On Language Learning

Perhaps in part because I highlighted this linguistic “no true translation” idea at the beginning of my last piece, I’ve been thinking a bit more about it over the past couple weeks. I came across this passage in the book I’m reading the other day:

“All translations miss something. Some miss almost everything. Irony. Indirection. Complex metaphors. Straight-faced humor. Damped-down anger. The human touch.”

I’ve come to realize that this very idea is my favorite part of language learning. Much of language learning is translation - the mother tongue provides an anchor, and the learned language is tethered to that anchor. When we first learn to speak our mother tongues, and when we learn languages via immersion, we skip that translation step. We learn to understand words via the way they are used by the people around us, and any anchor they may have is not to a translation in another language, it’s to the usefulness they provide to explain our world. I’ve come to realize that I’ve been fortunate enough to learn new languages now in two different ways.

I started German classes at Martin Middle School as an 11-year-old 6th grader. My logic in choosing to take German was some mix of: my last name is German, my Dad lived in Germany when he was young, and I had heard that Spanish classes fill up so fast you risk not getting in. I remember the dark, wood-paneled trailer where we studied conjugation charts, tenses, and vocabulary. Ich spiele, er/sie/es spielt, du spielst. It never felt like it came particularly naturally, but I stuck with it. From early on there was at least somewhat of a sense of community, if for nothing else but the fact that we were the weirdos who chose to take German. We attended annual “German Day” competitions at local universities where we competed in spelling bees, poetry recitations, and other performances. It was all a bit cheesy and a bit odd, but I chose to stick with it all 3 years at Martin and then all 4 years at Broughton High School. At Broughton I had a great teacher who made me start to love the language. One of the lessons that stuck with me the most was not the grammar or the vocab, but the approach to language learning. My teacher, who we called Frau Gulewich, emphasized that it didn’t matter if you didn’t have all the words you needed to say what you wanted to say, what mattered was trying to use the words you did have to find a way to communicate your ideas anyways. Rather than interjecting English words as a crutch when your German failed you, we were encouraged to meander, to find an alternative route using what limited vocab we did possess. She described it just like that, that we might not have the shortest path, but we did typically have a path, and in the end language is a tool for communication - if your path gets you to that objective, it’s done its job. We participated in an exchange program with a high school from Raleigh’s sister city in Germany – Rostock. We hosted an exchange student, Sören, who delighted at the phrase “Holy Moly,” and leaned heavily on the word “crazy” to describe his impressions of America. I then got to visit Germany for the first time to spend some time with Sören’s family. In spite of Frau Gulewich’s best efforts, many of my classmates on our trip sarcastically overused one phrase we all knew by heart - “Was machst du mit deiner Freizeit?” (What do you do with your freetime), in lieu of embarrassing themselves with their limited German.

I placed into level three German as a Freshman at UNC, and thus only needed one semester to fulfill my language requirement, but again, chose to stick with it, eventually graduating with a minor in German. The German department, on the 4th floor of Dey Hall, the brick building to your immediate left when looking out at the quad from the steps of the Wilson Library, was a refuge of sorts during my 4 years at Carolina. Going from a 300 person Econ lecture, typing notes on my laptop, to the 13 person German seminar where we just talked for an hour was always a jarring and welcome change. Although it had never felt easy, I had found that in middle school and high school I had typically been one of the better German speakers in my classes. That was not true at Carolina. I was routinely one of the poorer speakers in my classes. In a German theatre class where we put on a play I was chosen for a part with just a few lines (and even then managed to mess up one of them). But I knew the professors and I knew my classmates and always enjoyed the rhythm of my attempted German.

And then, some 5 months after graduating from Chapel Hill, I found myself in Konstanz, Germany, with two enormous bags, trying to catch a bus to what was to be my student apartment for the next year. I remember being surprised by how little practical German I knew. I was shocked to realize I didn’t know the proper way to order a pretzel. I didn’t know the proper way to ask for another beer. 11 years, countless hours of German, and these everyday practicalities, these rhythms with which people actually use the language, were missing. My Master’s cohort was 16 students - 14 Germans and 2 Americans. The easiest way to make friends would have been spending time with other international students, but I was determined to become a local. Those first 6 months, starting in October 2019, I spent a lot of time quietly trying to keep up. I insisted that my classmates speak only German with me. My brain probably was working harder during our lunch breaks than our lectures, trying to follow what felt like an overwhelming flow of conversation. I found it incredibly difficult. For the most part I could usually understand what was being discussed, but I was always at least a couple seconds behind. By the time I’d processed fully where we were at, and come up with a useful interjection, the conversation would have passed me by. I was a touch too slow, always behind, always trying to keep up. I found the university had some way to play football, and I joined quickly. Luckily, my football ability made me popular in a way that my language ability couldn’t. Upon arrival, everyone would greet me with something that I had never learned in school, and couldn’t understand. Eventually I learned that it was the go-to regional greeting - you could tell someone was from the North if they said “Moin”, and from the South if they greeted you as they greeted me - “Servus”.

