Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy* (Vol. 1)

*Chrestomathy-a selection of passages from an author or authors, designed to help in learning a language.

I have been immersed in the Spanish-speaking world for over a year now and it still fascinates me to no end to think about what must be going on inside my head as I learn things. Have synaptic pathways been re-routed? Have my “normal” modes of thinking been qualitatively changed by the process of assimilating a new language?

My intuition tells me that they have, and I certainly want the answer to be yes since that would indicate progress toward my general goal of “learning Spanish,” but there’s a creeping doubt that comes to me every time I think hard on the topic of language. Have I really been learning Spanish, or have I just learned a bunch of Spanish words that I translate back and forth from English? Is thinking in Spanish a necessary condition for gaining fluency? Are there aspects of language that can only be accessed by native speakers? How much of fluency is cultural? Can a monolingual person ever truly become bilingual? This frantic line of questioning seems to spiral down to oblivion, evading satisfactory answers…

But here’s the million-córdoba question as far as I can tell, the one that really gets at the heart of the problem:

Can meaning be separated—that is, does meaning stand alone—from the language that expresses it?

It seems to me that learning a second language can help parse apart the nature of language itself and shed light on the relationship between feelings and thoughts and the words that express them. In this series of posts I’m going to try and clarify that hazy relationship (commenting on the ontological status of meaning along the way) by drawing from my own experience in learning Spanish as a second language.

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When I speak English, my native tongue, it seems to me that during day-to-day conversation, during those commonplace exchanges about the latest gossip, what I’m going to eat, or what I did yesterday, there is no perceived premeditation in word choice—I don’t have think about the words before I say them. The fluidity and ease with which I can express my basic needs and wants, my nuanced ideas and subtle impressions, is a striking aspect of the effortless way I can exist in my environment when speaking my mother tongue. I have a thought, usually accompanied by some sort of mental image, and the words are simply there as if they were the thought itself. Indeed, the majority of the time I speak English, and not just in day-to-day communication but in more involved conversation as well, my thoughts, words, and what I say seem to be one in the same. It must be said however, that the deftness with which I can employ the English language only becomes noticeable in comparison to the embarrassing ineptitude with which I speak Spanish.

In sharp contrast to the fluid relationship between my thoughts and words when I speak English, speaking Spanish is a constant struggle. I think this struggle can reveal, however, something important about the ontological status of meaning—that is, where and how meaning exists.

This is the first installment of a continuing series called Learning The Language, A Chrestomathy. No one knows how many posts there will be in the end, but I'm working on a fairly long essay on this subject, and the post you've just read is the introduction. I'll try to post a new volume every week until I'm finished writing...hopefully this self-imposed deadline will give me the motivation I need to finish it! Don't forget to comment!

• Volume 1 ***
• Volume 2
• Volume 3
• Volume 4
• Pictorial Supplement