Should I learn another language?
You can. But should you?
On Friday May 26th, I’m holding my Interintellect salon on coping with failure again. Inspired by my viral essay of last year, attending is a wonderful way to both support this newsletter and get to know me a bit personally; tickets are here.
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One of the odder aspects about growing older is that our lives become shaped by decisions we made a good deal of time ago and sometimes can’t even remember why. In my case one of those was a great drive to be able to speak another language.
My particular case shows that it is eminently possible to do this even in adulthood. I started relatively late, committing to learning German at the age of 21; my ambition was to speak four languages fluently by the age of 30. Today, at the age of 40, after considerable efforts, I speak three fluently and have picked up bits of others too, so let’s charitably say I am 3.5 of the way to my goal. I am also not seeing a noticeable decline in my ability to acquire new tongues, not least as the connections between other European languages are becoming ever clearer to me.
I should say that doing this is caveated on showing a great deal of commitment to the task. I lived abroad for most of my 20s and resolved not to leave the country where I was living until I had mastered its native tongue. Once fluent in German, I acquired a Masters in Conference Interpreting and, after many years as a freelance language professional, recently secured a full-time position as a staff interpreter.
Languages then have been for me both profession and passion. I’ve learnt them seriously, with the aim to reach a high level, and I’ve made career choices to facilitate that. If your question is ‘Should I learn a few phrases to use on holiday’, have at it; it won’t make much of a difference to you apart from getting a few more smiles at airports.
What I’m talking about is learning languages to use them – with an acknowledgement that doing so is an enormous time investment and the work of many years, particularly in the absence of an easy opportunity to use them on a daily basis.
But before you start such a journey: Should you?
Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages here and also disadvantages within the advantages. Some of them are the particular disadvantages associated with learning languages in a culture like the UK which doesn’t centre language learning in the mainstream, and where doing so puts you in a minority; others are the inherent disadvantages and benefits of being a multilingual person.
Let’s alternate through some pros and cons to learning a language.
1) It expands your frame of reference. Having another language allows you access to the cultural products of another language; its films, its literature, the songs sung in it1. More importantly it creates a constant connection to those who speak said language. Of course, members of different language groups react differently to your displaying knowledge of their native codes; Germans and Dutch people, for example, can be notably skeptical of attempts to learn their languages. Usually though people are delighted at any attempt to communicate with them in their native tongue which of course, opens up a new world of experience for you as a learner.
2) Access to that world though can have the effect of slightly distancing you from your own tribe, especially if said tribe isn’t overly familiar with the business of learning a foreign language. (With fluent French and German I’ve regularly been introduced as a sort of language freak at UK parties; meanwhile on the continent, I’d just be Swiss). I use the example that in the English-speaking world a window is objectively a window; a fusion between signifier and signified has been achieved. Whereas for a language learner, you hear fenster or fenêtre or окно at the same time as you hear window; you are aware that window is just an arbitrary collection of sounds to designate the particular concept of a glass pane looking to the outside world. This creates a slight distancing effect between you and how language is used in monolingual societies, not least from the terror with which English people often react at the idea of speaking another, or even briefly not understanding, language.
3) Money. It’s often said that having a foreign language increases your earnings, and it’s true that languages open up a lot of potential paid activities for you, from translation to tour guiding. Interpreting, which is language skills plus performance, is particularly well-paid, particularly at international institutions. Often the question is asked as to which language would be the most lucrative to learn, which is a false premise; the only language you can learn is one you are sufficiently interested in to spend the time learning. Failing that, Chinese.
4) Unfortunately, language skills are generally poorly understood and poorly remumerated in the UK. Employers view them rather than a ‘must’ as ‘nice to’ have. Indeed most employers don’t even understand the basic distinction between a native and a non-native speaker; I have for example frequently been offered jobs writing in German because my CV states that I translate from it. Of course, UK employers have also been reliant pre-Brexit on a vast pool of talented European graduates who wanted to live in London; we can only hope the premium on languages increases a little post-Brexit.
