Humility & language-learning (vs. polyglot-ism)

someone sent me an email recently and
opened with a sort of apology like hey look I know you're busy sorry from writing to you wouldn't imposing an atomic busy and I wrote back and said I'm not busy and moreover I think it's a really important discipline to have as an adult to be aware of when you're not busy precisely so that you make more productive use of your time and conversely a lot of people get the fixed notion in their minds that being busy is a virtue and they complain that they're busy all the time and they protest to others that they're busy all the time they make up they make a conspicuous display of their busyness all the time because they think being busy is a virtue in itself and the result is you're not actually using your time as effective as it could and you're definitely not being as generous and welcoming to others as you could because you're pretending to be busy when you're really not now there's something similar that sets in with many other virtues we may get attached to like the notion that learning a language is a virtue in and of itself the notion that learning many languages makes you sophisticated makes you cosmopolitan learning a language and learning history are two very different things learning a language and learning politics or two different things learning a language and learning tact you know sophistication of that sense are two different things learning you know learning a language is completely different from learning the kind of customs and manners of a particular country or people learning their culture in a way that lets you express yourself in when it's even politically sensitive little unsophisticated learning a language I've been arguing is not a virtue in and of itself and a lot of people get stuck on this notion that it's virtuous and then the most extreme examples here on the internet are people who commit to learning twelve languages I saw another example of that where was exactly 12 found two different female youtubers who are learning twelve languages concurrently I why the number 12 I don't know get to a full dozen and then stop but my point is here not to just talk about diminishing returns we have this idiom in English the point of diminishing returns that I think everyone would agree on nobody is really gonna seriously protest that you shouldn't stop at eight languages you should keep going to and you know before I used the example of lifting two hundred pounds of the gym versus lifting 270 pounds that doesn't mean the same logic applies to lifting 500 pounds at that point you're making a sacrifice that's really gonna destroy your life but I really want to talk about a matter in principle why would it be virtuous why would it make you a better person to learn even one language or two so I got a message from a viewer here any rights what makes you want to learn new languages in the first place this is but this is Alex by the way supporter of the channel with Greek for example specifically when basically enough is enough with the language I would think someone like you might prefer to get into depth in one language instead of dealing superficially with several different languages he goes on to say I ask you because you mentioned the temptation to learn it and you have the book you mentioned the cost but what is the reward for you is it mostly the sense of humility you mentioned in the video okay so I think humility is the simplest one to deal with we can deal with it kind of right away here at the beginning for a white person living in genocide 'el Canada it takes humility to learn Cree it takes humility to learn a Jib way it takes humility to learn Mohawk if you're a white person living in the southern United States it takes humility to learn Navajo so there are some contexts where the sense of humility is really significant now conversely I don't really know if most people think of it as humility if you are a Mexican immigrant to Canada is it humility to then learn English you know it probably doesn't have the same significance and there I think the other combinations are kind of points along a spectrum where there's some rule for humility but it may not be what you think it is now again one of the reasons why I'm being so skeptical about this is I met white men in Thailand who were on a huge ego trip because they learn to speak incredibly poor fragments of the Thai language in a broken and incorrect an incoherent way but they got laid women slept with them and you know they thought they were racing ahead and slaves to thought they were making tremendous progress they're a tremendous ego trip for them it wasn't humbling at all it wasn't this role of humility yeah and in a very different context when you look at Buddhism or Hinduism people learning sacred languages like Pali sacred language is like Sanskrit there are really strange ego trips that people are on when they can't put together the sentence the man walked the well to get some water you know we're really they have incredibly rudimentary ability in his lineage but they think they're unlocking the sacred secrets of 2,000 years of philosophy and religion so on so look at you know what you can even find people who are an ego trip with French or Irish Gaelic right it's very strange but you know I think we probably could use laboratory methods to investigate this we probably could do real social science research why is it that some people find the study of languages humbling and others it has the sort of opposite intoxicating ego aggrandizing effect and I think to a large extent it would be the people who live in self-selected blindness to their own ignorance it is humbling for example to learn Cambodian if you're aware that you're constantly saying everything wrong and when