On learning new languages (Part 2)

Speaking nonsense in China and other mishaps

A Feast of Languages Generated by AI

The last time we met on this subject, I'd successfully learned Spanish in the Canary Islands by watching TV.

And I'm proud to say: I have a dubbed version of an American TV drama, Falcon Crest, to thank. But then, as the heroic story unfolded - indeed, unravelled - my linguistic skills failed me in Kyoto, getting me hopelessly lost in the city. How do you say, "Turn left” in Japanese, again? (Catch up on Part 1 in the language series here.)

One of the things I had most disliked about having such poor Japanese was being functionally illiterate. It’s tough for anyone, and some kind of humiliation for a so-called literate person. At best, it's getting a ham sandwich instead of the cheese soufflé. At worst, it's biting into a doughnut filled with sweet bean paste—a local delicacy I dislike—instead of one with raspberry jam. Doing that a second time was something of a nadir in my linguistic life. The third, hell itself. 

I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t let that happen again, if I ever got another chance with a character-based written language. 

I’d left the first part of this essay on a cliff-hanger: could I redeem myself and learn a character-based language? The idea was, of course, to pique your interest in this second instalment. For loyal readers (that's you), I'm sure your interest would've surely ripened into an intolerable longing—if I hadn't foiled my own plans by mentioning I'd learned Chinese a couple weeks ago in my piece on poets in China.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t write for TV. 

So yes, about 20 years ago I packed my bags and set off for Shanghai. My second chance had come!

Only, I couldn’t set off straight away.  There was the little matter of SARS - remember that? - to delay my journey. And, more importantly, I had wangled myself the opportunity to learn Chinese, which I could start off in London (and had to, anyway, because of SARS). 

So, one cool January morning, I went back to university - this time to SOAS’s Chinese language centre, in the heart of Bloomsbury. I was starting a new language from zero, having already hit the age of 40. It felt like a lot was at stake. Had my success with Spanish been a fluke? Would I ever be more than just a beginner in Chinese?

I was, though, well supported. I had some one-to-one classes and plenty of self-study time. I got myself a CD-ROM (remember them?) to help practise pronunciation. I also set about writing each character I was learning on a separate card, to memorise them. I even colour-coded these by grammatical function... I hadn’t studied anything in a formal setting since my teaching diploma 15  years before. I really felt I was back at school, almost at primary school, with all that coloured stationery.

And I loved it. Why?

First of all, there was the sheer joy of engaging with the learning of Chinese characters. I’ve never had a great memory, so I felt that I needed to roll up my sleeves and do some good old-fashioned rote learning. From my courses on language acquisition, I had picked up the theory that we can learn about 7 new items in one go (give or take 2)¹. And so I set myself the task of learning 7 Chinese characters a day with the help of the hand-written flashcards I mentioned above. I applied myself well. It seemed to work!

Second, I found that the pictorial nature of the characters, which were so alien to me at first and whose meanings had totally eluded me in Kyoto, came to fascinate me. This happened only gradually, and after some hard work, but eventually they became more a source of joy than terror. I began to love the way that a character could tell a story about the culture. 

For example, take the Chinese character for house.  The upper part 宀 is “roof”. The lower part 豕  is “pig”. Put them together and you get 家 ‘jiā’, the character for house or home. Home was the place you kept your pigs. This actually makes sense when you realise that pigs are hugely important in Chinese culture, having been domesticated in the country 10,000 years ago.  

So, pig under a roof = home. This was all the more real to me, having lived on a farm and looked after the animals as a boy. I’d also once lived in a house dating back to the 16th century (which my parents had acquired more or less by accident - but that’s another story) where cattle would have been kept at one end of the building, presumably for security (and perhaps warmth in winter). 

Chinese was starting to make more sense!

In fact, most Chinese characters can’t easily be reduced to their elements in this simple way, but I was still delighted and more importantly motivated to explore this aspect of the language. 

“That childish sense of joy in deciphering the previously indecipherable hasn’t left me.” 

A third reason for my contentment was the sheer excitement of finding myself, a couple of months into my studies, actually reading Chinese. Ok, I wasn’t reading the great poets yet, but I was beginning to work out simple paragraphs in my textbook. The way that these previously inaccessible symbols had become intelligible to me so that I could engage with them as a reader gave me a huge thrill. That childish sense of joy in deciphering the previously indecipherable hasn’t left me. 

