Welcome to the first edition of Ling-oh! The newsletter for people who find language profoundly awesome.
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Should we learn languages in 2024?
3 months ago I moved to Vietnam. Vietnamese is very different to the other languages I speak. This is true for most Westerners here.
How people solve this problem is surprising. A phone is passed back and forth repeatedly. They write in Vietnamese and you wait. You write back in English and they wait, and so on.
There's a strong sense of exclusion when this happens. I'm here on the other side of the world, yet the closest I can get is still the other side of a phone.
A month was more than enough to realise: I was living in the country, but I was still very much on the outside.
What about [insert app]?
Every year a new app or AI instant translator claims to have made this better, but in the end, they're all missing the point. You're still an outsider.
Learning a language is an opportunity to open a door to a place's culture, to its people. It's being granted access to the inside. Through language we get to see, feel and understand much deeper than we can by passing a phone back and forth. We also become seen and treated differently by others.
Sure, sometimes you just need to solve a problem quickly. But let's not confuse that for speaking a language and the richness that comes with it.
What a difference 24 hours makes
For the past 2 months I've been taking Vietnamese classes, and let me tell you, my experience in Vietnam has massively improved.
"2 months? I don't have that kind of time!" I hear you exclaim.
Don't be fooled. I have a weekly 1-hour class and 2 extra hours of self study. Here's the math: 24 hours. 1 day.
That's not a lot of time. I didn't start with the goal of attaining fluency, nor do I have that goal now. The thing is, a little bit of effort goes a long way. As the Pareto principle says: 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the results.
In my case it was only 3%!
From a relatively tiny effort, my experience here in Vietnam has become immeasurably better.
Long live language learning
I now address my taxi driver using local language, showing that I acknowledge him as my elder – an important feature of Vietnamese and other Asian languages. His eyes light up as he turns around to congratulate me on my "tiếng Việt".
I order my "cơm chiên gà" (chicken fried rice) expertly avoiding "cơm chiên ga" (fried rice gas). My little attempts to use the language everywhere I can creates a totally different energy from pretty much everyone I interact with. I feel like I'm on the inside.
Language learning is alive and well.
Go learn a new language. Become more connected to a place and its people. Put yourself on the inside and discover the richness of having an altered way of thinking. Be accepted as more than just a tourist looking in.
"To have a second language is to possess a second soul." — Charlemagne
