When’s the last time you learned a second language? What was learning it like?
I’ve been learning second languages for awhile, now. I made it through the German classroom circuit about a year ago, and now I’m in my streets phase with the language. In college, I studied Mandarin. As a child and then again in Junior High and High School, I learned Spanish. Sure, every language has its weird/unique mind games it can play with non-natives: German breaks more rules than it even has, learning to speak and write Mandarin basically means learning two languages at once, and Spanish has as many verb tenses as it has polite expressions that mean something dirty if you wink while you say them (lots and lots).
Despite the idiosyncrasies, learning a language is always the same in at least one respect: you can understand it before you can speak it.
And what was it like when you started using that shiny new second language you studied? Or, what’s it like using it now that it’s worn, flexible and maybe a little dirty? Have you ever wished you could simply communicate in your native tongue for just one second because you knew you’d be funnier, smarter, friendlier, more eloquent if doing so were appropriate?
Those two ideas have been stuck in my head for a good while, and they’re really making me wonder if life would improve if we all stopped learning to speak second languages. I know, I know, there’s at least one huge problem with that. I’ll get to it in a bit.
For now, imagine what it would be like if you only had to learn to understand other languages. For one, it would be much easier to integrate one’s self into a foreign society. When it comes to understanding, you’re usually ready to go after a few months in a local language class. If teachers could remove all of the speaking exercises from class, fluency in understanding would come even quicker. Perhaps this would make learning more than one second language more common (among those who aren’t officially language students or don’t speak a Latinate language natively).
An implication of this is that learning a language could be an exercise in adaptation rather than preparation. We could wait until it looks like needing the language is likely before we commit to learning it. Contrast that with the current approach: we spend years before and during college learning a language that might never be relevant during our particular lives. I, for example, studied Spanish as a child, because Mexico and Texas are sharing each other’s cultures more and more every year. As it turns out, Spanish has become very useful to me during my particular life. My girlfriend is Mexican, after all.
And now we live in Germany. Predictable needs for language skills, right?
Another aspect of life made better is maintaining proficiency in a language when you’re not using it. Lack of practice has to be the most common reason people are weak in a second language, even though they’ve studied it. My Mandarin was great when I was in college. Now, I sound like I’m trying to teach myself quantum physics, and that’s because I’ve been in precisely 0 situations that demanded my control of Mandarin since then.
To practice speaking, you need a speaking partner. Until you move to the country that speaks your second language natively, finding a speaking partner is tough. Practicing listening, though? Honing your ability to understand the language? That’s a piece of cake, no matter where you are. Subscribe to a podcast, tell YouTube you live in the language’s home country, watch movies in that language, find music on Spotify, Google online news media in the language, download a language pack for that video game you play once a day, change the OS language on your PC. Options for improving understanding are all over the place.
So, what would a bilingual conversation feel like? I think it feels really cool. Roxana and I have them every now and then. The results are maximum clarity and almost maximum comfort for both parties–Rox freaks out a little bit after a few minutes of conversation 🙂 Incidentally, this is also how almost the entire television show “Lillyhammer” works–the main character speaks English, while every other character speaks Norwegian. Bilingual conversations look cool, as well.
I’ve tried the approach with some German friends (without them knowing this is what I was doing). For about a minute, we’re having an especially cool conversation. They’re speaking German, while I’m speaking English. My mind feels fresh and energetic. I’m relaxed, as I assume are they. After the minute, though, my German friend will usually switch to English, presumably because they think I prefer English and they want to be nice. Then, I feel lazy and switch to German, and by the end of the conversation, I’m tired. It’s ultimately a really good mental exercise, but I’ve learned without a doubt that speaking is more mentally taxing than is understanding.
Despite its coolness, this supposed solution does not solve an existing problem. We could call it the Lingua Franca problem.
Today, the western world’s Lingua Franca is English–it’s the bridge language that most commonly connects people who don’t speak each other’s native language. If the bridge doesn’t connect both sides of the conversation, however, communication is not possible. That’s not necessarily praise or criticism. Just reality.
The “understanding only” system I describe in this post doesn’t fix this problem. At best, a conversation in the “understanding only” system would be one-sided if the language I speak doesn’t appear on the list of languages you understand. Communication between us would not be effective, unless you were my boss and our company ran on peon blood.
In fact, there could be no Lingua Franca in the “understanding only” system. We’d all be proficient speakers in only one language. If everyone on earth learned to understand English, that would mean nothing if the English-speaking world refused to learn to understand other languages. Or, what if English speakers tended to learn other languages, but not my language? That would suck–I would need to learn to speak English, even though speakers of other languages could get by with their comfortable native tongue.
And UN meetings would probably be complete messes.
But, every solution to international communication so far has its problems. It’s hard to motivate the world to learn and practice Esperanto. And, when an existing world language is the Lingua Franca (the current system), that arguably gives countries where the language is native an upper hand on the world stage.
Thought experiments are fun, aren’t they?
