"I think I'm just not good at languages."
This sentence, which I hate so much, came out of my mouth during my sophomore year in high school. I was choosing my classes for junior year, and I had decided to drop French. My high school offered Latin, French and Ancient Greek (yes, that's it), and I had taken the minimum amount of languages - 3 years of Latin, 3 years of French. I wasn't terrible at these classes, but I didn't feel like I had gotten much practicality out of them.
Fast forward 15 years, and I consistently spend 2 hours a week studying languages. Some of these languages had provided a lot of practicality, such as helping me escape from a remote town after all flights were cancelled. Most importantly they have helped me connect with many people all over the world, creating lots of bidirectional laughs, knowledge exchange and reducing misunderstanding.
I now feel comfortable saying I can speak five languages, though I am insecure about all of them. I've managed to do all this while possessing no real talent for language acquisition - in fact I believe I possess a below average memory and ear.
And so I hate it when people say, "I'm not good at languages", especially when they say it in English. It usually betrays the speaker's position of privilege. It doesn't help that often they are ignorant of this privilege. This isn't a view I've found commonplace, but I'll recount how I developed it.
As with this blog, my language story begins in my summer of 2008 in Beijing. I had come into the city alone armed with one introductory year of Mandarin from college. I also had grown up speaking Cantonese, the Chinese language dominant in the south, but that was of limited use in this northern capital. Everything was terrifying at first. Taxi rides would begin with 5 minutes of me trying to say where I wanted to go before the driver would begin driving, and sometimes they never would. I would go everywhere with a notepad and jot it down in English all the points I wanted to express but couldn't and look them up when I got home. Slowly I began to converse, but listening remained very hard. People spoke so fast and the Beijing accent is famous for its slurring of syllables. At first I thought I couldn't understand anything because I didn't know the words. But Chinese is a language with a relatively sparse word domain - a lot of complex concepts involve the bundling of more elemental words. Very often people were saying words that I had learned, I just couldn't recognize them at live speed. I needed to train my ear, listen very attentively, and load up guesses based on context.
In due time my ear got better and I was able to have conversations by the end of the summer, most commonly to taxi drivers about NBA players. It was a rush, feeling the improvement and being able to accomplish tasks easier and getting compliments. I remember talking to my building staff, who'd seen me progressed all summer, and observing real pleasure in their eyes when I said "慢慢走" at the end of a conversation, a phrase I'd heard dozens of times from service venues. The city slowly deciphered itself as I learned to recognize more characters.
During the Olympics, loads of foreigners came to town and I found myself useful linguistically. I could help people order cabs or ask for directions. Then sitting on the subway, I sat next to a French couple looking at the subway map, clearly trying to figure out where they were. Almost miraculously, though I had always been crap at listening comprehension in my French tests, I could understand them. I told them they were going the right direction and they could transfer in two stops, in French. I realized then how much French vocab I had stored in my brain, accumulated through all the homework and tests, but it was only now when my ear had progressed that I could actually perceive the words in spoken conversation.
Language acquisition is notoriously difficult to measure, and I can't find a definitive research source for it, but by all accounts the majority of the world is at least bilingual. This certainly jibes with my experience, as is the notion that this figure drops to 23% when examining just the United States. Not only is knowing multiple languages the norm in most places but monolingualism is associated with lack of education. Especially in the global south, inability to work in a "major" language can be a major hindrance to societal mobility. For the past two centuries, there has been no language more major than English, and it is amazing how different language acquisition is treated in English-speaking countries. In these highly developed countries, outside of immigrant communities, language acquisition is treated like an elective course. There is no link to economic advancement, and no stigma associated with monolingualism. In fact, it is common and socially acceptable to say the sentence I opened this blog with: "I'm just not good at languages." This educational domain, which is treated like a core human skillset like math or reading in much of the world, is treated with an optional "let's see if they have talent" mentality in the US. While there is a talent component to learning languages, it is not a prerequisite to becoming bilingual! You cannot tell me that every single Dutch or Filipino person is linguistically gifted. This success is due to the national education system and incentives of the citizens.
The lesson is not necessarily in replicating those educational systems. I believe people in English-speaking countries are bad at learning languages because they don't need or care to be, and that this attitude derives from a position of privilege. Learning a language as an adult is difficult, stressful, scary and full of embarrassing moments. You have to accept that you will be mocked and that your brain will feel like mush. And much of the world has to go through this process to enter the global economy. English speakers need not, and that is an immense step up. At this moment in time in the US, I find that privilege is spoken about within a national context, with a perspective of shining light on the struggles some Americans face that other Americans do not. But it needs to be spoken about with a global context, of all the powers that Americans, even Americans that lack privilege locally, have to step into another country without visa-stress and expect other people to understand them.
This privilege is so pronounced when one lives abroad. The number of English speakers who have been living abroad for years without picking up the local language is astonishing. The legacy of colonialism and the hierarchies of international trade has allowed this to be generally socially acceptable. With this context in mind this, I find it unbelievably hypocritical when English speaking countries attack immigrants for speaking English poorly.
It is true that native English speakers have experiences unique to them that I've written about before, including some that make it more challenging to learn other languages. But the reality is that learning a language is hard for anyone. It takes a ton of time and pain, but it's a challenge that most of the world has accepted is important.
If you are truly interested in global equality, you have to learn at least another language, and preferably a non-Indo European one. Not only is the acquisition process crucial for developing empathy, but post-acquisition one can access knowledge channels outside of the ones colonialism setup. And it's fun and rewarding and useful.
Personally, I find language learning a permanent part of my life. It is usually not a top priority and so I rarely study intensively, but I have 10 year plans for acquiring new languages (Vietnamese by age 40). Not only is it rewarding to be able to connect with whole new parts of the globe, but new grammatical structures and idioms shed new light on how humans think. Good luck with your language learning.
