The Celtic Languages

Before the discovery of America the western edge of Europe seemed like the end of the world. And it was here at the world’s precipices that the Celts, pushed out of their original homes by immigrants arriving from the East, found their final resting place. Today the six Celtic Nations- Brittany (Breizh), Cornwall (Kernow), Ireland (Éire), the Isle of Man (Mannin), Scotland (Alba), and Wales (Cymru)- are the last living reminder of a vast Celtic presence which once stretched from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula to Anatolia (Turkey).

The Celtic people originated in Central Europe (Austria and surrounding areas) during the Iron Age and thereafter began an immigration which took them far and wide. The letter of Saint Paul to the Galatians (the name for the Celts in Anatolia), the Galician dialect in Spain, and the Gauls who fought against Julius Caesar in what today is France are historical reminders of their ubiquitousness.

The Celtic languages once spoken across Europe and Asia Minor- known as “Continental Celtic languages”- are today completely extinct. Only on the rocky western shores of the continent has some form of the language been able to cling on to life. The six “Insular Celtic languages” have managed to carry Celtic culture into the 21^st century, albeit with relatively small numbers of speakers.

The Irish (Gaeilge) and Welsh (Cymraeg) languages are the healthiest of the bunch with 1.3 million and 700,000 speakers respectively. Breton (Brezhoneg) and Scottish (Gàidhlig) are in the middle of the group with 200,000 and 60,000 speakers, while Cornish (Kernowek) and Manx (Gaelg) have less speakers than some high schools do students- 3,500 and 1,800 respectively. In all, less than 2 and a half million people worldwide speak a Celtic language- a small number but certainly respectable for a language group that has risked complete eradication by more dominant languages.

Bilingual education programs have been founded to help the languages survive in this new millennium. In the Gaelscoileanna (Ireland), Ysgolion Meithrin (Wales) and Diwan (Brittany) students study the various complexities of their ancestral languages. They learn that while Subject-Verb-Object is the correct word order in English, they must use the order of Verb-Subject-Object when speaking a Celtic tongue. They memorize the 28 letters of the Welsh alphabet- which replace j, k, q, v, x, and z with curious “double-digit” letters ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, and th. They learn to “conjugate” their prepositions; the Breton word for with- gant- will change depending on its object: ganin (with me), ganit (with you), gantañ (with him), ganti (with her), ganimp (with us), ganeoc’h (with you plural), or ganto (with them).

Pronunciation is surely one of the most difficult aspects of learning a Celtic language. Even just sounding out the names on road signs in Wales can be difficult for non-Welsh speakers, especially when it comes to places like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, which translates to “St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of Llandysilio of the red cave.” Luckily for visitors, this town of 3,000 on the island of Anglesey in the north-western part of the country can also be referred to by its nickname, Llanfair PG, although that initial “double L” is always problematic for “foreigners.” It is what linguists call a “voiceless alveolar lateral fricative,” a sound which does not exist in English, although it is often approximated as “thl” or “chl” (where “ch” is as in the Scottish or Irish word “loch” or the German “ich”).

Luckily not all Celtic words will seem so foreign and difficult to the English speaker; many have entered into our vocabulary. Irish words such as banshee (bean sídhe- woman of the fairies) and galore (go leor- to sufficiency) are commonplace. Scottish has given us trousers (triubhas) and slogan (sluagh-ghairm- army shout). Penguin probably comes from the Welsh pen gwyn (white head).The French word bijou (jewel) derives the Breton bizou (finger ring- biz is the word for finger).

Though spoken by a small number of people, the Celtic languages are still quite alive in the six Celtic nations. And “small” is of course a relative description- in Llanfair PG 76% of the population speaks Welsh fluently, including 97.1% of those aged 10 to 14. At least in this small village with the long name the Celtic languages are far from being cornered into extinction.

The Uralic Language Family

Although Indo-European languages represent the vast majority of languages in Europe, they are not the only language group on the Old Continent. Finland is certainly part of Scandinavia, but the Finnish language is not at all a relative of its Nordic neighbors to the west. Nor is it a cousin, not even a distant one, of the mother of all Slavic tongues spoken by its eastern neighbor. The Uralic language family which includes Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian is not related in any significant manner to other European languages.

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian seems like an odd mix- while Finland and Estonia are Baltic Sea neighbors, Hungary is a landlocked Eastern European country with Germanic (Austria), Romance (Romania), and Slavic (Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia and the Ukraine) neighbors. Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia lie between Hungary and its closest linguistic relative, Estonia, and it is even farther from its ancestral linguistic homeland in the Ural Mountains, the spine of mountains which is traditionally considered to be the natural Eastern boundary of Europe.

Today the area just to the west of the Ural Mountains is still home to a number of minor Uralic languages, each spoken by approximately half-a-million people, all of which have official language status alongside Russian in their respective regions.

According to some linguists, the ancestral homeland of the Uralic languages was not confined to the Ural Mountains but extended westward all the way to the Baltic Sea. The Karelian language spoken in the Russian Republic of Karelia along the Finnish border and the Saami languages of Northern Scandinavia join Finnish and Estonian in testifying to this past.

The most distinctive feature of the Uralic languages is agglutination. To understand agglutination- which literally means “gluing together”- it is first necessary to understand inflection- the practice of specifying the syntactical role of a word through affixes (prefixes and suffixes) rather than relying on auxiliary words and word order. In English inflection is used only in a few instances, for example when we form the plural (usually by adding “-s”), turn an adjective into an adverb by adding “-ly” (happy -> happily), or say “he”, “him” or “his” depending on whether we are talking about a subject, object or possessor.