5) Development of confidence and independence. This seems to me a fairly unmitigated benefit of successful language acquisition. If you’ve gone abroad and learnt a language to fluency, you gain an awful lot of confidence about what your capacities to do things are. Once you’ve phoned up the tax office in a foreign country and dealt with matters in a second language you can manage it in your own. In addition, becoming fluent also gives you the specific confidence that you can learn further languages; I can’t imagine many people have achieved fluency in a second language as an adult and been entirely content to leave it there.
6) Yet there are limits to the fluency possible outside of a bilingual childhood, certainly phonetically, and even fortunate bilinguals often combine their native accents with shambolic grammar. After years of work, you are still short of that tiny native speaker premium, which can be greatly frustrating given that in certain aspects your knowledge of your target language exceeds its average native user. It leads you to a feeling of expending a great deal of effort only to hit a glass ceiling.
As I’ve written about before, you can easily end up not entirely belonging to any language culture, or rather instead belonging more to the large group of people who also find themselves in-between cultures, sympathetic to foreigners abroad, returned expats, and the Welsh.
The situation with languages in the UK is not good.
Generally, it’s a mixture of the rudiments of a few major European languages, stale puns on them (how can French children be in ‘pain’ or German children ‘Kinder’? The words are pronounced differently) and a few fossilized ideas about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (thanks, ‘Arrival’, for resurrecting that old canard). It all adds up to a fairly deficient picture of both the wider world and the properties of language itself, and it’s not something any of us should feel proud of.
It’s also more a product more of laziness than the malign; English is the world language and there’s no particular reason for its speakers to acquire anything else, aside from in order to have richer life and be a more excellent specimen of humanity. People are busy and you can hardly blame them from only acquiring the skills they need to get by, and UK workers just don’t see their careers advance with a foreign language in the way those abroad do learning good English.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t advise English speakers to feel too cosy about English being the world’s lingua franca. For said lingua franca is really a competing translation of hundreds of native languages into English which are just about mutually comprehensible. Listened to at length, it is often not a language anyone could feel at home in or even much affection for, as this recent piece ably communicates. Indeed speaking a native English variety is to a degree an active impediment to communicating with speakers of international English.
I think most of us have some instinctive sense that speaking only one language is a bit crap. The irony of course is that it’s never been easier for anyone to acquire any which language they want. You could pop online and download a course in Iñupiaq right now. So as an English native you do have, whatever the state of the wider culture, the choice to take your own personal stand against monolingualism – and my own example, being a state-school kid who has grafted their way to fluency in several languages, surely indicates it’s possible with a certain willingness to stand out.
But my question today is whether that’s worth it. In answering, I would stress that learning languages is the normal thing to do. Most of the world’s population is multilingual; it’s monolingualism which is the minority state, albeit it’s difficult to assess the exact figures as to how much of the world population is monoglot. Specifically for English natives, it’s only English’s status as the world which makes whether to learn a language even a question; for the rest of the world, the matter of not only whether but which language to learn first is an absolute fait accompli2.
Billions of people across the world speak their own language and bad English. That means those billions have the experience of trying and flailing to make themselves understood, of being in a situation where they simply do not have the linguistic resources available to communicate what they mean. And yet they try, taking on the deep humility of the learner.
That is why, above all, you should learn a language; to put yourself in the shoes of the billions of people who have to work every day in a language they may command only imperfectly. That’s too fundamental a human experience to miss out on. You can’t just swan about in your monolingualism waiting for everyone else to make the effort to serve you, unless you’re happy with being a snob.
Something you learn also is that the culture that native speakers treasure isn’t necessarily the parts known to the rest of the world. I don’t know many Germans who read Goethe, but I imagine all my German friends know the words to Grauzone’s ‘Eisbär’.
You could - and I would - argue that that gives English natives a particular responsibility to try and preserve lesser-spoken languages; the rest of the world doesn’t really have time to try and make sure Manx survives.
As someone fluent in German, with half-decent French and some knowledge of bits of other languages, I certainly agree with you that learning another language is a Good Thing. But it does set you apart a bit, adding perhaps to the sense of alienation from your own culture that you hint at. I dealt with it by opting not to use my language skills in my career, training to teach English and Drama rather than MFL, and not pursuing a career in translating and/or interpreting. I sometimes feel a bit of regret about that, though at the time it was definitely motivated by a desire to belong more to the culture I grew up in.