On language learning & a growth mindset

Learning hard things as an adult, raising bilingual kids, and more

Rodney McMillian´s In This Land (2019)

I started learning Korean two and a half years ago. I have become obsessed with it. The process of language learning is so intellectually stimulating, since it involves memorization, skill building, culture, and logic. It gives my brain something to chew on all day, since I translate live conversations in my head. It gives me an excuse to be extremely disciplined. It allows me to be an annoying Hermione Granger in Korean class. A friend once asked if my wish upon a genie’s lamp would be to speak 10 languages perfectly — I said no, because the process of learning a language is just that much fun!

In particular, Korean is so entertaining to learn because there’s so much Korean media to consume. It is a far cry from trying to improve my Tamil (which is probably at a 7 year old level) because I actually want to read or watch Korean media¹. There’s all kinds of media — the highbrow films Parasite, Burning, and the Handmaiden are incredible. But what I really like are the variety shows. My Korean is now good enough that I can understand a reality TV show, but is still bad enough that middle-school level discussion of politics or emotions will really trip me up. Instead, reality TV discusses topics at an elementary school level! I can understand 80% of what is going on without subtitles. It makes me feel proud of my learning, which is a rare feeling as an adult.

Learning Korean has taught me to recognize new emotions that aren’t named in English. It has also taught me to be less hard on myself. When I first joined Watershed, I was really beating myself up for not performing incredibly well. Did this mean that I wasn’t “good at my job”? Was I not smart? Did it invalidate everything I had done in the past 7 years? Was any previous success simply a stroke of luck? But at the time, I was learning about descriptive verbs in Korean. I learned that in Korean, saying “The girl is smart” is actually phrased as a verb, something more like “The girl is being smart.” Being smart is an action, not a characteristic of your person. Trying to drill that distinction into my head actually helped me think about my own journey in a more forgiving way. I am not “being an excellent worker” now, I thought. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t “an excellent worker” then! Some of the things I viewed as unchangeable characteristics of my person were actually actions that I could change at any given time.

I also think about how different my Korean learning journey has been to every other language learning process I’ve experienced. In my past, I have spent multiple years studying Korean, Arabic, and Spanish — one as an enthusiastic adult, another as a career-minded college student, and the last as a rebellious high schooler. Actively studying a language is also so different from the way I learned Tamil, just at home with my family. And that too is different from my negligible amount of Hindi², which was through passively watching movies and interacting with my friends’ grandparents. “Effortful learning” is fun for me, but effortless learning is also so magical. I want to give my kids that — the effortless ability to just pick up a language at home and wake up with a new skill. I started researching various techniques to pass on this type of language learning to my own theoretical children (“is my Tamil good enough to even pull off a monolingual household!?”) and realized there’s no very clear answer. It seems like some neurodivergent kids have an especially hard time with bilingual households. It also seems like it makes speech impediments worse. What might have been good for me as a kid might be terrible for my future child.

Which brings me to — what’s the point? I never learned languages for practical communication purposes. I did it because I love it. I did it to feel like a beginner and indulge in my curiosity. But I think that in the era of ChatGPT, language learning could become irrelevant for practical communication. You don’t need to learn a language to travel to a new place, nor do you need it to watch a TV show, and maybe not to conduct a business meeting. While you should learn languages for deep relationships (connecting with in-laws or deep business partners), I wonder if it’s more valuable as a show of effort than a necessity to understand what’s going on at dinner. If I could exert my will over how AI will change language learning, I’d love for AI to make the practical stuff easier, while making the process of learning more fun. Maybe it could generate foreign language comprehensible input reality TV for me!

I am always trying to learn about this topic and am endlessly interested in it. I am actually desperate for more of your recommendations — what should I read about linguistics and language learning?!

And here’s some of what I’d recommend reading.

1. Whorfianism: The rock upon which my love of languages is built is the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, that languages influence thought. Learning this hypothesis in 9th grade Sociology elective was mind blowing for me. Many years (and Chomsky books) later, I of course know that the literature itself is highly polemical and that it is very likely that the strong form of the hypothesis is false. But if you’re at all interested in language learning, I’d recommend taking a skim of the Stanford Philosophy Encyclopedia’s overview. It really helps lay out the various theories under the broader “Whorfianism” header.

2. The Interpreter, The New Yorker: This article is about a tribe in the Amazon that doesn’t have specific number words. This is something that every other language in the world has. The Pirahã have no linguistic method whatsoever for expressing exact quantity, not even “one.” As the abstract of the specific paper that inspired the article says, “These results suggest that language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal, and that number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality.” Is this the language that breaks the idea of linguistic relativity?!

3. The Case for Comprehensible Input: This is also a paper about the idea that language learning should happen the way babies learn language — via input — instead of the “skill building” method where a student learns grammar and vocabulary step by step. If you’re interested in teaching your children languages, this is a good read.

4. “Han” in Korean: Confession time. I watched the very cheesy and romantic drama “Crash Landing on You” and was stunned. It was so wonderful. It’s a metaphor for the North Korea/South Korea relationship and taught me about the Korean emotion of “han.” This blog explains the idea in the context of the drama incredibly well. I tell people that I was inspired to learn Korean by my grandmother, which is partially true, but I think this blog post and drama made up the rest of the motivation.

5. AI’s effect on language education: Here’s a little podcast from Duolingo on how language learning might be affected by AI. Feels like it plays into the famous two sigma tutor hypothesis that a personal tutor can increase a student’s performance by two standard deviations above the mean.

6. Silicon Valley Talks: Tech jargon can feel like a foreign language. Artist Christian Jankowski invited Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to present lectures on “normal” topics using tech jargon.

7. Home Language, World Language, Meghna Rao: A beautiful essay from Meghna Rao on her first language, Kannada, and what it felt like to lose fluency in her mother tongue as an American immigrant.

   Some years ago, I spoke to an aunt who was embarrassed and a bit saddened to tell me that her Kannada had been fading in purity. What else to do with four decades spent in the country, with nary more than a week or two every two years back home? I feel, finally, that I have an answer.

   None of us were born Kannadigas. We were simply born human, creatures with the ability to babble, an ability that may have developed even before consciousness. If we seek to remain Kannadigas we must believe in our language, the existence of our homes. Not just as hollow symbolism or a frail, reactive lingua. We must engage with its philosophies, what U.R. Ananthamurthy describes in Ooru and the World as the ability “to smell the fragrant Mysore jasmines, eat the bananas of Nanjangud and read the great vachanas of Basavaeshwara and Allama Prabhu…when those who admire the wanderings of Joyce’s hero Daedalus also open their eyes to the rich Dalit world that Kuvempu’s character Nayigutti leads us into.”

8. Borges on the power of English versus Spanish: I know Borges has a complicated legacy, but he was also undeniably a master of language and an incredible writer. I thought this was interesting (and supports the “English as a Creole” theory.)

   Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.

   William F Buckley: Why?

   Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason. The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages.

   WFB: The most what?

   Borges: Physical. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.

   WFB: “Asomó?”*

   Borges: Well, no, no, they’re not exactly the same. And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Romance language.

1. I hate Rajinikanth films, don’t kill me.

2. I can mostly obey commands (“sit down” “be quiet” “fetch that chai”) and regurgitate this propaganda placed by Big Parents about how it’s important for all children to follow tradition and respect your parents.