Responding to a Triggering Comment About Language Learning

My love of languages is just as right as anything else

Image created by me with DALL-E 3

For this week, let me turn to a comment I had missed over a year ago and recently fell upon by accident.

It was on one of my articles on Medium about learning multiple languages and how I arranged for myself to not turn crazy.¹ Here it is.

Am I the only one this triggers?

Since most of you are most likely language learners as well (otherwise, please tell me how you ended up following me 😅), I’m willing to bet you’re already seeing where I’ll be going but stay with me for a moment.

You see, I’ve been asked countless times why I learned multiple languages. What I learned from them, what was the point, why these languages and not others, and so on. Now, with AI growing, I get the added question “But what’s the point anyway now that we have AI tools?”

I’m used to those and don’t mind answering. Most often, it’s one more way for me to share my passion.

But this one got on my nerves. The bold on the “why” and the exclamation point made it sound to me like an attack. As if I didn’t have the right to choose what I wanted to do with my own time.

There’s a lot wrong with what that person says too.

What are pain and success?

The time to do this painlessly and successfully is before 5 years old!

That one sentence is so subjective it’s borderline crazy. I won’t say it actually is though, since that’d be subjective too.😁

First of all, while science has indeed proven children’s brains are more able to learn languages than adults, I still hold my doubts about this for the single reason that we’re comparing kids who hear 10,000 hours of their native language (without any other responsibility to juggle) before they even say a word while we adults have to study them in our spare time and never wait that long to start speaking.

In reality, as one person who responded to this message said,

I actually believe that doing this as an adult is more advantageous, because unlike a child, I am consciously teaching myself these rules. So I can explain what I know (and don't know). Children cannot always do that.

We have an advantage as adult learners. We don’t need to start from scratch and discover what the hell the past or future even entails.

Then comes the idea of “pain.”

Pain, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

While I love losing track of time while studying a language, I’d likely run away within the first 5 minutes if you gave me a physics textbook instead. What I love is what I love. That person may not love language learning, and that’s completely fine.

But don’t try to teach me how to live and enjoy my life.

The other person who replied said they enjoyed “the pain of forcing myself to think in a different language. I like the misery.” While I wouldn’t go as far as using the word misery, I get that feeling too.

Learning a language is bliss but it’s also hard work sometimes. Hell, that’s part of what makes it so good. It’s because we struggle that we get to feel that pride in ourselves when we remember that word we kept on forgetting or use that grammar pattern that’s been bugging us for years.²

That unstable balance between pleasure and frustration is part of what makes us language learners come back for more again and again. The tiny successes nobody else sees overwhelm us.

And while I do understand this commenter was rather “complaining” about me mentioning the study of 6 languages at the same time, than the act of studying languages as a whole, I don’t think it’s a reason to look down on other people.

Phew. Feels good to go on a small rant once in a while. I should do it again in the future. 🤭

A few updates

I spent the last week extremely sick while pushing myself to visit a few more spots and see friends one last time before leaving Korea. I’m happy I did but this also made me take longer than I probably would have to recover. Still, I’m now feeling better so that’s what matters.

I left Korea a day ago and am in Taiwan for the next three weeks. I originally wanted this week to be a kind of reflection about my time in Korea but I wanted to write it once outside of Korea and I’ve been traveling with a buddy ever since I arrived so that’ll be for the newsletter in two weeks. Or I might just wait for me to be back in France after February 23rd.

That’ll also give me some time to sort through the mess of feelings this departure is bringing. Although I reckon it’ll still be quite a mess.

Anyway, cheers for reading, and ’til next time!
Mathias

1. Read: crazier than I already am.

2. When I’ll finally naturally use the ending 거든 in Korean, I will most likely look crazy to my interlocutor because I reckon I’ll have to jump out of happiness.