In some ways, I learned more in those first 6 months living there than I had in the 11 years studying. Of course, those 6 months were built on the base of those 11 years, but I found myself falling in love with those gaps, those things we missed in school, the way people actually talked, the filler words, the slang, the rhythm with which conversations started and ended. Servus, doch, digga, na ja, jungs, ich packs. These words and phrases delighted me, left me wanting more, in a way that grammar and conjugation charts never had. I loved the way the language sounded, the way it flowed, the way native speakers used it. And I learned quickly. I’ve got this note in my journal from 2021 where I delight in the realization that I’d unconsciously correctly used a divisible verb:

“I just had a cool German language moment. I went to text Philipp, and I wrote "Fährst du noch morgen ab"

German is a bit odd in that the verb here is separated - it’s abfahren - to depart, and it’s divided in two, one part at the start of the sentence, and the other at the end, with a conjugation added on transforming fahren to fährst, just in case it wasn't complicated enough already. I didn’t know that I knew this word, I wasn’t conscious of it’s direct translation - I used it because it felt right, and it was right, “are you still leaving tomorrow”.

My Spanish learning has looked a lot more like those first 6 months in Konstanz than it has those 11 years in classrooms. If you ignore the one day a week in elementary school we spent dancing around a sombrero singing “La Cucaracha” (as I choose to), I’ve never had a formal Spanish lesson. Rather than starting with the grammar and the conjugation charts and eventually filling in the gaps, I’ve started with the gaps and worked my way backwards. And I can’t tell you how much I prefer this approach. My friend Nicole, who is a language genius, truly native level fluent in English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish, told me that she loves learning the grammar of a language first - she feels like that provides her a structure, and from there it’s easy to fill in the structure with words as you learn them. I’ve learned I’m much the opposite. In Spanish, I started with the gaps, the filler words, the strange expressions. And what I liked the most about that was they were immediately useful because they followed the rhythm of the way people talked. Maybe I didn’t know how to say “what do you do with your freetime”, but I knew how to say “que chulo!” when I found something cool, and “que triste” when I found something sad. Maria taught me phrases and expressions I could use that were guaranteed to get a laugh out of her family and friends - the foreigner that doesn’t speak quite right but uses slang is a universally endearing trope. Maria and I still laugh about her asking a waiter if they could “break a hundo”. I thrived on that feeling. I learned from music, from memes, I learned from everything but a textbook, a classroom. Most succintly I guess, I learned from immersion.

When you learn through immersion, rather than through a textbook, you understand more completely the idea of “no true translation”. Learning in a classroom, in a textbook, you are most directly learning to translate. You’re learning the German/Spanish equivalent of an English word you already know. Book -> Libro, to play -> spielen. When you learn via immersion, you are learning via context. Attempting to translate becomes a tedious, unnecessary step - you understand the meaning of a word via the situation in which it’s used, you then repeat that word in a context that makes sense based on your understanding of the way in which you heard it. Sometimes (all the time) you use a word wrong and your friends laugh at you, but it's all a part of the learning process. My Spanish is filled with words for which I don’t know the English translation. If you asked me to think about it, I could figure out a good option, but that’s not the way I think about or understand the words. Apretado. Acojonante. Apañado. Bolinga. Cariñoso. Cosquillitas. Cutre. Empapado. Espabilado. Niñato. The translations, perhaps because they come second to my understanding of the words, often don’t feel complete. “Empapado” would actually probably translate fairly directly to “soaked”, but when I hear and speak that word, I don’t think of “soaked,” I think of the rain storm we got caught in on the walk back from lunch in Cunit and Paco saying he was “Empapado”. Translations often feel more like a closest approximation than they do a true like for like representative. Speaking this way, based on understanding, is actually less mental work. The translation process - trying to translate German to English in real time, then figure out a clever response in English, and translate it back into German - was the very reason I was so regularly lagging behind my German colleagues during my first months in Germany. I can see it happening in my dad’s brain when he tries to speak Spanish. It’s first - ok I know that word, what does it translate to? Okay, I’ve done the translation, now I understand the meaning, now let me figure out a response and attempt to translate that response. It’s difficult. That tether to the anchor tongue is both necessary and cumbersome.

I’m incredibly lucky to have gotten to learn languages with and without the anchor. And learning without the anchor has strengthened by belief in the idea that there is no true translation. Whenever Spanish lacks a word that English has, I’ll joke with Maria about what a “poor” language she speaks, regularly citing the fact that the English dictionary contains almost double the words as the Spanish dictionary. And when Spanish inevitably has multiple words with different degrees of nuance to describe a concept represented by one word alone in English, her family will always boast about what a “rich” language they speak, and what a shame it must be to speak a language so lacking in depth. In my limited experience, all languages do some things better than others. All languages sing with a liveliness, a verve and a rhythm. It’s precisely those subtle differences, the slang and the gaps and the connectors, the new words understood for what they mean and not what they translate to, that make me love language learning.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to Maria for editing help!