Learning languages

"The words of the world want to make sentences."
- Gaston Bachelard

My grandmother does not know, but her talent for languages is the one I wished I inherited the most. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, several other Chinese dialects, and has picked up English quite well over the years, in addition to bits of Vietnamese. During the 50s, she worked as a radio host during the string of wars in China, broadcasting the news in a spectrum of dialects. Moving all across China and eventually Asia, my grandmother found solace in the most ordinary of conversations even as she found herself trapped in a war thousands miles away from her kids and home. She tells me, sometimes over her home cooked dinners, other times in the car on the freeway, that she learned languages by just talking to people, as if developing fluency was as easy as saying, hello! As if it was as easy as asking the Vietnamese fisherman how much the silver flecked sea bass cost, wondering to her Cantonese neighbor how to cook a good braised chicken, telling the Sichuanese postman to send bundles of letters. Of course, learning a language was as easy to her as inhaling air.

Although my sisters and I grew up hearing words in Mandarin float around our house like ghosts, none of us could speak it, let alone write Chinese. At dinners with family friends, we made sad attempts and scowly faces when our parents coerced some Chinese words out of us. It was simply not cool, simply not done, the idea of speaking any other language than English. My grandmother, an avid polyglot even in her 70s, would sigh and chastise our parents for our poor command of her native tongue. We spoke like foreigners, a horrible, shameful thing, but after all we were children of California, of naive comfort and contentment.

So it was only when I began travelling to other countries that I began to appreciate the complexity and convenience of learning languages. To learn how to say hello! and thank you! in local speech became imperative, a part of the whole travel bug. It became rude, in fact, to not at least try to inquire about the deep purple pomegranate juice in Catalan, to order a soulful bowl of pho in Vietnamese, to ask for directions to the castle in Slavic.

The seductive pull of deciding to learn a new language, however, always means the eventual morning after of realizing how intensely overwhelming the challenge actually is. And unlike my grandmother, the challenge of learning languages is pointedly problematic for me, because my recalcitrant brain refuses to think in any other language than English. It becomes an obstinate slave to my will, offering immediate, albeit nonsensical translations of unfamiliar words. When I decided to learn Mandarin, the words tumbled out of my mouth like leaden objects. It was like exploring a new world in the clammy dark, groping for familiar sounds and cadence. It meant feeling stupid, naked and unaware in those foreign landscapes. Somewhere between my brain and mouth, the words lost their meaning. People could only guess at my true intent – perhaps she wants a small coffee, not large? I’m not sure why she bought MSG at the night market. It is a mystery. Learning the language meant over-exposing myself to a linguistic world that I had always shied away from. It involved playing the part of the willing fool, the English dummy, the ethnic fraud, the funny Chinese girl imitating Chinese sounds.

And yet, when I finally accrued enough confidence to read and speak without fear, it seemed to me that I had literally entered a new country. When travelling in Taiwan some time ago, I was in a bookstore leafing through the fiction aisles, as if I was at home in New York. And it was just that, the awareness that I was casually book browsing on a Friday night as if I was home, that made me see the Chinese characters as a bright opening instead of a dark barrier. Book hunting, a habit so ingrained that I forget I am prone to losing hours like pocket change among the stacks, became for me a catalyst in fully inhabiting a familiarizing myself to a place in other words. I no longer felt that uncomfortable sense of alienation when taking the subway, ordering from the paper menu, or asking for directions. Instead of feeling like an uneasy guest in someone’s house, it seemed like I was suddenly appointed a time share, or had become a new co-owner of the whole estate. I now emotionally and psychologically responded to the blinking signs, the stacks of newspapers, the talking heads on television, knowing they were now talking to me. It was only after the repeated errors of linguistically fumbling in the dark, that the payoff became exceptionally clear, in a way beyond the practical need to communicate.

I now understood why my grandmother, who for so long seemed to collect languages like stamps, felt that it was so easy. It wasn’t that learning languages didn’t require hard work. Having lived through war, my grandmother came to experience how learning a language was like accepting an invitation to belong, so that you could feel perhaps a little more at home, no matter where you were.