I spoke Cambodian I would really make the effort to speak with great precision with great accuracy and was really aware when I was miss speaking but if instead you just have a sloppy attitude of pronouncing individual words wrong and putting the sentence together in the wrong order and you don't care and people around you have to figure out what you mean maybe that recklessness is gonna lead to a greater sense of reward for much less work if you care about accuracy care of us anything's right and then also caring about accuracy it doesn't just mean you were examining the language it also means you're examining yourself and you have that I think ineluctably humbling experience of realizing how limited your capacity is to catch up with a five-year-old child you might work very hard as an adult for ten years to catch up with the level of fluency a five-year-old child has especially we talk about a really hard language like this some it's a very far removed from your your mother tongue something like Cambodian Japanese so on and so forth okay baby you you had so my girlfriend's your Afghan you let's learn to say on this topic I think connected to humility in learning language yeah the more that you'd say the more I think yeah you're right I can relate to that we had the experience when she was four and five and her level of French was you know exponentially higher than mine was I mean yeah I just say I do wonder what you might say to this idea that there is a sense of accomplishment and I felt a sense of accomplishment when I was living in China initially and was like basically relying on you like any time we'd go out and buy anything from the grocery store from a restaurant like I'd you know at first I didn't know any Chinese but then once I learned more and then especially when I was living in Taiwan and studying Chinese full-time when I started to be able to even just order something you know it's it was just finally like like wow you know that's really cool that I can like communicate with somebody from a completely different culture so I don't I don't think I'm not an ego trip about it but I just think it's kind of a neat thing so it's not really worth you know all the suffering that that aspect alone isn't but I just want to say that that is a neat thing and I was you know I'm not in it for sleeping with Taiwanese men you know like like who's men might be a no for sleeping with Thai women or something like that but yeah the thing that I was thinking of with languages you know there might be some something to the idea that when you're working on the rudimentary aspects of language getting to the very fundamentals that it may help you in other areas of your life or other areas of study to kind of question it from the basics so look I agree the kind of two levels this one is cultural and then one is really more purely psychological and philosophical um there are some people who are maybe so sheltered and live lives that are so narrow-minded that's simply having a diff perspective would also be a better perspective right but I just point out a different perspective just because it's different from when you've already got is not necessarily superior or better or what-have-you let's give an example right now maybe someone in Israel who lived their whole lives being a kind of Israeli national and supporting the Israel government for them to take some time to live in Persia the modern state of Iran and learn Persian Iranian what every must say and learn to see the world from an Iranian perspective that could be very meaningful you know I can see however it's just another perspective it's just a different perspective it's not a better perspective it's bettering you as a person only in as much as you've taken on a kind of narrow brittle individual perspective that excludes that other perspective there's something you haven't thought of well I'm gonna save myself I'm not boasting I do not think I would benefit from living in Iran and taking on the Iranian perspective in any way whatsoever now I'm 41 years old I've had a lot of travel I have a very cosmopolitan I already have learned several languages as been mentioned and lived in many different cultures so that's kind of again relative to the individual now I mean you can still generalize about it doesn't mean there are no generalizations moved there I mean maybe someone who grew up in Kansas in the United States and who's only spoken English their whole life it only has a kind of American view of the world maybe even just learning French and learning to see the world in a French way could have a positive impact maybe learning Chinese and seeing the child the world through a Chinese perspective a little bit could have a pause me back maybe baby [ __ ] yeah if you were actually using social science methods here we'd have to also measure and count when it has a negative effect and I've I've met white men who went to China and learned a little bit of Chinese and slept with some local women and a lot of them you know started drinking the local alcohol and stuff and I can look at them and say wow learning Chinese is that a really negative affection and it certainly wasn't humbling they found it empowering they got on an ego trip they go to this other country and even worth questioning do do they really feel that they've gained a Chinese perspective or do they just feel that they're on an ego trip cuz they came to China and they got to impose their the superiority of their American view of the world do they just go around China they go none of these Chinese people appreciate democracy and freedom and what really happened during World War two the way I do the white middle-aged ego is very often linked to memories of World War two the supposed superiority of your historical knowledge of World War