At one point, he recounts his initial, completely unexpected response to an early passage in "Sailing Alone Around the World": "I stumbled on this run of language, bearing its load so easily, and the emotional burden it discharges so cunningly.
I was running out of languages, and the officials were running out of patience.
Habemus papam!" cried Sister Walburga, a polyglot nun from Germany who almost ran out of languages in her excitement as a shadow formed behind the curtain on the balcony.
A recent survey by Benesse Corp, which runs the Berlitz chain of language schools and produces learning materials, found that 14% of households with children of preschool age sent their offspring to English lessons.
The exhibition "Ecstatic Alphabet / Heaps of Language" runs until August 27 at MoMA.
That number puts it ahead of the debuts of the recent run of foreign-language arthouse films, including The New Girlfriend, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Girlhood, Phoenix, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and the part-English language Clouds of Sils Maria.
I got the usual 'you're an unfit mother,'yourur kid is stupid' and the run-of-the-mill sexual assault language (because, trolls), which honestly doesn't bother me because I have learned how to forgive ugly comments," she explained.
The more than 300 comments (and close to 100 personal e-mails) in response to my last post, "A Picture of Language," ran the glorious gamut from "love it/taught me to write/thank you, Mrs. Wengler!" to "ridiculous waste of time/confusing/who needs it?" I was delighted to see that 400+ people can get passionate in print about the subject.
Michael Malone, a reporter at Broadcasting & Cable magazine, lives in Mount Pleasant, N.Y., and runs the language-of-baseball blog Batter Chatter.
There are also a number of small institutes of language training run by the government and by the Beijing Radio Station.
