The Benefits of Language

It’s inevitable that when people get to know us, pretty early on in the conversation, they find out that we speak three different languages. Well, really my wife and children speak three. I’m still working on my Chinese, and it’s usually on hold because of other priorities. But as I speak English natively, and my wife is a native Chinese speaker, our children grow up understanding and communicating in both of those languages. And of course, as we live in France, we use French at work, school, church, with our friends, and everywhere we have to go.

We chose French deliberately. When I met my wife, she was doing a Master’s program in Linguistics, specifically English and French. The obvious reason that she was studying these two languages is that they are global languages, spoken by a significant portion of the Earth’s population, and certainly hold political significance as well. That was the same basic reason that I was interested in Chinese and French as an American. Obviously one of these turned out to be a bit harder for me to learn than the other, but the fact remains that both are powerful languages. Our goals are simply to expand our horizons and experience different things. French opens up a lot more opportunities for us than other languages which have fewer speakers concentrated in weaker countries.

There are a lot of good reasons for us to live in France: as a third country it’s “neutral” ground for our family, it could allow for citizenship opportunities with significant benefits in Europe, and it offers a new language for us and our children. More significantly, this new language offers new ways of thinking. The pattern of langauge and the way we use it affects the way we think and behave, to some extent. A simple example is the formal “vous”, as opposed to the informal “tu”. This separation, common in many languages, differs from the ambiguous English “you”. The effect that I see is that a French person behaves more distant from somebody that they don’t know, whereas an English speaker, especially an American, is usually comfortable making small talk with complete strangers.

Immersion is the best way to learn a new language. Though it involves a lot of sacrifice to move somewhere new where you aren’t yet comfortable with the local language, there is a lot of value in seeing native speakers in their natural habitat. Language goes hand and hand with behavior and lifestyle. We can learn grammar in a classroom in a foreign country, but it makes more sense when we see people speaking, whispering, arguing, even sending emails and text messages in the language. At that point the practical use of the language becomes apparent, which drives the will to learn. After being immersed for a while, the culture and the language become enjoyable in some way. For example, I personally am not very outgoing, and don’t really look forward to making small talk with employees at a store, or other people in a places where I’m basically just looking to get something done and leave. French is good for that, because we stay at the formal level. We say “Bonjour” or “Bonsoir” and that little communication suffices. Back in the USA “Hi” often just leads into a comment about what I’m buying.

Every language has its pros and cons, but some appear more advantageous than others. Just the economic opportunities offered by English make it the most desirable language to know in my mind. A language like French offers a different way of thinking, not influenced too much by English (though that may be changing), an alternative in the modern Western world. To me, Chinese (Mandarin) shows how over time a language can become less practical. In the modern world, we are looking to become more flexible, and more able to quickly adapt to a changing environment. Mandarin grammar and Chinese characters, even Simplified Chinese characters, don’t exhibit that characteristic. When a new technology comes along, we have to construct a term from existing characters. A computer is “电脑”, literally “electric brain”. And while certainly it is practical to spend less on neon lighting for the sign reading “电脑” instead of “computer”, in the age of (ironically) computers, that advantage isn’t very impressive. We aren’t carving our writing into stone, or writing on precious scrolls. Often we aren’t even printing out our language at all, meaning that the savings on length is negligible. Instead, we have to memorize thousands of characters to have a good grasp of the language, and we have much less ability to deduce the meaning of a term compared to another language, where we derive words from other words. Our behavior becomes more focused on memorization than reasoning or creativity.

Whatever language we choose to learn, we should do so knowing it will open our eyes to different ways of communicating, not just in grammar but in behavior as well. If we can recognize that and accept that the ways we knew before might not always be the best ways, that is half the battle to growing as a person. A person who understand multiple languages is one who normally has more ways of thinking, more ways of solving or avoiding problems, of being creative, and of achieving their goals.