Learning Languages
Earlier this year, I decided rather impetuously to collect some possessions into an old camping bag (the essentials: clothes, a toothbrush, and electronics) and head south from San Francisco. Three weeks — and multiple languages — later, I arrived at the border and turned back around. On my way, I managed to find a travel partner in a most exceptional person, a friend I’d made a few months earlier in the city who happened to be in Los Angeles around the same time I was. Ewa was a polyglot from Poland, and the first of this kind of person that I’d ever met, the kind that was actively practising and using most, if not all, of her dozen-or-so languages.
For a week, I stayed at the Malibu ranch of two business-magnate-cum-explorer-cum-sage parents of a friend, whose ranch housed two ponies, a goat, a dozen chickens, two dogs, a pig, and a canary. I, a neophyte at “life on the road,” (my experiences of places like Mexico and South Africa were their most sterilized iterations, like Cancun all-inclusives, and my only comparison was from reading Kerouac’s On The Road as a kid), was eager to learn about their up-river travels in Thailand looking for archaeological remains, or their past lives as New York marketing executives at Cosmopolitan, and so on. Malibu is an idyllic beachfront town, half populated by celebrities, and half populated by farmers who remember the time before Malibu was overrun with celebrities.
Every morning, I’d take the younger of the two dogs on a walk to the beach. In the afternoon, I’d go hiking or read a book from their library. They divided their collection into two categories broadly: fiction and non-fiction. That being said, this library did not follow Dewey Decimal, but, rather, a specialized system. For example, all language-learning books were classified under “fiction,” because “languages are all made up, you get it?” they would tell me.
Towards the end of that week, my friend came to stay with us. When I came into the house from my hike, she was deep in conversation (in English) with a friend of the couple, asking him about his chiropractic practice and his taste in fish. After that, we both went into the garden where we both greeted the two ranch hands, Mexican immigrants from Hermosillo. They spoke the same level of English that my hosts spoke of Spanish, which, perhaps inconvenient, seemed to work for both parties. They would call my host Patrón, and he’d refer to them as “The Guys.”
Most of the time, Patrón would gesture at things and say, “Necesito,” or “No necesito” if he wanted something done or not done, like cleaning out the chicken pen or the shed. If he wanted to confirm that they didn’t have something in the house, he’d say:
“No tengo [English word]?”
“Ah, sí, patrón.”
“Comprendo?
“Sí, patrón.”
Or:
“Donde [English word]?”
“No se.”
“Donde [points to object on computer]?”
“Ah, sí, patrón. Aqui.”
“Bueno.”
When I arrived, my Spanish was still pretty rudimentary, so I could only carry on a basic conversation with the ranch hands — nothing more than, “How are you?” “I’m from Canada,” and “I speak French, though I’m learning Spanish. You don’t happen to speak French, do you?”
When my hosts asked me, “Do you speak Spanish?” I replied, “Un poquito.” Really, it meant I knew the word for “map” (mapa) when Patrón asked me to help him find an old topographical map of the Los Angeles basin in his library.
When Ewa arrived, she immediately launched into a conversation with the ranch hands: where they were from, how they got here, the weather, what their favourite fruit was, what they were working on. And although I could interject intermittently with “¡Qué bueno!”s, I felt crippled, the same way, I imagined, that they would feel speaking to me in English. In that moment, I realized how much engaging with others in their language, their culture, and on their terms of familiarity, can engender empathy. You don’t have to speak a language fluently to be able to empathise with someone else. In fact, the times in which I’m struggling the most, searching to find a word I want, are also when I empathise the most.
As much as Ewa understood the power of language to be inclusive, she also understood its potential powers of exclusivity. Growing up the child of South African emigrants, I was familiar with this concept (Desmond Tutu once called Afrikaans “the language of the oppressor”). Ewa and I usually spoke in French together. However, in the company of others, she insisted upon English. In one Uber ride, we three — Ewa, our driver, and myself — collectively decided that our lingua franca for the car ride would be Spanish.
Language is meant to connect people together. The etymology of the word “language” stems from the twelfth century Old French langage, meaning “speech, words, oratory; a tribe, people, nation.” Language isn’t static. It’s a living, adaptive method of communication that doesn’t just encompass words and oration, but, rather, the connection between people and nations. The more we encourage language learning and bilingualism, the more connections we can propagate.
When I went to Mexico on a similar kind of trip as my trip to Southern California, three months later, my Spanish had increased to the point of being a basic conversationalist if given a very understanding partner. I could speak slowly and had a limited vocabulary and understanding of moods and tenses, but I had enough to introduce myself to my friend’s family. In those two weeks of travelling around Baja California, I was fully immersed in Spanish. I only allowed my host and his friends to speak in English in the case of emergencies. Otherwise, I would stubbornly hack my way through conversations in Spanish, undeterred and unembarrassed. When I made my first joke in Spanish, I felt like I’d just won a marathon.
A common reservation amongst those learning a new language — especially Anglophones — is speaking and potentially embarrassing themselves. Learning anything necessitates mistakes, and mistakes are a crucial ingredient to language acquisition in particular. Embarrassment, however, is optional. For the first few weeks I began learning Spanish, I would habitually confuse “hermoso,” meaning beautiful, for “hermano,” meaning brother. I would also respond to good situations by saying, “Estoy excitado!” Later, I learned that “emocionado” is the correct translation for “excited,” (excitado is called a “false friend” in linguistics terminology) and that “excitado” is reserved exclusively for sexual arousal. (Until that point, I had thought that the giggles I was eliciting were from my accent.)
Ewa also helped me understand a crucial factor for language learning: motivation. Each of Ewa’s languages stemmed from deliberate choices and circumstances. She was a native Polish speaker and other languages in the Slavic family were mutually intelligible to her; she went to school in Germany; she took French classes because she loved the culture and had Francophone friends; she was interested in Middle Eastern culture and visited Palestine, so she learned conversational Arabic; she saw learning Spanish as a natural extension of her interest in engaging with the Latino communities of San Francisco and spent her winter working on a farm in rural Zacatecas; she was moving to Korea, so she started learning Korean.
On a macro scale, first responders in St. Charles, Missouri are learning Spanish to cater to the part of the population that does not understand English well, and New York City firefighters are doing the same with Mandarin. Some professions, such as journalism, the military, and human rights law, prioritize the knowledge of foreign languages. Not only is bilingualism a fantastic tool for cultural immersion and intellectual stimulation, it is an eminently employable skill. In 2013, CNNMoney named bilingualism the “hottest job skill.”
Not only is it the hottest job skill, but also, I would attest, the hottest travel skill. The ability to have even the most basic conversation in a foreign language facilitates both transactional exchanges (in a market in Ensenada, a vendor told me that it was “más barato si hablas en español,” meaning, “cheaper if you speak in Spanish”) but also foster friendships that would otherwise not be formed. I have friends with whom I speak primarily in Spanish, and a Spanish-speaking version of me, devoid of the habits I have ingrained into my English vernacular after years of use.
In the twenty-first century, aided by technology and increased ease of communication, multilingualism is a realistic goal to strive for. The first step is adopting a growth mindset towards language learning. Any barriers towards adopting new languages we may have are arbitrary; after all, English has lexical similarity of about two thirds of German and one third of French. Polyglots aren’t savants; they merely understand the benefits of learning languages. My hope is that, even in the most homogenous of societies, el monolingüismo es curable.
