N’importe nawak

One of the strange things about learning a foreign language and a foreign culture is that you are striving towards an unattainable goal, and as you move toward it, you move away from the pleasures that motivated you to seek it, and you move away from a potentially useful point of view towards one that is potentially useless; you move away from yourself and your community towards an uncertain identity and towards a community that you cannot be a part of. You begin somewhere, and you may end up nowhere.

I love to think about the dark side of second-language learning. We learn languages, if we learn them in school especially, in a relentlessly ideological environment, a world in which the value of language learning is wrapped up in the value of education itself; it is not only taken for granted, but promoted by everyone and every institution that would battle against the forces of ignorance. Many people learn languages simply because they believe it will be good for them. Learning a language is like taking vitamins for the brain; it’s like playing a sport or a musical instrument; it will render you sexy, civilized and saleable: it’s a little piece of cultural capital, and what more need be said?

I wish that instead of mindlessly encouraging students—and indeed forcing them through degree requirements—to study languages, it were mandatory for every would-be postulate to attend a series of counseling sessions in which the perils of language learning were laid out in graphic, horrific, and utterly convincing detail. Then, and only then, fully informed of the dangers they were about to incur, would students be allowed to proceed, if they still so desired. That would be far more honest than the polyannish nonsense and the pathetic attempts at seduction students endure in language classes today. Truer, and much more exciting too.