It's rantin' time

In the last two weeks YLC Sana'a has gone from about 7 US students to about 130 US students. The school now feels like a US college and the security of numbers has caused some of them to wave their red, white and blues more proudly than they would otherwise. Not that I'm anti-American, I'm just opposed to ignorance and we have a few young and adamantly wrong people here who happen to be American.

For example, last night we had a discussion about the wording of the certificates for students when they complete study here. The sentence of interest was similar to, "This student has studied at the YLC from Date A til Date B achieving X% on their exam and achieving an Intermediate level in speaking, reading, listening and writing".

I was talking to one of the Yemeni teachers who is really fluent in English but always keen to learn more and I told him you can say to "achieve" a particular level but you could also say "reach" a particular level. But "no, no, no!!!" according to one of the Harvard educated Americans. She said I was using British English, not American English and, like it or not, this institution used American English. You might wonder where did that knee jerk reaction come from and I do too. But since she wanted to make a debate out of it I told her there is no great difference between real English and American English. She went on to cite the example of when British people saying you look smart, they mean you are dressed well whereas for Americans they say it means you look intelligent. This example stunk like it was straight out of her American English 101 textbook and I replied there is two meanings and British are well aware of both meanings. But more importantly, just like Arabic, although there are regional differences in everyday speech, when you talk about higher-level topics (like the certificate) the language is identical (although the spelling differs to an extremely slight extent). Then in hopped a nodder from Boston who's only keen to agree with whatever opinion is opposed to mine while he has no real knowledge himself and then a Mexican PHD student joined the debate in the affirmative too. Harvard girl went on to say no certificate in America would say "you reached a bachelor in so and so studies" and obviously that's true, and true in Britain as well. Reaching is a verb used for levels, heights etc. I can understand some-what why the Mexican is keen to think there is some kind of wide dialectal difference between Australian/British English and American, I mean, English is his second language and he's always happy to find an excuse for why he can't understand something. He claims he can't understand academic papers from the UK because it's written in British English. But I really want to know why Americans think their language is so different. Is it because they're so keen to be independent from their British history? Or is just because their lecturers and teachers told them it is?

I listen to a Podcast called Filmspotting where they review movies and one of the reviewers complained they couldn't understand a lot of the language in a recent movie called Hot Fuzz, and in Shawn of the Dead before that. Which I find really bizarre but indicates how isolated from the rest of the native-English-speaking-world America really is. Similarly I watched Notebook on a Scandal with an American here and he really struggled to understand subtleties in the language and so he missed all the jokes.

The other similar issue which pointed to an American desire to be independent was a discussion I had with the super opinionated Mexican PHD student. I told him I found it interesting to talk to other half European, half Arab students because they and I have things in common. I mentioned a half Iraqi half American student. But the Mexican guy got wound up and said wait, you're half Australian, half Lebanese and I said yeah.. half British ancestry and half Lebanese.. just like the American/Iraqi. But he couldn't see the connection and wouldn't accept only a few hundred years ago white-Americas were mostly all British (or Irish, Scottish whatever).

I'm not looking to have these sorts of heated discussions with Americans but I will continue to reply when they make an uneducated comment to me.