In (Even More) Other Words: Reflections upon Language Immersion
Image courtesy of the author.
As my cab pulls up to Bennington College in Southern Vermont, where I am about to participate in a seven-week immersive Italian program organized by Middlebury Language Schools, I feel fretful and apprehensive. Within ten minutes, I will sign a pledge promising not to communicate in any language other than Italian for the duration of the program. This might prove difficult: I’ve never taken an Italian class before. I’ve studied the language on Duolingo for about a month, but knowing how to say “I am a girl!” and “the mouse is in the kitchen” probably won’t help me through the process of finding my room, orienting myself on campus, or befriending my fellow students. I’m eager to learn, but worry about humiliation. As I approach the group of teachers gathered around the entrance of Bennington’s Commons and rehearse for the last time the greeting that I have laboriously prepared in advance, I think (already with nostalgia) of how dearly I will miss the English language, and ponder the relative facility with which I express myself in that tongue.
Invece no. I don’t find myself missing English. In fact, now that I have returned from the program — with a much-heightened level of fluency in Italian — I find that I miss Italian. I miss the stimulation of working hard to communicate and the excitement of being able to do so in a language that, at the beginning of this summer, I couldn’t hold a simple conversation in.
In English, it is relatively easy for me to go a week — or longer, even — without learning a single new word, expression, or grammatical concept. I am fond of saying that it is silly to talk of “knowing” a language, as we never gain complete mastery of even our native tongues: there are so many English words that I do not know, so many grammatical concepts that I use without fully understanding. The fact remains, however, that speaking in English requires significantly less thought for me than speaking in Italian does. I can rattle off a grammatically correct utterance when I am half-asleep. I am not constantly working through issues of concordance or conjugation as I speak to my friends at lunch or write essays for class. I’m still learning English — and always will be — but I’ve reached a plateau; in Italian, every day brings new words, new constructions, new concepts. As I put together my lunch at the salad bar, I remember the irregularity of the “egg,” which switches gender in the plural: l’uovo, le uova. When I talk to my friends during our break from class I constantly ask myself: should I be using the imperfect or the passato prossimo? Is this an instance where I need the subjunctive? Is that really a word in Italian, or am I just saying the French word with an Italian accent? The constant mental effort — the force I have to engage in to communicate simple ideas, to tell simple stories — is tiring, but it’s also invigorating, and social interactions that would be more or less devoid of meaning in English become opportunities for growth and learning in Italian. Without sitting down in front of a textbook and memorizing verb forms, I’m studying and practicing as I navigate my everyday life at Bennington.
Another regrettable effect of my relative competence in English is that it’s extremely easy for me to get lazy. On one side of the spectrum, this means that I can get away with utterances such as “is that the person at the thing?” — an unfortunate sentence which escaped from my mouth just a few days ago. Perhaps my laxity with English comes from a desire to be perceived as fluent: I don’t think anybody has reason to doubt my abilities as an English speaker, because I am American and it is the language that I know best. As a result of this, I make less of an effort to speak clearly and correctly. I don’t need to prove myself in English. Since I do need to do so in Italian — since I feel compelled to show that, though not a native speaker, I can think of the right nouns and the right verbs — I make a more concerted effort to find the correct words, in order to show that I do know them. If I don’t know a noun, I try to find a clear periphrasis instead of simply using “thing” or translating it into English. Italian forces me to engage myself more, to make the mental effort to think of which words I want to use instead of just throwing around abstractions.
On the other side of the spectrum, my fluency in English makes it easy for me to speak meaningless but impressive-sounding statements of the sort that George Orwell parodies in “Politics and the English Language,” statements along the lines of
“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”
(If you didn’t understand that, that’s the point). Yes, I know more English than Italian: my vocabulary is greater and I am more comfortable using complex sentences. This means that I can discuss more complicated ideas, but it also means that it’s easier for me to cloak simple or fallacious ideas in flowery language — a strategy which, like most people who have attended high school English classes, I have deployed on numerous occasions. My limited vocabulary in Italian doesn’t mean I can’t have profound conversations: it means that I have to force myself to express complex ideas in simple language, in a limited vocabulary that is comprehensible to my interlocutors and accessible to myself. Circumstances compel me to be clear and direct — as they do not in English.
But on a less comparative level, there’s something exhilarating about communicating in a language I’ve just started learning, especially when I’m working with other people who are doing the same. It’s a bit like flying a kite for the first time. I study Ancient Greek and Latin at Swarthmore, and in classes on those languages I learn grammar and translate texts. There’s no spoken component. As much as I love my Classics classes— and as much as they have helped me with all of my modern languages — I find that I’ve missed the thrill of speaking in a foreign tongue, of using it to communicate with people with whom it would otherwise be difficult to converse. This was especially true at Bennington, given that most of the seven-week students (there was also a group of M. A. students, many of whom were actually Italian) were significantly less comfortable in Italian than in English. The challenge and excitement of using the language we learned in the classroom to build friendships brought us together in a way that speaking in English — even with the same people — wouldn’t have. At the end of the program, after the language pledge had expired, I had a few brief conversations with my Middlebury friends in English. I didn’t like it: it felt too easy. It felt like we were cheating. My voice in English sounded discordant to me; my word choice, unnecessarily pretentious and confusing.
One of my fellow beginner Italian students gave me, as a parting gift, a book by Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri entitled In Altre Parole (In Other Words). This memoir chronicles Lahiri’s journey with the Italian language, as she fell in love with it in college, moved to Italy, and ultimately resolved to write only in Italian. I read the book — primarily in Italian, occasionally glancing at the facing-page translation when I didn’t know the meaning of a word — as soon as I returned to my home in Texas after the program, and I felt an immense sense of sympathy with the author. I understood her perpetual struggles with Italian grammar, her knowledge that she would never speak the language like a native, the stimulation she received from working hard to express herself in a foreign tongue, and her strong conviction that doing so made her a better writer and thinker. After all, I’d spent the past seven weeks grappling with the same issues myself.
As the language in which this essay is written proves, I have no immediate plans to giveup English. (I think, in fact, that such a decision would be rather inconvenient to thenon-Italophone people I interact with, a circle that is significantly larger than the Italophoneone). But I think that we should seek out language immersion, even for protracted periods oftime, even if we don’t know the language in question very well at all. It forces us to simplify ourthinking to its very essentials; it humbles us by depriving us of what can otherwise betaken for granted, the ability to communicate easily, without struggles. Le parole sconosciute miricordano che c'è tanto che non conosco in questo mondo, Lahiri writes. The unknown words remind me that there’s so much in this world that I do not know.