Fourthly, I was happy because I felt I was succeeding rather than failing. We all learn from failure, as we know from a billion self-help books on the subject, but a sense of some success, no matter how limited, is preferable to unremitting failure. Which leads me to the 5th reason for being pleased, which was that I was finally putting to bed my feelings of failure in Kyoto. 

Generated by AI

During my time studying Chinese in London, I recall the day the weather turned cold just as spring was approaching. After class, leaving the grey concrete slab buildings at SOAS to travel home, I looked up and felt a coldness on my face. Snow was beginning to fall in an abundance that was rare for London. It was already beginning to settle on the park, smudging the green of the grass to white. It had started to settle on window sills, roofs and on the pavement in front of me. In my near euphoria, I began to imagine that the snowflakes were individual Chinese characters floating faintly down, settling with benign indifference upon the good learner and the bad. 

I was happy. 

But it is for a reason that they say that confidence in a language learnt in a classroom doesn’t always survive the first contact with language in the wild.

Upon arrival in Shanghai that summer, I struggled to understand or to make myself understood. On the plus side, Chinese grammar was relatively straightforward. My teacher had told me that if I could master 20 or so basic patterns, I’d be all right and he wasn’t wrong. And if I put in the work, I could learn enough words to get by. But we both knew that the biggest challenge was pronunciation. Understanding the four basic tones of Mandarin requires a discerning ear and reproducing them requires a disciplined tongue. I didn’t really have either. 

In a clear context, with a sympathetic interlocutor and a fair wind of good fortune behind me, I could get by. That in itself felt great. But there was always the risk of completely misunderstanding what was said to me. Worse, there was the likelihood - in fact, in my case, the certainty - of coming out with complete gibberish at times. I mean a different kind of gibberish than I usually produce in my own language. 

What I feared most was lapsing into the kind of utterance that you might get in a Dadaist poem. And judging from some of the looks I got, that’s exactly what happened. 

Anyway, I was moderately pleased with myself for having reached the foothills of success in Chinese - and let’s be honest, the view can be very good from foothills.

However, I’m afraid it was all rather downhill after that. 

Next came Turkish. It’s a beautiful language, which I found as interesting as it was challenging. I tried hard to master when I first arrived in Ankara. The charm of Turkish people generally, and their generous delight in finding foreigners who can speak a little to their language in particular, were obvious motivations to learn. 

Against this was the fact that I might never use it again; that, in the time available, I would probably never get to a level where I could really use the language. And there was also the prosaic, ever-present reality of just being very busy at work. 

So, I failed even to scale the foothills of Turkish, perhaps reaching the top of a gentle incline at very most. But I did learn quite a lot about the language, which for me was far from negligible.

Languages are ways into understanding culture as well as being interesting in their own right, in all their beautiful complexity of syntax, vocabulary, morphology, pragmatics, and even sociolinguistics. For example, I was fascinated (in my nerdy way) by something called the reported past tense of “miş-past” in Turkish. It describes past actions which the speaker have not witnessed but only heard. To discover a language making that kind of distinction, between something that happened (which we saw) and something which happened (but which we didn’t see), was somehow a glimpse into a different way of seeing or at least describing the world. It was a delightful cultural nuance.

“I believe our knowledge of different cultures and languages can make us part of many imagined communities or cities in the mind”

I retain a real fondness for the Turkish language which perhaps is hard to distinguish from my love for the country and its people. Armed with the surviving remnants of the words and structures I’d learnt and a fading hinterland of knowledge, I still feel I have some access to the country which I must learn to call "Türkiye".

Elias Canetti once said “cities begin in the mind”. Benedict Anderson wrote of ‘Imagined Communities’. I believe our knowledge of different cultures and languages can make us part of many imagined communities or cities in the mind, or at very least more welcome and adaptable guests in them. 

Now, having written so much of my failures in language other languages, I ought to address a question that I used to get asked a lot in my previous existence: What’s the best age to learn a language? It’s worth reading this report.

