Second Languages : Cultural Mix Translates Into a Boom

When Luis Orlando Arias was a young delivery boy in his native El Salvador, one of his favorite stops was the Japanese Embassy. He would gaze wistfully at posters of Japanese temples and graceful women in kimonos strolling under the shade of cherry blossom trees. He yearned to learn more about the culture he had grown to admire, but the dream seemed as distant as Japan itself.

Then he came to Los Angeles. Within a few years, Arias developed a taste for sushi and made new friends at Little Tokyo piano bars and arcades. A school bus driver who speaks English and Spanish, Arias has been studying Japanese at Los Angeles City College with the hope that it might someday broaden his opportunities.

‘A Triumph’

“For me it’s been a dream come true, a triumph,” said Arias, 36, who still harbors dreams of travel to Japan and plans to study Korean next.

Increasingly in this multilingual city, learning a second or third language is becoming an advantage, if not a necessity. The practicalities of doing business in an international capital, as well as the simple desire to communicate with new neighbors from Latin America and Asia, is fueling a surge in the popularity of foreign languages in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles phenomenon is part of a burgeoning national movement, spurred by the desire to make the country more competitive, according to experts in the field. Since the mid-1980s, high school and college foreign language enrollments have been rising significantly throughout the country. Berlitz Learning Centers for adults, the world’s leading language school, reports significant national growth, with California among the leading states.

Growing Demand

Students are flocking to classes--particularly Spanish and, increasingly, Japanese--on university campuses and at some community colleges and private language schools throughout Los Angeles County. Some schools report a growing demand by private firms and public agencies for classes offered at the work-site and tailored to their needs. The translating and interpreting business, meanwhile, is booming, with the ranks of court interpreters almost doubling each year, according to leaders in that field.

The city’s diverse ethnic mix provides unique combinations of languages and students. Downtown lawyers and bankers, eager to do business with the Orient, crowd Japanese classes; Korean merchants setting up shop in East Los Angeles practice their Spanish; a jeweler at I. Magnin studies Korean to better serve his growing Asian clientele.

Those attracted to foreign language classes “are reading the same information we’re reading that says the future of Los Angeles is multicultural,” said Marianne Kanter, coordinator of language courses at UCLA’s extension program. “And they’re preparing themselves for that eventuality.”

Carmelita Arsena Thomas, who runs the study-abroad program at Los Angeles City College, also credits the new interest in languages to the realization that, in international trade, “our competitors are beating us at our own game because they have an edge of dealing with other cultures on their terms. Finally, the American business community is becoming aware that we have to know the language and culture of countries we want to do business with.”

Fastest-Growing Language

Japanese is favored among businessmen, the fastest-growing language in the city, according to language experts. Some schools are also seeing increased demand for other Asian and some Middle Eastern languages. While traditionally strong Romance languages, particularly French, are holding their own, Spanish remains overwhelmingly the most popular language.

Syrian-born Anahid Warwarian, 23, an accounting major at Los Angeles City College, said she decided to learn Spanish soon after coming from Canada to Los Angeles, where she found that Spanish is the city’s “second language.” Though she already speaks four languages, Spanish has helped her interpret for her jeweler husband and his Latino employees, she said.

“It’s imperative that we learn to appreciate Latino culture and the language since we live in the heart of it,” said Derrick Harrison, a free-lance writer who lives in Echo Park. After struggling through a Spanish class at the community college last semester, Harrison compares not knowing Spanish in Los Angeles to “going to a symphonic concert, listening but not being able to hear the brass or the violin sections.”

Suddenly, international bankers and merchants who floundered in high school and college French and Spanish classes now listen to Japanese language cassettes on their drive in to work, practicing with colleagues in the office.

Until Kenneth Slade joined the international law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, he thought that “studying languages was something you did in high school,” he said. But when Slade moved to California from the East Coast a few years ago, he found the large Japanese presence here “startling.”

“New Yorkers like to think of themselves as the beginning of the country and California as the place where the country falls off,” he said. “But to the Japanese, California is the gateway and New York the backwater.”

