not English.
So we whine to our friends and blame our poor understanding of the material on the fact that we have no idea what our TA was saying the entire hour of class. Whether it is Spanish, Chinese or traces of any other foreign language, we see accents as nothing but an extremely dominant language barrier.
However, accents are not a weakness like we have cast them off to be. Accents are the residue from a different first language, showing us English is not the end-all-be-all of communication as we may think.
My dad has always had a very thick accent -— the effect of living in a different country for the first 25 years of his life. My siblings and I would always poke fun at the way he butchered seemingly simple words.
The last time we were mocking the way he pronounced his F’s as P’s, my dad just humored us and laughed along, as usual. Then he said something that has stuck with me ever since. He said sure, we can make fun of the way he talks —- but he can speak two languages. How many can we speak?
This short and unexpected response was eye-opening to me. As much as I loathe admitting it, my dad was right. We make fun of his accent as if he’s the one missing out, when in reality, we are the ones who do not understand. His slightly flawed pronunciation indicates he is bilingual, and because of that, he can actually communicate with more people around the world than I can.
Before you snicker at someone’s foreign accent or sigh in agony because we can’t make out his or her broken English, consider what my dad said. The person you are trying to communicate with is not at some disadvantage. If anything, they have the upper hand. While it may seem like this person does not have a clue about the English language, they actually do — they’re speaking it to you. Hesitation before finding just the right word is because they work with a mental dictionary twice the size of complaining unilingual students.
Take into account that English is considered one of the most challenging languages in the world. We may fumble through Spanish class for an hour, but that is nothing compared to learning the ridiculous number of synonyms, weird spellings and awkward contractions that make up the English language.
Instead of criticism, our fellow bilingual Tigers deserve some praise and applause.
Appreciate that we deal with a diverse group of people every day at MU. [According to the MU website](http://www.missouri.edu/impact/), an estimated 1,000 international students and researchers flock to our university every year to pursue higher education.
Whether we recognize it or not, this is giving us a better reflection of the people we will be working with in the real world. When we leave here, we will be seasoned veterans when challenged to collaborate with a coworker who has a thick foreign accent. Because of our exposure to different cultures, we will have the advantage in terms of being prepared.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying everyone should go out and learn 10 languages right now. I’m simply urging us to have more patience and really think about why we see foreign accents as some sort of weakness or impairment in others.
My dad’s response to my ignorance has inspired me to embrace my three required semesters of Spanish, not dread it. I now know that I should be utilizing these Spanish classes instead of just completing the homework and receiving the grade. He urged me to learn the language as well as I can and see where it might take me.
MU students often criticize our TAs from other countries for not speaking better English. Why must they have these thick, difficult to comprehend accents?
But the real question is -— why not?