CHICAGO – I recall as if it were yesterday something that happened on a business trip to Germany about 10 years ago.

I was at a client’s site in Wiesbaden for a series of meetings. They set up a conference room as my office for the duration. While it was late one day and everyone had gone home, I still had a couple hours of work to do since the home office in Chicago was seven hours behind me.

I was on the phone with a colleague when a maintenance man walked in the room to repair something. I completed my call and mustered the courage to say “guten abend” in my best German accent. I hoped he would respond in kind and leave it at that since German is not one of the languages I speak.

The man answered me with a pronounced German accent but in perfectly understandable English: “Good evening. Please excuse my intrusion. Someone reported that there was a problem with this room and I came to see what needed to be repaired.”

I didn’t know this person at all.

While he could very well have had a college degree in linguistics, I highly doubt it. He was dressed in coveralls – toting a toolbox and a ladder – and was clearly working in a maintenance or custodial capacity. These are the three things I kept thinking over and over again and still think to this day:

1. In Germany, someone who had what I assumed to be no more than a high school education was capable of saying what he said to me in English.

2. The chances of this scene taking place in the U.S. would be very slim to none.

3. Knowing that I was American, the man assumed I didn’t speak German. If he wanted me to understand him, he would need to speak to me in English.

This experience simply left me awe-struck. It still fosters hope for what we could achieve in the U.S. if we realize how important languages are to us and we take action to do something about it.

Stories about “ugly Americans” are legion and justifiably so. Historically, we have made little to no effort to understand foreign countries, foreign cultures and foreign languages. Visions of an American woman in Paris yelling (in English, of course) at a department store clerk for refusing to accept American currency come to mind.

The stereotype of the arrogant, ignorant American tourist flourished in the 1950s when a strong economy and a strong dollar made a trip to post-World War II Europe a “bargain” to countless Americans. More than 50 years later, do we still deserve this ugly reputation?

Just so you know where I stand on the issue, I was raised in a home where both English and Italian were spoken thanks to my grandfather and his brother who lived with us while I grew up. When I become president, everyone who hopes to graduate from a U.S. high school will need to prove basic proficiency in English and at least one language other than English.

Despite my pro-language stance, let me concede that there have historically been reasons why we have been a one-language nation with an aversion to learning additional languages. Part of the answer can be found in examining what makes the average European look like the antithesis of the monolingual American.

Due to the general size, number and proximity of European countries to each another along with the fact that almost each country has its own distinct language, a tradition has grown to learn foreign languages in Europe that simply has not existed in the U.S.

According to MapQuest, you can drive 178 miles from Dutch-speaking Amsterdam, Holland to German-speaking Bonn, Germany in two hours and 45 minutes. However, driving from English-speaking Seattle to French-speaking Montreal, Canada would involve a trip of 2,949 miles or almost 44 hours of driving.

To get something roughly similar in terms of distance and driving time in Europe, you would have to travel from the north of Sweden to the southern coast of Spain. On this trip, you would go through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Spain (five countries with five distinct languages).

In the Netherlands, approximately 85 percent of the total population has a basic knowledge of English, 55 percent to 60 percent of German and 25 percent of French. Statistics for the entire European Union (EU) reinforce the multi-linguistic tendencies to be across Europe:

1. 45 percent of EU citizens can take part in a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue.
2. In Luxembourg, nearly everyone can do this.
3. In the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, more than eight in 10 can do this.
4. The proportion of EU citizens who can speak English well enough to hold a conversation continues to rise.

Though a large percentage of this increase must be attributed to the rise in immigration to the U.S., it is encouraging that this represents an increase over the 31.8 million (14 percent) who reported speaking another language at home in the 1990 census. It’s a further increase over the 23.1 million (11 percent) reported in the 1980 census.

Figures from 2000 show that the absolute number of people speaking other languages in the home has doubled since that time. Since English has become the world’s undisputed lingua franca as well as the universal language of the business world, there is less of a perceived need for American businessmen to learn a foreign language.

Even so, the fact that our language is the foreign language most spoken by non-native speakers of English should not diminish the absolute need for us to learn foreign tongues nor its importance to our standing as a world leader.

It is insulting to me personally that the world just assumes we are either too lazy, too arrogant or intellectually incapable of understanding a foreign language, of not being able to name a country’s head of government or of knowing the basic geographical layout of their country.

While reasons abound and excuses can always be found to explain our English-only mindset, Americans need to realize that in order to be competitive and respected in our global economy we need to shed this single-language baggage we have been carrying around far too long.

The point must be driven home with those who influence elementary and secondary-level education because this is where it will need to take root. In Spain, the study of a foreign language is compulsory from age eight or what would be the third-grade level in the U.S.

By the time a student finishes high school, he or she would have invested approximately 10 years toward the study of a different language. A similarly structured curriculum in the U.S. would go a long way toward helping us achieve our goal.

Because of my cultural heritage, I have always admired and respected those who could understand, speak, read and write in a foreign language.

As an American, I want to see my country prosper economically and to be respected and admired for making valuable contributions to our world. I firmly believe that making a serious effort toward speaking the language of those we need to communicate with will go a long way toward achieving this.