Now a frequent business traveler to Japan, Slade wants to learn enough Japanese to at least show his new clients that “we are interested in them and their country.” More than a dozen of his colleagues join him at a class offered through UCLA extension at the firm’s downtown law offices.

Help Them Move Up

Mickey Jannol, a vice president at the downtown Yasuda Trust & Banking Co., is taking a Japanese class with about 20 colleagues. Many, he said, hope the class will help them move up in the Japanese firm. “I think that learning Japanese is an advantage and also demonstrates a greater ability and commitment (to the company) on my part,” Jannol said.

For free-lance commercial photographer Bruce Ayres of Culver City, who spent his teen-age years in Japan, the growing importance of the Japanese language in the business world is “like coming full circle,” he said.

Ayres, 37, is increasingly finding work among Japanese advertising agencies that come to California to produce commercials. His plans are to eventually go to Tokyo to directly market his work there. In a world growing smaller by the day, Ayres said, “We can no longer afford to take the egotistical position of, ‘Let the rest of the world learn English.’ ”

Earlier this year in Washington, a task force of the National Governors’ Assn. came to a similar conclusion. Addressing the need to make the country more competitive in world trade, the task force urged that all college graduates be conversant in a second language and that training begin as early as the first grade.

‘Insular Students’

“How are we to sell our products in a global economy when we neglect to learn the languages of our customers? How are we to open overseas markets when other cultures are only dimly understood? How are our firms to provide international leadership when our schools are producing insular students?” asked Gov. Gerald L. Baliles of Virginia, chairman of the association.

David Edwards of the Washington-based Joint National Committee for Languages, an umbrella organization of foreign language teachers and educational associations, said there are several signs already pointing to a shift toward a more multilingual society. “We bottomed out in the late ‘70s,” he said “By the mid-1980s, we began to see a turnaround.”

The signs include:

- More students taking foreign language classes in high school than at any time in the previous 70 years.

- For the first time since 1971, more than 1 million college students enrolled in classes.

- Enrollment has doubled in several states over the last two years.

- And, among all states, California ranks second only to New York in high school foreign language enrollment, showing a 22% increase in recent years.

Last spring, the California Department of Education published its recommendations for foreign language instruction, including a call for schools to start training in the early grades. The report has been called unprecedented in its forcefulness and is meant to offer guidance for school districts throughout the state.

The report set a new direction for public school teaching, calling for what educators describe as “community-based teaching,” an emphasis on speaking a language rather than the more traditional method of writing and memorizing grammar rules. The approach is already popular among private adult schools such as Berlitz.

The state recommendations also promote another new trend in the field known as “conservation,” calling on schools to help children who already speak foreign languages to continue to develop their skills.

“We have this fantastic resource of language in our state,” said Adele Martinez of the state Department of Education who helped prepare the report. “And the need is so urgent and immediate that we have to look at using the resources we already have.”

Yet despite the momentum in the foreign language field, she said, “changes don’t happen overnight.”

Already there are shortages of teachers and interpreters.

Demand Outstrips Supply

Despite an exponential growth in the ranks of interpreters in the Los Angeles County Superior Court system, the court’s demand outstrips the supply. The courts are short an average of nearly 10 interpreters each day, said Ed Johnson, director of the court’s interpreting and translating services.

In 1962, the court employed five full-time interpreters at a cost of about $29,000 per year. Today the court--the largest single employer of interpreters in the county--keeps more than 450 on the payroll at an annual cost of $6 million. The interpreters speak about 80 different languages among them.

Noting that UCLA’s extension program is perhaps the only school in the area offering state-accredited interpreter training, Johnson said there is a need for more of these programs. Meanwhile, the court’s judges are trying to address the problem, including instituting an in-house training program of their own.

Another example of the difficulty in meeting the new demand for language services can be found in the teaching field. Last year there were 80 Japanese language teaching positions available at universities throughout the country, but only 15 new doctoral graduates to fill them, said Noriko Akatsuka, a professor of Japanese at UCLA. A similar shortage exists this year.

