The Danger of Learning a Foreign Language
Once upon a time, I knew enough to be dangerous
During the pandemic I attended more online gatherings than I want to remember, but one stuck in my mind, albeit for an odd reason.
The event was held in English. A Japanese lady in attendance was invited to share her perspective with the other attendees.
She prefaced her remarks by apologizing that her English was “not very good,” although it sounded just fine to me. With her perfunctory apology out of the way, she began talking, only to be interrupted by a non-Japanese attendee who was fluent in Japanese.
The guy proceeded to tell her in Japanese that she should never apologize for her English, that she should be “confident in herself,” etc. His impassioned appeal was delivered in clear, direct, grammatically correct Japanese, not native level, but impressive nonetheless.
The Japanese lady listened quietly until he was finished. When it was her turn to speak, she was clearly flustered; the unexpected interruption and undue attention it brought had knocked her off balance. To her credit, she soldiered through, but the moment felt awkward.
I don’t agree with the guy’s premise that the lady should stop apologizing for her English since I found her humility endearing. But a more culturally savvy approach would have been to discreetly contact her afterwards and offer advice one-on-one. No reason to do it publicly.
Language wasn’t the problem
“The essence of cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing responses than with sending messages. It is more important to release the right response than to send the right message.” ~ Edward T. Hall
Hall’s words imply that cross-cultural communication is strategic, which means the burden is on the message sender to craft a message that elicits an expected “right response”. It also means that if the message recipient doesn’t respond in a desirable way, then the communication breakdown is mostly on the sender for failing to craft a sufficiently effective message.
Applying Hall’s standard to the situation described above, let’s take the message sender at his word and assume his desired response was for the Japanese lady to stop apologizing for her English.
If so, his efforts were doomed from the start, certainly in this context. Asking a Japanese person not to apologize is like asking a bird not to fly or a fish not to swim. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard Japanese folks apologize for and downplay their impressive abilities, I’d be buried under a mountain of nickels right now.
Why do Japanese folks put themselves down like this? We turn to Confucius for answers:
“The superior person is modest in speech but exceeds in action.”
And so it goes in modern Japan where even today it’s considered “cool” to downplay your ability and let your actions do the talking. It is a classic “under-promise-over-deliver” strategy that works beautifully in a culture that frowns upon tooting your own horn. (I find this practice both endearing and hilarious.)
Indeed, humility is just too deeply baked into Japanese culture for a stranger online to culturally deprogram a Japanese native in one fell swoop.
The moral of this story is that just because you speak a foreign language fluently, it doesn’t necessarily follow that your message will elicit the response you had hoped for.
I was dangerous too…
Yes indeed, I’ve made the same kind of communication mistakes over and over during my long, bumpy, beautiful love affair with Japan. Because once upon a time, I knew just enough Japanese to be dangerous.
The year was 1980. I was enrolled in Waseda University’s one-year intensive language program. It was the year I learned to carry on a basic conversation in Japanese, admittedly, not nearly as proficiently as the aforementioned attendee’s Japanese.
But my Japanese was still plenty good enough to get me in trouble! This is when it started dawning on me that learning to speak Japanese wasn’t enough to connect me with my Japanese friends in a deep, meaningful way.
I was about to discover that, without an understanding of the values, assumptions, mindset, history, and culture behind the Japanese language, I was better off not speaking it at all.
Imagine driving a car blindfolded
Making a distinction between language and communication might sound confusing to someone with limited cross-cultural experience. To simplify the concept, let’s use driving a car as an analogy.
We can all agree that a car is a transportation tool to get you from point A to point B. You can learn the techniques needed to drive that car — how to start the engine, put it in gear, turn left or right, press the accelerator to go, the brake pedal to stop, and so on. This would be analogous to learning the vocabulary and technical rules that make up the grammar and syntax of your second language.
Now imagine you are driving your car without knowing the rules of the road. How would you know what a stop sign looks like? Or which side of the road you’re supposed to drive on?
Extending the analogy, if you speak a foreign language without an understanding of the target culture’s “rules of the road”, your language ability ceases to be a tool and becomes a dangerous weapon instead, certainly if you’re a clueless young idiot like I was!
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was driving my metaphorical car on the wrong side of the road, running through stop signs and over my Japanese hosts; I was breaking rules without even realizing it.
Again and again I stumbled onto clues that something was off — puzzled looks, passive aggressive responses, answers that didn’t match my questions, jokes that bombed, or worse, that offended my hosts!
My Epiphany
“Knowing others is wisdom; knowing yourself is enlightenment” — Lao Tzu
I wasn’t sure at the time what I was doing wrong, just that I was struggling. My next move was to enroll at International Christian University in Tokyo where, for the next four years, I would continue studying the Japanese language, but this time with a focus on intercultural studies.
I stumbled onto the vital importance of culture when I signed up for a class in my sophomore year titled “Introduction to Intercultural Communication.”
Taught by a stodgy American professor, I attended the first day of class thinking we’d be delving into the finer points of Japanese culture, only to learn that the course would focus on American culture.
I immediately decided to drop the course. After all, I reasoned, I’m an American, why bother studying my own culture? So after class, I approached the professor to let him know my intentions and also ask when he’d be offering a course on Japanese culture.
He couldn’t answer my question but gave me a piece of counterintuitive advice that stuck: “If you want to learn to communicate with other cultures, then you need to learn about your own culture first. That way you have a baseline for comparison and are better equipped to deal with any culture.” Then he added, “Unfortunately most people don’t understand their own culture. Self-awareness is the best place to start.”
I took his advice to heart and signed up for his class. And it proved to be a humbling experience because that’s when the truth hit me: I had been unconsciously projecting my American values onto my Japanese hosts since I had arrived in Japan four years earlier!
Suddenly I felt like the punchline of an old joke:
One fish says to the other fish, “How’s the water?” The other fish responds, “What the hell is water!?”
That “other fish” was me, and “water” was my values and unconscious assumptions. So immersed was I that my own values and beliefs were invisible to me. And my behavior reflected it: I had been engaging with my Japanese hosts under the false, unconscious assumption that they put as much importance as I did on values like freedom, individualism, equality, meritocracy, directness, and so on.
Oh, how wrong I was!
This introduction to my own culture was the catalyst that pulled me out of my cultural pond and laid bare the values and assumptions I had been taking for granted my entire life.
Just the realization that something as abstract and intangible as a cultural value had so much power in connecting — and separating — people blew my little mind. And it kindled a passion for cross-cultural communication, eventually leading to the profession I’ve been practicing most of my adult life.
Learning a foreign language was indeed a game-changer for me. But only because it forced me to look beyond language and seek out the hidden culture gaps that needed to be bridged. Unfortunately, it took way too many head-on collisions for me to realize I was driving on the wrong side of the road.
Don’t make the same mistake I did — don’t be dangerous. Mastering the cultural rules of the road upfront can transform your linguistic weapon into a constructive tool that elicits desired responses, and builds deeper human connections.
If stories about my cross-cultural triumphs and failures in Japan sound like fun, you can read all about ’em here.
If you are on LinkedIn and would like to connect, please reach out with a brief note introducing yourself. Here’s a link to my profile.
© Tim Sullivan 2022
