The video feels familiar at first: a woman venting her frustration with modern dating. But a note in the corner revealing it to be translated by Meta AI stops me in my scroll. Turning the translation off, the video replays in Spanish. In both versions, the woman’s tone rises to accentuate her exasperation, her pacing accelerates when describing what she really wants, and most incredibly, her mouth matches her speech perfectly. The translation seems lossless; the untrained eye struggles to identify which is the original.
Unlike such technological marvels, understanding a language remains an incredibly demanding human endeavor. Anyone who has tried to learn a language can describe late nights spent poring over verb charts and conjugations, drilling vocabulary, memorizing grammatical rules, and then the exceptions to the rules, and then the exceptions to the exceptions to the rules. In Mandarin, you are a couple of incorrect tones away from mixing up “panda” and “chest hair,” and in Arabic, one mispronounced “ق” away from referring to your beloved (“cough cough”) as your dog. Beginner learners of French are tempted to say “je suis excité” to mean “I’m excited,” but the phrase more commonly connotes sexual arousal. Robert Worth once described language learning as “moments of elation alternating with grim, soul-churning despair.” What then is the point of learning languages, this frustrating and foolhardy task?
We find one answer in Xiaomanyc, one of the most renowned language content creators on Youtube, a white American who PRANKS and SHOCKS waiters, taxi drivers, and nail salon workers with his perfect Mandarin (or less-than-perfect Tamil, Welsh, or Navajo). His millions of views reveal how we too often see language learning: worthwhile insofar as it is a signal of intelligence, a posturing of worldliness, or a pursuit of perfection.
Language learning, understood as such, may well deserve to be thrown to the wayside of niche pursuits like dog breeding, researching algebraic topology, and reading Žižek to reference at parties. It seems designated for the select few who possess the time, motivation, and natural knack to arrive at the enviable summit of native fluency.
But language learning’s true utility lies in the very opposite: the humbling task of failing at what is second nature for children. When we learn languages, as with any kind of personal and spiritual growth, we “force ourselves,” Simone Weil notes, “to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity.” There is no other path to progress but through abject failure. We must experience “our mediocrity” to “acquire the virtue of humility,” which is a “treasure” greater than even intellectual progress. Seen through this lens, language learning does not demand perfection—only an openness to try and fail.
Every other Thursday evening, if you enter Revolution Brewery on Kedzie in Chicago, you will find tables and tables filled with people chatting in a multitude of languages. During the language exchange, each table is designated for a language (Mandarin, English, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Esperanto, and more) and participants wear stickers corresponding to the languages they speak. They are heritage speakers, or native speakers hoping to help others learn, or dedicated language students, or polyglots, or Duolingo devotees, or first-time language learners, or international students hoping to practice English, or some combination of these, or none at all.
Every time I attend the language exchange, I leave with a sense of giddy excitement. After all, language learning’s rigor is only meaningful if the intelligence it stimulates, as Weil observes, then “grows and bears fruit in joy.” But what makes language learning so enjoyable?
Bhartṛhari, an Indian grammarian, philosopher, and poet from the fifth century, provides a rejoinder. In the Vākyapadīya, his celebrated Sanskrit treatise on the philosophy of language, he argues that language carves divisions from our experiences to make them legible. In some ways, this is obvious—the distinctions from red to orange to yellow are clearly contrived, or the moment of transformation when cream is churned into butter. But for Bhartṛhari, the entirety of experience is fundamentally indivisible, such that when I walk on the Quad on a spring day, feeling the wind in my hair and seeing the Gothic buildings, I am comprehending this experience—making this experience comprehensible to myself and others—through divisible word-meanings, which are superimposed onto the indivisible sentence-meaning. That is a building; this is a spring day. He offers up the example of a shard of a pot which is also part of the pot, so that in the same way, language apprehends “आकाश,” aether, part by part, “which is really without any division.”
