How Anyone Can Learn a Language
It’s amazing what we can verify with enough certainty without having to resort to tiresome scientific and statistical testing.
As an example, I believe, from experience, that every word of any language you hear is permanently imprinted on your brain with near-zero loss.
The most convincing proof of this assertion occurred over 35 years ago when I saw one of my first Fassbinder films, Fox and His Friends. So accustomed had I become over the past fifteen or so years to the soundtracks of the French nouvelle vague that I found myself sitting in a theater about to experience a soundtrack I was reluctant to associate with “foreign film.” Perhaps that is what caused my ears to prick up at the start of the first frame and its soundtrack in German—a language I didn’t know at all.
In some eerie state of enhanced clarity that lasted approximately six minutes, I understood every single word in the film I was watching. So effortless was this experience that the characters could have been speaking English… until a sudden awareness of what was happening penetrated that uncanny clarity; whereupon I felt a kind of confused panic—before the dialogue became incomprehensible and my eyes were forced to subtitles for the remainder of the film.
I’ve heretofore withheld one key to this puzzle of uncanny comprehension. When I was growing up, my parents would speak Yiddish whenever they didn’t want the kinder (children) to understand what they were talking about. Naturally, my brother and I would strain to decode their subject of conversation.
As adults, both of us took away only a few jokes, maxims, and insults from that second language. However, I am convinced that my brain recorded every single Yiddish word, within its mostly still uncharted-by-science network of nervous cells, until the right, rare audiovisual social moment temporarily released that complete lexicon of words; or rather, until I became conscious of what was happening and fearfully closed those shutters of perception, making myself dependent upon subtitles for the rest of the Fassbinder film.
The question that interests me is not how Yiddish was recorded by my brain, but why the same brain went into denial about that event. I am currently convinced the reason had to do with its challenge to the conscious identity we build for ourselves: I did not believe I was someone who knew German and who had only retained a modicum of Yiddish. Finding out differently was a threat to the stability of the ego, and panic about the loss of that stability slammed shut the doors of perception.
Perhaps less convincing to you are other experiences pointing to this same conclusion: Consciously, I am bilingual and have translated 14 books of French literature into English. But during visits to Paris that have extended beyond a month or so, I’ve discovered over and over again that my French only manifests as absolutely and effortlessly correct when I am exhausted or slightly inebriated, times that are also characterized by a nearly total disappearance of my American accent. This is further evidence, I believe, that anxious emotional repression is one of the only impediments to speak another language.
My brilliant, now deceased friend and literary colleague Ursule Molinaro, who spoke four languages with no accent at all and who was frequently disgusted by my accent when I uttered French, once told me, “When your fingers touch a wall as you are speaking French, and you think, ‘Wall, which is translated into French as mur,’ you will speak French with a foreign accent, but the day wen you touch a wall and think mur right off the bat, that accent will stop existing.” This is another example of the way in which proficiency in a language is intimately entangled with identity—who we consciously think we are.
“A person who must learn a language by necessity and under duress—such as a displaced immigrant—seems capable of learning it more quickly than the most studied academic,” claims writer and extensive voyager Ben Shields. “It’s something I’ve seen over and over in my travels.” In the ideal world I dream of, anyone can learn a language effortlessly and at blinding speed, the same way we learned our first, or “native” language as infants. The words are there, as intensely afraid to come out as the most disturbing subconscious thought or emotion that required the coaching of psychotherapy, becauing learning to speak a language well requires the immense courage of forfeiting our idea of our own identity.