two and and lecturing your teenage Asian girlfriend about how much more you know about World War two which is seen this in Thailand see that in China see it but anyway it's also true each one of these countries has its own kind of propaganda version of World War two so even in Japan if you have a Japanese girlfriend even if you have a 40 year old Japanese girlfriend probably Rafi so there's a reason why that that particular history I'm mentioning here as a kind of touchstone so you know it's not necessarily public that's the kind of comparative cultural anthropology side look let's keep it all the way real if you're talking about learning a language that was never written like a language that was never associated with a massive urban civilization a language that maybe stayed in the stone Age's so to speak something like that then I think there's probably a sense in which nobody looks at this as taking on a superior perspective it's just a different perspective so you know anthropologists like my ex-wife she was an anthropologist that learned a language that had no written history that was basically associated with the kind of Stone Age tribal people or Bronze Age you know they lived at a very low level of Technology and so on in the jungle etc so if you go out and learn that language what is that effect so maybe but so the other side of what you're saying I don't want to say more about it that I think is more purely philosophical psychological okay isn't there something positive to be said about going back to basics about looking at the rudiments of thought and how language how thoughts are formed in language then this kind of thing well I'm curious what you have fine but look most of what you spend your time with with Chinese is there anything profound and meaningful with reconsidering the way you express from and to in a sentence you know is there anything is there anything that really reveals before I use the example of numbers you don't come to some new insight about numbers or math by learning how one other language expresses numbers I'm being skeptical and rigorous here people I'm not I'm not gonna tell you there's no benefit at all but we've got to be skeptical this yeah I don't know if there's real inherent value but I think it is interesting for example today we were talking about 10 in Chinese this idea that there are similarities between English and Chinese despite them being so foreign so this means like before but it's it also has the same meaning in English so you know there's also oh sorry I just clarify though so it's a clarify for the audience this is a word that means before both in the sense of something being prior in time but it also has the sense of before means something's before you meaning in front of you this is a very very strange coincidence that in English the word before also has this double meaning that's an illogical double meaning field right right so I mean yes on an on a linguistic level I think it is interesting but you know one other thing that I wanted to say do you mind if I talk more on the the other aspect of being humbling to you know I think it really boils down to the intentions of learning another language is you know you you get out of it what you put into it quid pro quo is this statement that's now becomes so popular and well-known in America you know you get out of it what you put into it and you know I I think I would be funny to share this example and I learned to order food in Chinese and I got comfortable it's a certain level of you know speaking with people one-on-one but because we didn't live in France like long term when I was in France I found it like very scary the idea of just ordering a falafel sandwich you know and I let it like really kind of get to me I was like I can't order anything or like even like going to the grocery store I'm like afraid to like ask somebody but like French is so much you know it's a lot more similar to English than than Chinese is even though I to this level of competency in Chinese so maybe there's um maybe there's something to say for getting over the fear of communicating like with learning another language maybe fear of foreign nests or few of those kinds bit right right yes exactly so yeah I think it is you know about intentions I mean if you're going to a foreign country and learning their language just to look this thing for me there's a difference between knowing something and being able to verify something for yourself so I'm gonna go through a couple languages rapidly examples of this I can explain to you right now in English that the meaning of the word oligarchy in ancient Greek is not really the same as the meaning of oligarchy in modern English but we can we can do this entirely in English you don't need to know Greek and I don't need to know Greek either I can just share with you you know so when you're reading Aristotle and what Aristotle says but oligarchy you really have to keep in mind it doesn't mean the same thing we mean now by oligarchy okay now even the word King it does not mean in ancient Athens in ancient Greek at all what it means today in English this really it's really very important to understand that difference in the meaning of King then and King now one that's very well known is tyrant the meaning of tyrants doesn't mean okay but this whole discourse the all the learning about it and I can give examples when you talk about political philosophy and why this matters and so on we can do this all in English what you would gain by putting in hundreds of hours to learn ancient Greek is the ability to verify this for yourself the ability to go to the original sources and see for yourself in what ways the translation is misleading right you can't do that in English only but all the other benefits that we attribute to language learning language education you can get in your primary language right now again I'm going to come back this question of going back to basics dealing with the rudiments of thought and philosophy I think that still leaves something unanswered here so look with Buddhist philosophy the reason why it's so important to read the original ancient languages is that all of the other translators are lying to you there tremendous dishonesty to give a really easy example the translation of the word slave as servant sometimes translation of the word prostitute as servant you get this kind of thing you know intentionally where it's it's just censoring in this way but there is a word that meant summary like the summary of a tech like a bullet point summary of a text and it was being translated as like Transcendental Meditation where there was a really crazy you know religious and philosophical meanings being foisted onto things that are just not there so in that case the ability to verify what things mean for yourself is huge if you really want to know about but it's philosophy and the type of conversation I'm saying about Greek you couldn't have because there isn't enough honest scholarship in English already for you to talk that through in the way I was just discussing it you know the way I sorry I don't know ancient Greek but I've now been reading in English about ancient Greek for a long time so I'm aware of many of the issues that come up in translation if you just pay attention to the footnotes of a really good edition it'll sons draw your attention to this hey you know this word has two different meanings and some translators do it this way and some do that way in this context so on and so forth so you know if you met someone who wanted to study the philosophy of Taoism right so Taoism the Canon is in Chinese and it's quite difficult to understand Chinese what would their expectations be in a really learning Chinese rather than working with English translations well if your interest is in understanding exactly how the English translations are really awful what's wrong with them then you'll accomplish that but I think most people who engage in learning languages this way even a modern language like Russia I think they do have deceptive Hallowed expectation that it's really gonna make them a better person that they're gonna change as a person some profound sense you know now I know Sanskrit now I can read Hebrew now I can read Latin Greek you know etc and I do people might not be as open about it I know people who studied German to read philosophy and German German is almost the same language as English they're so close but nevertheless no oh no you have to read Hegel in the original German this kind of [ __ ] where it does have this hallowed sense of personal transformation and transcendence that you're supposedly getting through learning a language but I don't I don't believe in at all and I would caution everyone against that that misconception so what would learning Chinese accomplish again if it's about interrogating the text verifying what it really says for yourself challenging existing scholarship there are various ways in which it's interesting but when you look at a language asymmetry of that kind it there's nothing positive for you in it there's nothing that transforms you so Melissa mentioned this anecdote no offense but it's just an anecdote Oh in Chinese there's this word that means before and has the same kind of double meaning as English before in time and standing before you okay interesting anecdote with the comparison of any two languages there will be hundreds of anecdotes like that and then you get into anecdotes about the ways in which they're different sometimes different in kind of baffling and untranslatable ways so again if you're talking about Buddhist philosophy or Taoist you know so you have a bunch of and like that's even talking about politics in ancient Greece the word vote doesn't mean the same thing an ancient creek is it means in English what's translated English just vote you know interesting you know okay so you you learn a bunch of asymmetry see doesn't make you a better person doesn't make you more sophisticated it doesn't make you more intelligent doesn't have any kind of personal transformative effect on you right I mean maybe it gives you a greater sensitivity to how much methodological rigor really matters - how much honesty and integrity matters how easy it is to mislead people you know indeed even with the translation of the Bible it's kind of amazing you know the power that rests in the translators pen or something sure okay but again you could you could get that from watching this YouTube video right now you don't have to spend hundreds of hours learning Japanese or hundreds of hours learning Hebrew or Greek or Latin or whatever the example is so that's that's kind of a warning I think I don't say town and it's it's hundreds and hundreds of hours one season of it yeah I mean what you say is all very interesting to me and I'm sorry to be at a such a basic level with what do I have to say I mean like I think you've got a lot more experience learning languages but I guess one thing I can say is there's nothing quite like the feeling of stupidity when you are learning a new language and trying to communicate at such a rudimentary level like recently I was it's like a second childhood as I've been implying you have to regress to a childhood speaking with a native Chinese speaker in my hometown and I was like you know I just had to say in Chinese like I'm sorry I speak like a baby in Chinese you know like um but it's it's it's um I think there's something useful about it or there's something that might maybe that does make you a better person like accepting that you like rather than thinking that you know look so there were several translation controversies in Buddhist philosophy that I took a stand on where I said look every whatever one thinks this meanings in English is a hundred percent wrong and one of the simplest ones was the Buddha is black that in the text it says the Buddha is the color of his skin is black not brown not tin not dark tan it said black doesn't but there were people still known on the internet who claim the guy had blonde hair and white skin it's like no if you actually read the text there's nothing ambiguous about it black and so that's one of the most obvious but also controversies about passengers on translation being sorry passages on transcendental meditation being totally misses mistranslated zone it is true that when I talked about those controversies with people who had never done work on a language they found it inconceivable and I mean that in the strict sense they could not imagine that it was possible that this translation was lying to them right whereas for someone like me I can't imagine him and we've been talking a lot lately about how my past experience with Buddhist scholarship really helps me to think more incisively and analytically about Greek philosophy so you know I'm able to look at the kind of excuses and rationalizations that Western interpreters of Plato and Aristotle have and be able to say look this is where the evidence of the texts stops and then this is where the excuses made by the raw readers starts you know I'm aware of that gap much more dynamically because of my work on other languages yeah without even getting into learning ancient Greek yeah and I noticed this too earlier this summer I was starting to read the Bible and I was getting into just the first chapter there's so much of it that you know if you actually got to the original translation or you know this series of I want to double down this two ways so when Melissa was reading the Bible it's true I know the Bible better but it's also just because I have this training so when I'm reading the same passage of the Bible I'm finding like 10 things wrong with it like 10 red flags and I'm saying what's okay do you notice this do you notice this Genesis I'm finding problems in the text there's not really problem the translation there problems in the actual source material and melissa is not seeing that melissa is just reading in like this is kind of confusing it's kind of hard to follow right so so that that's in tourism that reflects the kind of I guess you could call it Phil illogical training but the language the language base with Esther but also when we were just reading in English we Melissa had a simple guidebook text to the history of Greece here and every page I was finding things wrong with it finding errors and in many cases the errors didn't it wasn't that I had other factual knowledge of this degree some cases it was it's like I knew I knew its effect but where there's an inconsistency or self-contradiction or incoherence in the text but I'm not just skipping over with my I'm catching on that like no you know if that happened at that stage of the war then it's impossible that eight years later this other thing happens you know where I'm catching those things so that's that's true or maybe the person who is detail oriented is may be attracted to learning languages but well then I mean like saying it's humbling I think you've got to be able to go out and actually look at it on a social science basis and say well for whom is it humbling and for whom is it an ego trip because for some it's one of them that's right yeah yeah no I do think that's especially learning Chinese if you if you just miss one character in a sentence when somebody's speaking to you if you don't know one character or if you don't know one word it's like you don't get the sentence at all you know being able to this listening comprehension reading comprehension in another language maybe enhances even your understanding of your native language or like your appreciation for you your definitely your awareness of the distinctive features of that so I think it's implicit in the point I made in the earlier video implicit in the point that language is not just a way of communicating but is a way of thinking it's that there's some value in trying out different ways of thinking however I don't think it's the value people are expecting or hoping for or yearning for you know and I also have to insist different doesn't mean better right like you know it's true I mean in some other language the way that time is expressed is a little bit different you know the way that emotions are expressed is different that's always something people find charming about lotion and and tie those languages like oh you know the blackness of my heart and the stuff you get these kind of different ways it's not that surprising of expressing emotions you know what even things like racism and nationalism are expressed differently in that it is interesting i mean when i was when i was in laos a lot of what i was learning about the ways in which other nationalities are racist against lao people and the way in which they're racist against everyone including people within their own kind it's interesting I admit it you know there's there's some value to that and you know many times I've spoken to people who are more or less racists in the Western world and one of the ways to challenge them or deprogram them is just to really say to them like have you ever thought about the fact that like people in Thailand hate people from Cambodia like let's talk about some other examples here who thought of other people people from the lowland in Laos a racist against people from the highlands like have you thought about some situations where you don't have any personal attachment to this so yeah seeing the world in a different way thinking world and if it isn't thinking or seeing in a better way and I think that's part of what made learning Latin so mystical for Europeans for such a long time you know you were living in your dead-end job in Scotland and then you started learning Latin and learning Latin would give you a world of difference concepts different just different words different ways of thinking different ways to express yourself different different ideas and different express it is but different doesn't mean better and doesn't mean you couldn't arrive those things without learning Latin so on and so forth it was just you know I know obviously the for many of those people they were actually reading the Bible in Latin they were reading Cicero in Latin that were reading political philosophy in Latin and probably they wouldn't have been reading any of those things in English you know it exposed you to a different different set of ideas okay so finally the basic challenge you've raised to me here melissa is that there's something really important about getting down to the rudiments of language and thought and re-examining them again and you're probably right but it's not what most people are looking for because what most people are looking for is greater sophistication greater analytic ability just I'm like I said when I was holding up those two books before probably what most people want is to have a sophisticated understanding of Chinese politics in history and you're not gonna get that by spending hundreds of hours understanding the way in which Chinese expresses the passive voice that's one of the most annoying things if English is your first language just trying to do passive voice in Chinese that's that's a huge challenge to master doing passive voice sentences and in Chinese I never do it when I speak Chinese I always use active voice it's just a boy I avoid using it but if you really want to sound like a native speaker you got a pact at practice doing those other those other sentence patterns maybe one day I'll give you an update on that um so you know when people are looking for sophisticated understanding you have to be looking at much much higher levels of language learning much more deep but but just more factually dense and complex things and with embarking on learning another language yes you're reduced to this childlike state shallow like process of starting again with the bare rudiments of language but what you're learning as an adult it's not meaningful in the way that people want it to be so let's close by just asking what does it mean to be a good person you know if the delusion is that learning a foreign language will make you a better person that leads us to question what are our assumptions about being a good person learning twelve languages will not make you vegan none of these people are freaking learning of learning two languages let's just say you learn Chinese and French it won't make you care about ecology it won't make you care about war it won't make you care about torture or human rights it won't make you want to go to the prison and help improve prison conditions right it won't make you more compassionate it won't make you more caring it won't make you more responsible it won't make you concerned about there was the consequences of your own actions it won't make you concerned about the consequences of other people's actions or the society or part of it won't make you more participatory in the democratic system it won't it won't make you more kind towards your aunt and uncle or your cousins now there are myriad notions of what it is to be a good person or to live a good life but I think it's actually interesting to say that learning languages probably will help you with none of them unless again you're starting from a position of such incredible narrow mindedness you know like maybe the person who lived their whole life in Israel as a kind of Zionist nationalist who then goes and spend some time in Iran is like whoa there's another way of seeing that well unless you're starting from such a narrow and brittle position the learning a language brings about this kind of ethical transformation maybe that does make them more compassionate you know maybe for a white American who's racist against black people in America maybe if they go to Africa and learn any particular black language let's say it's Swahili and live among black people in Africa in an all-black environment speaking that language maybe when they go back to America that'll make them less less racist but I can only say maybe because I gotta tell you something I knew a white guy I knew one white guy he was blond and white he went to Africa he learned African languages he had also lived in Brazil and he slept with an enormous number of black women in both Africa and Brazil and when he went back to the United States of America he was still racist as hell against black people he was if anything more racist against black people in America because he would he would say to them I think most of time he just said it to his white friends probably sometimes he said to them he would say to them why aren't you more like the black people I knew in Africa and was like he felt they were yeah he thought they were examples of positive black communities and he intensely hated the blacks of Mesmer if I hadn't met that guy myself talked to him for hours fascinating example of human nature so again I think you have to remain skeptical about this in the purest sense of the world purest sense the word skepticism even if this can have positive outcomes for some people remain open-minded about what percentage of people this is gonna have negative outcomes for even if it's humbling for some people for what percentage of people will it be an ego trip