Foreigners learn our language; we don't learn theirs. On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama was asked about foreign-language education. Being able to speak a foreign language makes you "so much more employable," he said. " I recently telephoned Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and read him that quote. Americans are still stubbornly—even proudly—monolingual, more concerned with protecting English than with learning another tongue.