Learning a language is a process that intellectually challenges the limits of one's pre-existing knowledge and reason
This summer I decided to do something new, extraordinary, and as they say, ‘out of the box’. As a law student caught within the box of legal education and practice (mandatory internships), I decided to do something that wasn’t forced on me by any compulsive and normative force of a binding value (this is a rough definition of my field, which is law). I narrowed it down to a path I had not ventured into in my life until then — learning a foreign language.
Moving beyond, or rather, sticking to the Anglo-Saxon way, I joined a basic course in French. Linguistic researchers such as Tracey Chapelton have demonstrated how ‘young children’ in contradistinction to the so-called ‘wise’ and old folks are better suited to learn and develop skills such as reading, writing and speaking languages. But, as C.S. Lewis said, one is “never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream,” here I was, meandering through and sometimes creating a ruckus in the language class. My focus here is not to make the cliché, yet the important point is that there’s no ‘right’ time to do or learn something new, but rather, to share how and what it is like to learn a new language when you are old enough to have learnt other things in your life.
The distinction that I seek to draw is between learning a language before you learn other things in life, and learning a language after you have learnt other things in life. To simplify matters, I make the claim that both the experiences, contingent largely on the age at which you learn a new language, are very different.
But first, the question that must be addressed is: why does this argument apply only to learning languages and not to engaging with other disciplines? The answer lies in looking at how the subject matter of languages (inter alia constituted by elements such as script, vocabulary, rules, conventions and pronunciation) is founded hardly on universally cognisable forms of logic and ratiocination. In other words, questions such as why concepts such as tenses, verbs, nouns are treated in the particular manner in which they are treated have no answer except petitio principia — where a person claims ‘X to be true’ simply because ‘X is true.’ Here, the question is begged for, and the initial premise sans and de hors of any reason becomes the conclusive assertion. This was first
explored by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his work on tautologies in reasoning.
First, young and naïve children who by virtue of their mental state may be said to have a greater ability to learn new things do not find any absurdity in their language teachers committing the aforesaid logical error. On the other hand, the wisdom and baggage that adult-learners bring to a language classroom will make them amused and aghast; they will find themselves learning things that have little logical explanation that could be related to what they have previously learnt! Having learnt other disciplines, or rather by virtue of just having spent some time in their lives breathing, socialising, communicating and interacting with the larger social system, they bring with themselves their large baggage stuffed with their understanding of normativity, sensitivity, and philosophy to the language classroom. This baggage happens to be too large to fit into the small classroom.
Secondly, when the first happens, the language classroom becomes a place of debate and confrontation. The learner’s mind (which is not a clean slate as that of a child) witnesses a conflict between its ‘old’ contents and the ‘new’ insertions. This phenomenon of covert or internal conflict, if expressed overtly in the classroom, makes the learner realise how logically bankrupt certain forms of knowledge may turn out to be. Yet, the learner may make a smart observation of how all of knowledge is nothing but a construct, an artifice and a supposition.
Thirdly, the dissatisfaction, displeasure and discontent that a learner may experience on not having received a logical answer to the questions that throb in her or his mind may at once be casually deemed as consequentially inconsequent. But a keen learner would also draw another important lesson: of realising the intrinsic and inherent value of asking questions and dissenting. While ultimately learning a new language may entail considerable unlearning and discarding of one’s earlier mental cues, the process entailing the same nonetheless witnesses an insightful mental multilogue where the learner starts to appreciate diversity that may characterise the differing shades and terrains of knowledge forms. The stimulating joy of asking questions which do not have reasonably logical answers leaves the learner basking in the glory of self-realisation about the infinity that characterises manmade knowledge.
I can state that the Arab proverb that says “learn a language, and you’ll avoid a war” is proven wrong. For me, learning French involved ‘fighting’ a cold war in my mind, as my sense of ‘reason’ did not find much room in the language
classroom. But then, it’s always a humbling experience to discover the limits of what you have already ‘learned’ and how your intellectual baggage is but a drop of water when compared to the ocean formed by knowledge forms far and beyond.
The author is a law student at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), Hyderabad.
asr@nalsar.ac.in.
