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“Ah, Ms. Katsuki-Nikiforov. I assume you know why you’re here?”
“As a matter of fact, no, I don’t. I have a guess that it’s something to do with my application for graduation, but I’ve finished or will finish all of my credits by the end of this quarter, so I don’t know why we need to have a meeting about it.” She’d checked three times to make sure all of her boxes were ticked for her double major in International Relations and Public Policy, that she hadn’t accidentally tried to double-count a class or forgotten to get one of the university’s core requirements done. Everything should be good to go.
Her advisor looked uncomfortable. “Ryoko, when we checked over your plan, I assumed you had some kind of test credit or ESL hours that would exempt you from the language requirement. After all, your English is flawless, and I know you didn’t grow up in America.”
Ryoko stared hard at her advisor, and then at the dean who had asked her to come in for the meeting. “Ma’am, one of my majors is International Relations. That requires proficiency in a foreign language. My advisor for that major assured me that her signing off on that requirement based on our discussions when I declared the major would also take care of the university language requirement, since it’s a lower threshold.”
“We don’t have any record of you completing the language requirement,” the dean said. “Now, listen, this isn’t the end of the world. You can probably test well enough in… Japanese? I assume? That we can count that for your language requirement and still have you graduate on time. I’ll call the Language Center…”
“No. If you’re going to be ridiculous, so am I.” Ryoko tossed her hair. “I have native or near-native proficiency in Japanese, Russian, English, and French, so we’ll consider those unacceptable, and probably ought to throw out Mandarin Chinese as well. My family didn’t mean to teach me that one but since my aunt’s kids’ father is from China and she wanted them to speak Chinese too, I picked it up and spoke it from early childhood.” She took a minute to think it over. “If you have a test for it, I could use the excuse to brush up on my Kazakh or Thai. If not, I’m sure you’ll have a test for Italian or Greek. In fact, just to be thoroughly silly, why don’t I take all four… and maybe Korean, Czech, Arabic, and Spanish while we’re at it? I don’t know that I’d test well enough in those to count, but I don’t know that it’ll hurt anything. I’d be willing to bet you don’t have a test for Ukrainian sign language and I don’t speak the actual language very well.”
Her advisor and the dean glanced at each other. “This is a big claim, Ms. Katsuki-Nikiforov. Where did you learn all of those languages?”
“Katsuki comes from my Japanese father. Nikiforov from the Russian one. They both speak English and French because of being figure skaters and having ballet training, and in Papa’s case, his best friend is Swiss, and they wanted me to know both as well. I already mentioned where the Mandarin came from. My uncle has Italian half-siblings and when he started learning Italian to be able to talk with them more easily I learned it with him, and his soulmate is Kazakh. Same thing. My soulmate is from Greece but her mom comes from Jordan, so I learned Greek and Arabic to talk to their family. The Thai, Czech, Korean, Spanish, and Ukrainian come from various friends my dads made in figure skating, and I was interested in learning their languages so I could talk to their kids more easily.” She crossed her arms and barely managed to not stick her tongue out at them. “My advisor already told you I didn’t grow up in America. At the very least, you should have realized I speak Japanese or Russian better than I spoke English when I started here, from living in one or the other of those countries. If nothing else, the quarter I spent in Beijing! Instead, you decided to be baka.”
“Wait, what?” The dean looked at her transcript again, going pale when she noticed where she’d spent the spring quarter the year before. “I… I see. Yes. I apologize for wasting your time, Ms. Katsuki-Nikiforov. Please, don’t worry about scheduling any language exams. You’re quite right that you have demonstrated proficiency in more than one language.”