Here's something about Americans and foreign languages from the Washington Post. Mostly about Arabic, but also applies to Chinese. Boo-hoo.

"The best way to learn a language is without distraction, which makes most university language programs problematic, because students are probably taking biology, psychology and basket-weaving along with it," said Roger M. Allen, a leading Arabic scholar who is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

"It becomes just another subject, which is exactly what it is not," he said. "It is a skill, and it takes a lot of practice."

Learning other languages has never been a high priority among Americans. The United States was built by immigrants who, until recently, tried to shed their old languages and accents to melt into their new world, said Kirk Belnap, an Arabic professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

World War I left Americans suspicious of anything foreign, and the Supreme Court in the early 1920s overturned laws in 22 states that restricted the teaching of foreign languages. In 1979, a report commissioned by President Jimmy Carter declared that Americans' "incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous," and many linguists say that not much has improved since.

Fewer than one in 10 students at American colleges major in foreign languages, according to the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages. And most of those language majors choose French, German, Italian or Spanish. Only 9 percent learn such languages as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Indonesian, ones that are spoken by the majority of the planet's people.

Foreign languages are not considered a core subject in the United States, unlike in Europe, where people cross borders more frequently. Europeans also start students on languages at an early age and get more practice than Americans.

Arabic belongs to the Semitic group of languages, which includes Hebrew and Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia. It is grouped with Chinese, Japanese and Korean by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages as the hardest for an English-speaking person to learn.

Also, a few years of college instruction often isn't enough. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages estimates it takes between 2,400 and 2,760 hours of instruction for someone with a superior aptitude for languages to attain the highest level of achievement in Arabic -- one that would be good enough to be a translator or lawyer.

A typical university course that meets daily offers about 280 hours over two years.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government began providing money for programs that stressed proficiency. Guidelines for teaching Arabic emphasized speaking, listening, reading and writing. Those remain the foundation, though government funding dipped in the 1990s. After Sept. 11, millions were added to boost language instruction.

The next era, some linguists and U.S. officials say, is for Americans to look at other languages not merely as a way to learn about another culture or read literature, but also as a tool to conduct financial, diplomatic and intelligence activities. And they must drop the assumption that because English is becoming a world language, they don't have to learn any other.