At UCLA, the demand for Japanese classes has more than tripled in recent years, with students turned away from full classes, Akatsuka said. At City College, a crossroads for many of Los Angeles’ ethnic communities, enrollment in language courses has almost doubled over the last couple of years to about 2,300 per semester, department Chairman Roger Fernandez said.

Most students take the courses to fulfill the state school system’s foreign language requirement, but the classes also attract those who want to learn a language for their job or for more personal reasons.

Japanese classes have drawn significant numbers of Asian-Americans interested in learning their ancestors’ language. And other students, such as music teacher Barbara Hasty, who recently completed a course in Chinese, are learning languages because they want to be able to communicate with members of Los Angeles’ diverse ethnic communities.

‘Common Ground’

“It creates some common ground,” said Hasty, who has numerous Asians among her students at East Los Angeles College.

Alfredo Mendoza, chairman of the college’s foreign languages department, has seen a steady rise in the numbers of Asian students taking his Spanish classes. Some are merchants who operate small businesses in the neighborhood and want to learn the language of their customers and employees, he said.

Similarly, other Los Angeles merchants are taking Asian languages to deal with local Asian customers. Erik Laykin, vice president of Laykin et Cie., jewelers at the I. Magnin downtown store, is learning Korean because, over the last decade, the area has come under the growing influence of nearby Koreatown, changing the store’s clientele. About a third of the store’s customers are now Korean or other Asians who buy fine jewelry “with a passion,” Laykin said.

Unprecedented Growth

Private language schools, which cater to a post-college clientele, are also experiencing unprecedented growth.

U.S. enrollment at the international Berlitz Language Centers, which has offices in 26 countries, grew by 37% from 1986 to 1988, said spokeswoman Patricia Zse. In California, enrollment jumped 55% in the same period.

Despite the dramatic surge, the United States has a long way to go to match the demand in Japan, which remains Berlitz’s fastest-growing division worldwide, she said. “The Japanese have always been quick to realize that if they’re going to get ahead, they have to speak English,” she said.

Guillermo Frixione opened One-Twelve USA Language Services about four years ago in Burbank, hoping to capitalize on the demand for English classes by the city’s large immigrant population. Long waiting lists for English classes at the city school district’s adult schools--which has reached 50,000 at times--show the desire of newly arrived immigrants to learn the language of their new homeland.

But though most of his classes started out teaching English, Frixione was surprised to find that demand was outstripped by a stronger need for Spanish, especially among companies who contract with his firm’s job-site program.

Two-Way Program

Several manufacturing firms with predominantly Spanish-speaking staffs have contracted with the firm for a two-way program that provides Spanish classes for English-speaking managers while teaching English to workers, Frixione said.

Frixione’s clients, like those at most language schools for adults, run the gamut from manufacturing plants and service industries, such as hotels with largely Latino work forces, to a wide array of public agencies.

Some hospitals, like many public agencies serving Latino communities, still depend largely on bilingual staff to interpret for patients. At Bay Harbor Hospital, for example, the hospital offers translation services in more than a dozen languages through its diverse staff. Nearby Los Angeles Harbor College occasionally provides teachers for classes at the hospital on medical terminology for Spanish-speakers participating in the hospital’s interpreting program.

Increasingly Frustrated

Still, Dr. Richard Goldin, who is affiliated with the hospital, said he became increasingly frustrated by his inability to communicate with Spanish-speaking patients. “Interpreters are worthless” when it comes to translating the vagaries of pain, said Goldin, a specialist in arthritis and rheumatism.

So, when the hospital offered a Spanish class for physicians about three years ago, he signed up.

Goldin, who teaches residents at the hospital, said that in his lectures, he tells them that in a city with such a large Spanish-speaking population as Los Angeles, doctors “owe it to their patients to know their language. . . . You can get a . . . lot deeper in a person’s skin if you can talk to them.”