Bhartṛhari goes further to argue that “all knowledge is, as it were, intertwined with the word.” There is no cognition without language; rather, all knowledge “depends upon the word” as a condition of its intelligibility. He even frames the instincts of prelinguistic children as derived from the “residual traces from the previous birth”— the language acquired in a past life.
Language learning is ultimately joyful because it reveals the delightful vastness of human expression, and by doing so, offers us more ways to articulate and therefore understand our experience. Languages elide or lack certain concepts without us realizing it until we are confronted by a language that does not. The Mandarin word “腥味” describes the unpleasant, gamey taste and smell in certain meats, which necessitates blanching before cooking. Arabic has a close equivalent in “زنخة.” English lacks such a word, making the smell harder not only to describe, but to recognize. Knowledge, being so intertwined with language, blooms when it is fed new possibilities.
When we learn a language, we realize that the borders and bridges we have erected on the terrain of human experience—the “metaphors we live by,” as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson—could have followed any number of arrangements depending on culture, history, identity, and eccentricity. Take the Arabic root “ج-ن-ن,” which relates to concealment or hiding. The root gives rise to the word “جنّة,” meaning garden, evoking the tangling of vegetation which conceals what is below. This word was later used in the Qur’an to denote Paradise, a connotation likely borrowed from Aramaic. From the same root also comes “مجنون,” meaning insane, tied to the experience of being possessed by “جِن”—spiritual beings concealed from the senses. A single root and its remarkably expansive derivatives reflect the vastness of possible historical and religious conditions, out of which one came to create the Arabic we find today.
At the same time, language learning allows us to find each other within this vastness. Befriending another, having learned their language, rather than expecting them to learn ours, meets them in mutual effort. Through this, we experience friendship, love, and passion in another tongue—a different glimpse, that is, of what Bhartṛhari calls “the highest form of undifferentiated speech, the pure Light which appears differentiated only in the midst of all this darkness.” Crowded around the Arabic table at the Language Exchange and learning cuss words at the skatepark in Jordan, mispronouncing but laughing and learning all the same—I have seen a glimpse of this “pure Light.”
I would like to end with a brief illustration of my favorite novel, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Through the course of the relationship between a precocious boy named Ludo and his mother, Sibylla, the novel attempts to teach us Ancient Greek, Japanese, and Icelandic. The experience can be unsettling; Ludo masters these languages and leaves us in the dust. But we feel these emotions only in the face of pursuing language learning as perfection. DeWitt is not trying to shame us, but the opposite. She pushes us to face head-on the challenges we have accepted as impossible.
Sibylla, at one point in the novel, goes to a concert by the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto. Yamamoto, a prodigy like Ludo, has grown obsessed with the multiplicity of a song, and plays it over and over again, late into the night, to the consternation of his unimaginative audience. At the end of the novel, Ludo hears Yamamoto playing piano through an open window and approaches him to ask him to record a CD for Sibylla, which might just cure her suicidal ideation. The project is absurd, doomed to financial failure. In that way, it resembles the novel itself, whose expansive, ampersand-laden typesetting, foreign alphabets, and wildly varying font sizes produced a nightmare for DeWitt ahead of its publication. After licensing issues forced her to retitle the novel, she watched as a Tom Cruise film of the same name overshadowed it in search results three years later. An accounting error left her in debt and the novel went out of print for nearly a decade.
There is value in attempting what is absurd, illogical, and in a practical sense, doomed to fail—to set out, knowing the long, arduous, journey ahead, choosing to be led by joy. In other words, the value of life, or any other quest, is not measured by the attainability of its aims. We can pursue the impractical and grow to a greater extent than we ever imagined. Along the way, we will certainly fail—mispronounce, misconjugate, misunderstand, and come face to face with our own mediocrity—but emerge not only better at a language but at being human.
Image: Bedford Master, Building of the Tower of Babel from the Bedford Hours, illumination on parchment, ca. 1410–30 (British Library, London).