I'm American, so I only speak American

In a couple of weeks I'll be jetting off to Frankfurt for a business trip. I'll spend four days or so in Germany, and then another two in London before returning home.

This will be my second time in Germany and my third time in the UK, and I think both countries are great.

That's partly because there's virtually no language barrier in either. They invented English in the UK (though I naively like to think we in the U.S. perfected it), and virtually everyone I ran into during my first trip to Germany spoke English. Excellent English, in fact. It was weird.

I mentioned to several Germans how stunned I was at their ability not only to speak my language, but to speak it so fluently. One woman with whom I regularly work at our German public relations firm at times has no accent whatsoever when she speaks English. It's like she's from Iowa.

Generally their response is something along the lines of, "Well, we learn English in school at a young age, and of course we're bombarded by American culture and American TV shows and movies all the time."

Which always makes me feel bad. Not only that relatively few of us in the U.S. bother to learn a second language well, but that our influence is everywhere and we sort of take for granted that that's the way it should be.

A lot of Americans take foreign languages in high school, but that seems way, way too late to start. The time to start learning a language is when you're really young and you're an absolute sponge for vocabulary and pronunciation.

When I was growing up in the Wickliffe school district, everyone took French class from the time they were in first grade. In fact, I took French every year from first grade through my third year in college.

You would think that would make me fluent, but I'm not. I can read it fairly well, and I can get by in a conversation if the person to whom I'm speaking talks slowly. But I never spent any significant amount of time in a Francophone country, and therefore I was never forced to really learn the language the way you are when you're immersed in a culture and have no choice but to learn the words or be utterly lost.

Nowadays Wickliffe has gone to a more traditional model whereby the kids don't get any exposure to foreign languages until sixth grade, and even then the only choices are French and Spanish.

It probably makes more sense in today's world to learn Mandarin, or maybe even Russian or Arabic. But regardless of what language you take, there is value in the learning itself. Taking a foreign language forces you to think in new and unfamiliar ways, presumably forging new pathways in your brain and making you smarter and all of that stuff.

But I'm American, and  I will likely die knowing only how to say "Please open the window" in French and how to count to 10 in Japanese.

Which puts me ahead of about 99% of my countrymen. Sigh.

My poor mom

I should start by saying that my mother is a wonderful woman. A real saint. Salt of the earth. All of that stuff.

But I reserve the right to make fun of her, and will do so now.

I can do this safely, you see, because my mother doesn't own a computer and therefore there is no chance she will ever see this post. Unless one of you snitches shows it to her or tells her about it, in which case we'll need to meet on the playground after school and settle our differences through old-fashioned, bare-knuckle fisticuffs. You're totally going down.

Anyway, my mom is not what you would call technologically savvy. The last semi-electronic appliance she learned to operate was the microwave, and that was back in the early 80s when (true story) she was afraid she would somehow incinerate the planet and therefore didn't use it for the first several weeks it was in her kitchen.

NOTE TO MOM: It's not a thermonuclear device. It's a microwave. It's deadly only to the Stouffer's frozen pizzas you stick in there.

It's not that Mom is anti-technology or anything. She just isn't interested in having a computer or a smart phone. Many of her friends and relatives are on Facebook and the like, but it's not something she particularly wants. Which is fine.

The problem is that when she does interact with modern technology and finds herself stuck – which I will say here happens on a fairly regular basis – my sister, brother or I are the ones called upon to bail her out.

And given all that Mom has done for us throughout our lives, this is in no way a problem or an inconvenience.

But you would think that once we show her how to solve a particular technological dilemma, she would write down the solution or otherwise memorize it so that it doesn't become a problem again.

And again. And again. And again.

This happens most often with her TV. It's a simple flat screen for which she has digital cable service. Time-Warner, in their infinite wisdom, has given her a remote that only a trained fighter pilot could confidently operate. It has (and I'm estimating here because I haven't actually counted) 4,718 buttons, all but three of which do things for which she has no use.

So what often happens is that Mom wants to watch TV, but she can't figure out how to turn the darn thing on. Or, if she does manage to turn it on, how to get to the channel she wants.

Or – and let me assure you, this has happened – how to make sure the TV is operating in English and not in Spanish. This is my absolute favorite Mom TV Conundrum, because listening to her try to pronounce the onscreen Spanish words as they appear makes me laugh so hard I cry.

I know I'm a terrible person. You don't have to tell me.

So every couple of weeks, I am summoned to her house to get her TV back in working order so she can watch Oprah or the Indians game or whatever (and in English). And every time I forget to write down what I did so that she can fix the problem herself next time.

In the meantime, I think I've figured out what we need to do to the remote control to help her: