People say it looks weird to hear me speak an Asian language. It looked weird also the first time I saw my Caucasian friend speak perfect Chinese. Western societies are so diversified now that any ethnicity speaking English doesn’t look surprising, but a minority in a homogeneous country like China or Japan speaking the local language will still turn a few heads. That effect has faded over the years, but it is still the case.
It is a testament to the mystique that certain languages inspire in the non-speakers.
When I first studied Japanese, every character was a masterpiece, every sentence was poetry. It was enlightening. Even though millions of people speak the language better than I do, it felt like the ultimate intellectual and spiritual achievement. I was starting to understand a code, a cipher, that only months ago, meant nothing to me, and that to the majority of humans looks, in its written form, like a bunch of tiny drawings.
Now, it feels mundane. It’s just another cipher. It’s tedious to read. Because once you know how to speak a language, you forget to stop to admire its sounds, the shape of its written form, its musicality. Your brain looks for the novelty. And the novelty is no longer in the language itself, it is in the message it conveys. An email notification from work will give you that ping of anxiety just as much in Japanese as it will English, French, or Chinese.
Today I stumbled upon a documentary in Arabic. Without subtitles, the Qatari host can easily hypnotize me into this mystical hazy state where you feel like you have just been enlightened from hearing a few sounds. Sometimes it makes me want to learn another language again. Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian. But as I reminisce my previous experiences, I sometimes realize I’m in no hurry to lose that sense of awe and admiration for the coveted language. Maybe I’ll find the time one day to learn one of those languages. But right now, I love wallowing in the bliss of not understanding a word of them.
When you learn a language, everything becomes boring. It loses its mystique. People that seemed like angels turn into flawed human beings, demons turn into pathetic jerks. Learning a language is like becoming an adult. It awakens the soul. And with that awakening, you lose the mystery, you lose the mystique. So what do you get?
You get wisdom. And wisdom isn’t always fun. Wisdom is even boring. But wisdom is necessary. If you learn Chinese, some words will become mundane commodities, like toilet paper or a toothbrush. You’ll collect fapiao to do your taxes. You’ll threaten to tousu a bad service representative to get what you want. You’ll realize you forgot your yusan on a rainy day. You’ll even learn to dread words, names of diseases for example. You might even tell some shabi to qusi once in a while.
But it’s a good thing. Losing that mystique is important. Because along with the disappointment of realizing the grass over the fence is not any greener, the people of the culture that you used to fantasize about turn out to just be human, just like you. And that’s why I don’t think instant translation can ever replace that wisdom. When it becomes ubiquitous (because it will), let’s use that AI to teach us to learn languages faster, to get better feedback from our mistakes. But let’s not use it as a crutch to translate for us and lose our wisdom. This AI might be just a way to universalize, but also worsen our communication through systematic translation. But if we use it right, it might teach us we are all human, one language at a time.