Learning Languages is Like… by Mr. Vinson

Why do dancers feel the urge to keep dancing, even when there’s nobody watching? I’m not a dancer myself, but I imagine it’s something akin to the feeling my grandfather got by tilling the field with his mule, and then planting, weeding, and harvesting his corn, beans, and okra. He didn’t need to. He was a high school teacher; he could have bought vegetables from another farmer. Yet he still got up before sunrise to feed the animals, cleaned and oiled the plowshare when it wasn’t in use, gave away far more produce than he or my grandmother ever ate. I think the work reminded him of his childhood and helped him connect to the rhythms of life that affirmed him in who he was.

That’s what languages are like for me, minus most of the sweat and sacrifice. I started with Latin and German in junior high, primarily because there was a full-page representation of the Indo-European language family tree in the dictionary in our house. I figured that if I learned those two languages, I’d be much better equipped to answer all the questions I had about my native language, English – about words, what they meant, where they came from, how they were connected, and how they could do all the things they did. The (mostly ancient) languages I’ve studied since then have been further extensions of that basic curiosity. I never stop having questions, and language never stops offering tantalizing, complicated, usually partial answers to those questions.

Apart from the raw enjoyment of learning what and how things mean, studying other languages has offered me lots of chances to connect with other people. Sometimes that was in real life, like when I did an exchange year in Germany. The language functioned both as the medium through which I got to know people and, in some cases, was itself the point of connection. Case in point – an acquaintance started using the English word “safe” as an interjection. It took a bit, but another person in our peer group figured out that he was translating the German word sicher, which covers the English words “safe,” “secure,” and “sure.” He meant the last, a la “For sure!” We laughed, but it also gave me a chance to gauge his perception of the social value of English. Even though it didn’t make sense idiomatically, for him “safe” sounded cooler and more urbane than the German equivalent. 

In the case of ancient languages, it’s more often been a feeling of connection brought about by reading a line, hundreds or even thousands of years old, that still rings true for me today. I remember the first time I read the description in Book 10 of the Iliad of Agamemnon’s racing mind and restless night. I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” Even the unpleasant experience of anxious insomnia, rendered poetically, can link people across time and space, where no such connection actually exists.

In ways big and small, studying different languages has also influenced my perspective on what it means to be a person. The structures and strictures of particular languages both enable and limit what one can say. Some languages don’t have verbal tense; you can’t say that something did or will happen, or at least not at the level of the verb itself. Other languages don’t have gendered pronouns. The more I learn, the more I realize how contextual, how contingent even our most heartfelt utterances and urgent entreaties are. Languages are a reflection of the people who use them, but they can’t ever sum up, in themselves or in the thoughts they enable us to express, what it is to be a person. There’s always an unresolved remainder, something new and unexpected to uncover. There’s still room to wonder and always more to learn.

One of the biggest advantages to teaching language in a middle school is that there’s seldom much salespersonship involved. If I’m excited about it, then the students are game to try it. Not every student will experience the same level of sheer enjoyment that I do in studying language, but I think every student can find meaning, and even pleasure, in seeing however small a slice of the world through somebody else’s linguistic lens. At the very least, it illustrates for them the point that the world is bigger than they may have imagined – that with persistent curiosity, they can explore and start to understand an ever-unfolding world.