In praise of language-learning folly

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This post is sentimental and it’s not directly related to ReadLang. I’m posting it here because I think other language learners might enjoy this material.

In Czech, we say kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem, which literally means “you’re as many times a human being as many languages you know”; the most English-sounding translation I’ve found is “With every new language you live a new life.
If you know only one language, you live only once.”

I think the adage is literally true: when I switch on my English/German brain, I become a slightly different person, because each language supports different kinds of thoughts.

Other people have had similar experiences. Just a few examples:

A lady named Carolina Herrera tells how it’s easier to talk about trauma in a language not related to the traumatic experience https://www.quora.com/Is-it-normal-to-have-a-different-personality-when-speaking-another-language

J.R.R. Tolkien in defense of having his characters talk somewhat archaically (via https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jJ2p3E2qkXGRBbvnp/passages-i-highlighted-in-the-letters-of-j-r-r-tolkien#On_Language):

take an example from the chapter that you specially singled out (and called terrible): Book iii, ‘The King of the Golden Hall’. ‘Nay, Gandalf!’ said the King. ‘You do not know your own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better.’ This is a fair sample – moderated or watered archaism. Using only words that still are used or known to the educated, the King would really have said: ‘Nay, thou (n’)wost not thine own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall …’ etc. I know well enough what a modern would say. ‘Not at all my dear G. You don’t know your own skill as a doctor. Things aren’t going to be like that. I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casualties’ – and then what? Theoden would certainly think, and probably say ‘thus shall I sleep better’! But people who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom. You can have ‘I shall lie easier in my grave’ or ‘I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed at home’ – if you like. But there would be an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual ‘archaic’ English that I have used. Like some non-Christian making a reference to some Christian belief which did not in fact move him at all.

Another person’s experience with translating texts:

@Sr1’s question has prompted me to start this thread:

My native language is Czech. My other languages are English, German (enough to watch a movie unless the characters talk in a dialect), Finnish (elementary) and Hebrew and Latin (eternal beginner). Plus I understand Slovak passively, but you could claim it’s just a dialect of Czech, so it doesn’t really count (with a little practice, all Czech people understand Slovak).

In this country, it’s common that people learn 2 foreign languages at school, and I haven’t progressed far in the other 3, so compared to my compatriots, I wouldn’t consider myself a polyglot.

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Thank you for that post. The quote is inspiring, and in line with what I’ve heard, in different forms, from other sources – but not yet experienced for myself.

I had a similar experience, however, when I took physics – and found myself walking through the world noticing things I had never noticed before. I’ve heard that when you find yourself literally dreaming in a language you have crossed an important threshold. Are you there with, perhaps, German? I keep hoping I will get there “soon” with Spanish, but I now think I need to emphasize speaking, much more, in order to get there. Finally, I think I have found some small-chunk but high-quality reading sources for learning to emphasize that (one is a couple of US Foreign Service Institute training manuals from decades ago, which has very detailed, ideosyncratic, “mark-up” language to emphasize exact, proper, pronunciation). I dream that this will be the year I start dreaming in Spanish…but I’ve got a way to go before that.

I was forced to take “two years” of French in high school, but scarcely learned anything lasting…except the useless belief that “I’m not good at learning languages”. At least that belief is gradually fading. I’m determined this will be the year of getting past my “intermediate” plateau (it feels like less than intermediate, but podcasts and writings supposedly ranked intermediate are increasingly very comprehensible).

I have begun to think about beginning another language, mostly to see if I can learn a lot faster now that I think I’ve learned the proper system of learning … at least for myself. I’m thinking of either French (to turn my high school failure around) or maybe Russian (I’ve heard a recent amount of it in recent years and it sounds comfortably like the Polish my parents, and other relatives, used to sometimes speak.)

Do you have any thoughts on when it is relatively “safe” to begin exposure to a third language? Should I force myself to only drill Spanish, or might a slow introduction to a third language actually be motivating, while I proceed with my second???

The whole process of learning a second language reminds me very much of trance/hypnosis experience: relaxing out of stressing my logical brain and trying to let the second language wash over me, sort of like waves at the edge of a beach. I increasingly want to go with the drift without thinking too much – I often fall asleep listing to a foreign language podcast or audible. Maybe that would be different if my sense of grammar was better. But I didn’t even like grammar lessons in English – and circumstances arranged that never got much education in grammar. I know a few people who learned Latin as their “second” language, and they seem to lean heavily on their ability to classify things in terms in grammar when acquiring third, fourth, etc. languages.

I hope you don’t mind my posting this rather meandering reply/ soliloquy in your thread.

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I love the story about how studying physics changed the way you’ve experienced the world at large.

In my experience, dreaming in the foreign language doesn’t depend on proficiency as much as it depends on the amount of exposure during the day So I remember dreaming in “German” during a high school exchange trip to Germany, even though I guess my brain had to make up some of the words or simply avoid dreaming them because I simply hadn’t known them yet. I don’t remember, but I might have dreamt about attempting to communicate in Finish during a trip to Finland, because trying to communicate in a foreign language in a real-world situation for the first time is such an exhilarating experience that it is replayed during dreams. More than once, I’ve started retelling a dream and then I’ve realized that I don’t know whether the characters spoke Czech or English - I remember the concepts but not which language they were expressed in or even whether my brain bothered to translate them into actual language at all.

Learning more than one language: I find it hard to practice more than one language consistently, so it’s more like “I dab at this language and then after a few weeks when things get tough/boring/too difficult, I start concentrating on the other language and then come back to this much later”. So it’s not totally efficient, I’d say, as it is very tempting to procrastinate. Also, it seems that I have a “Czech brain” that tends to communicate with my other language-specific brains, and English and German brains that don’t communicate with each other directly, so if I want to translate from English to German, or even go from speaking in English into going in German, I have to first activate my Czech brain (translate into Czech or think what I want to say in Czech) and only then I can activate my “German brain”. And all the languages that I know very little seem to have just one “brain” in common, so my attempts to put together a Latin sentence frequently contain Finnish words without me realizing…

I guess the question whether you should start a new language boils down to the question whether it will give you joy. If you are excited when you learn that the same thing is expressed in many different ways in different languages, then go for it - the beginning stage is full of such novelties. For me, a large part of the joy comes from comparing the grammar of the different languages, and the rest from reading and watching movies; the early stages are full of new grammar concepts/structures, but then there is a long and somewhat annoying struggle to get to the reading proficiency. I guess that’s the main reason why I tend to start a new language before getting the precious one to full proficiency…