Language is funny

In the last couple months, I’ve moved to Montreal, where I’ve been hitting the French lessons hard. A few observations about language:

  • Learning a new language really returns you back to infancy, and this is an astounding pleasure. I am laughing constantly at things in French that would never amuse me in English. To the extent that humor is based on some surprising ambiguity or confusion, nearly everything is newly ambiguous and confusing. What a treat!
  • Because of this, a lot of language learning mirrors early childhood education. You may be a highly accredited legal expert used to requiring a slide deck wherever you go, but you still have to know the cow goes moo before they can let you out on the street. This feels remarkably natural. In fact, the creepiest language instruction material is the stuff that deals with normal, adult subject matter in only an eight-year old’s vocabulary. Discovery Channel, e.g., has a whole series of language education sitcoms that put together some rough facsimile of the cast of Friends plus one foreigner and lets them make vaguely sexual remarks at each other in slow, precise diction and using 500 word vocabularies. You feel vaguely dirty watching this, like you’ve discovered some tragic, debilitated society, where everything developed normally, except the language centers of the brain.
  • Spoken words are not discrete things in the brain. They exist contextually. I can hear a sentence in which I know every word, and not understand the sentence be causethe wordsblee dintoea chotherim possibly. It takes a lot of practice to hear the phonemes and unconsciously recognize how they are segregated. 
  • Every language has its share of utter illogic, and you learn a lot about your own language’s illogic just by trying to understand another’s. For example, English speakers are well-advised not to confuse “I love you the most” with “I love you mostly.” French has this one solved, but a whole slew of replacement problems to keep you busy.