One headline you could take from this is “you’ll only get to native speaker level if you start by 10”. But another is that you can get very good results by focusing on language learning in the teens. Part of my job in a previous life was helping ministries of education around the world to work out their strategies for foreign language teaching (usually, English). There is often a temptation to throw huge resources into teaching kids languages at primary level, but it means a massive investment of resources, with probably only marginal gains, even if it goes well. Generally, it's a better investment to improve language learning at the secondary level, given that resources are always limited. 

At this point, let me quote a venerable expert in second-language acquisition (SLA), as the professors like to call it. N.S. Prabhu was one of the world’s experts on the field, though now retired. His work was pretty impactful in general, but the phrase I remember most from him was: “Language learning always ends in failure.”  That bald statement felt like the voice of doom.  I suppose that if we compare ourselves as learners to native speakers or others who are extremely proficient, I guess that will be the case. 

But, as ever, it depends how we define success and failure. For instance, objectively speaking, I probably failed to learn Chinese well. In particular, my pronunciation was poor and my reading vocabulary was pretty limited. But, on the other hand, I had achieved a key goal for myself, in learning to read a character based language at all. And I could at least get by in the language.

So, maybe, the truth is that while language learning will always end in some kind of failure, it will, if we put in the work, also lead to some kind of success as well. Maybe not great if you’re a perfectionist, but if you’re a pragmatist like me, it feels ok to focus on the positives. 

Before I come full circle back to Japanese, I should mention my dalliance with learning Arabic. I knew it would never last. But there were some good moments. I loved the sound of lively conversation in the language it in the streets of Cairo and, of course, the gorgeous script that one would see adorning mosques, as well as the beautiful calls to prayer. 

And I’ll never forgot how my driver - yes, I had a driver to take me across for the city for meetings - would always say “Insha’Allah” (“God willing”) when I would say something like ”So, I’ll see you right here after the meeting ends”. The answer was never “yes” or “ok”. Always “Insha’Allah”. I loved it. It seemed like a great example of language as a vehicle for the culture (and, in this case, religion), affording us a priceless opportunity to glimpse into the way people think and act in that culture.

“Who wants to be beholden to a machine for every human interaction?” 

Now, back in Tokyo, I am still dealing again with my linguistic limitations. Although Chinese and Japanese share the characters, they are pronounced differently and often have different meanings. The way the two languages deal with words from other languages, including foreign names, is very different. The grammar is utterly different. 

So while I am now much more confident with reading and can just about deal with common interactions, I still have a long way to go. To get where? Well, again, that depends on how you define success. For me the key is to find linguistic independence. Translation apps and Google Lens can help me out, but who wants to be beholden to a machine for every human interaction every day? 

So, what have I learnt about myself as a language learner in my long linguistic odyssey?

Motivation is important. Both extrinsic (e.g. “I have to learn this because...”) and intrinsic (“I want to learn this because...”). My pursuit of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is an example of the latter.  My need - an absolute imperative - to avoid bean paste fillings in pastries is an example of the former. 

I also think focus is important - by which I mean putting in the effort on cracking the bits of a new language that really seem like a barrier to me. For example, the subjunctive in Spanish, the characters in Chinese and the scripts of hiragana and katakana in Japanese. I do best when I become mildly obsessed with cracking a particular problem in a language. 

I think methodology is less important. Another Prabhu dictum was “there is no best method” and I think he was right. 

But a key issue for me, and it’s linked to motivation, is about taking responsibility for my own learning. Too often, I have sat with a teacher and relied on him or her to teach me a language, even though my teacherly brain knew that wasn’t the right attitude. It seems, at least once I have some grasp of the basics, I do best setting my own goals and finding my own sequence of learning and doing things my way in my own time. 

Recently, I actually have been using Duolingo to revise the basics in Japanese. Their gamified model of endless repetition and silly cartoons does help, a bit...

But in the end, I feel like Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour's Lost’ of whom it is said, and not in a complimentary way, that “they have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”

Should I go back to watching Falcon Crest?

1. It turns out that the magic number of 7 was actually plucked out of the air in an act of whimsy. For the original paper see here: https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/millers-magic-number  And for the a fascinating account of the impact of that paper on subsequent research, read here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4486516/  Apparently, most researchers now put the number at closer to 3 or 4. Which explains a lot.