Other languages rely much more heavily on inflection. Those who studied Latin will certainly remember the torture of memorizing cases and declensions. A “house” is casa when it is a subject (nominative case), casae when it is possessive (genitive case), casam when it is a direct object (accusative case), and so on. The high level of inflection in Latin allows for much greater liberty in word order, making the poetry of Horace, Catullus, and Vergil that much more interesting and that much harder to translate.

Agglutination takes inflection to its extreme consequences by instating a one-to-one relationship between syntactical category (i.e. subject, direct object, possession) and affix. The result is a vast number of possible prefixes or suffixes and highly specific syntactical categories. Hungarian has 18 noun cases, while Finnish has 15 and Estonian has 14.

So while “house” in Hungarian is Ház when it’s the subject of the sentence (nominative case), it is Házat when it is the direct object (accusative), Háznak when it is “of the house” (dative-genitive), Házzal when it is “with the house” (instrumental), házastul when it is “with the house and its parts” (essive-modal), házzá when it is “into a house” (translative), házért when it is “for the house” (causal-final), házba when it is “into the house” (illative), házra when it is “onto the house” (sublative), házhoz when it is “to the house” (allative), házban when it is “in the house” (inessive), házon when it is “on the house” (superessive), háznál when it is “at the house” (adessive), házból when it is “out of the house” (elative), házról when it is “from (top of) the house” (delative), háztól when it is “from (nearby) the house” (ablative), házig when it is “as far as the house” (terminative), and házként when it is “as a house” (formal). In addition, there is a temporal case which cannot be illustrated with the word house- “house o’clock” isn’t an actual time, even in Hungary.

Features like agglutination make Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian difficult for a speaker of an Indo-European language to learn. Have you had any experience with a Uralic language?

Language Regulation

Is the foreign language you are studying regulated? Many countries have bodies which officially govern their national language.

The most famous of these is probably the Académie Française, the French language moderator whose role is “to work, with all possible care and diligence, to give our language definite rules and to make it pure, eloquent, and capable of dealing with art and science.” However don’t try to tell French Canadians that they have to follow the Académie’s rules- in Quebec the Office Québécois de la Langue Française holds forth on how the language should be spoken.

French is not the only language to have multiple standardization bodies. Portugal’s Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Classe de Letras (Lisbon Science Academy, Class of Letters) is trumped in Brazil by the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). The National Language Authority governs Urdu in Pakistan, while the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language makes the rules in India. The bad blood between mainland China and Taiwan is carried into linguistic governance- the People’s Republic of China has the State Language and Letters Committee and the Republic of China (Taiwan) has the National Languages Committee.

However, aside from these few cases, international collaboration seems to be the rule in language regulation. The Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (Council for German Orthography) is composed of 18 councilors from Germany, 9 from Austria, 9 from Switzerland, and 1 each from the South Tyrol in Italy, the German-speaking community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. The Odbor za standardizaciju srpskog jezika (Board for Standardization of the Serbian Language) was founded in 1997 as a collaborative effort between institutions in Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republika Srpska (one of the two main political entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina). The Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (National Swahili Council) of Tanzania regulates the Swahili language and works in partnership with the Chama cha Kiswahili cha Taifa (National Association of Kiswahili) in Kenya. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature includes members from Iran, Tajikstan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan while the Academy of the Arabic Language has an even broader reach, uniting councilors from Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Sudan, Israel, and Somalia.

Governance of the Spanish language, meanwhile, is a truly global effort involving 22 countries and one territory. The Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Association of Spanish Language Academies) is, as the name suggests, a council which unites regulatory institutions from across the Spanish-speaking world. Founded in 1951 in Mexico, the Association brought in the historic Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) and has welcomed such newcomers as the United States’ Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (North American Academy of the Spanish Language), founded in 1973 in New York.

However, despite being home to a linguistic council for Spanish, the United States has no regulatory body for the English language. In fact English is not a regulated language in any country in the world. English speakers rely on dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster’s and Oxford English, high-quality publications, and the speech of the Queen of England as sources of “proper” language, but even these sources are up for disputation. The English language is governed directly and democratically by its hundreds of millions of speakers, and it seems to be doing just fine.

Know Your Vowels

Did you know that the English language has at least 15 vowels? The pure vowels in English, technically known as monophthongs (from the Greek mónos “single” and phthóngos “sound”) are:

/iː/, /ı/, /ε/, /æ/, /ɜ:/, /ə/, /Λ/, /u:/, /ɔ:/, /ɑ:/, /ʊ/, /ɒ/, /a/, /oː/, /e/

These strange-looking symbols which come from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are more precise than the A, E, I, O and U (and sometimes Y and W) which we use in written English. In fact the five written vowels themselves can be transcribed (in their “long” form) with IPA symbols as:

/eɪ/, /iː/, /aɪ/, /oʊ/, and /ju:/

As can be seen, the letter E is the only real pure vowel (the two dots after the “i” mean that it is long); the others are combinations of multiple sounds. All syllables and words in English- or any other language- are built up of combinations of vowels with consonants and with other vowels. This makes a working knowledge of phonetic symbols a great boon for two categories of people- those who are learning a foreign language and those who are teaching their language to foreigners.

Imagine teaching the word “stood” to a Spanish-only speaker. You are trying to get him to say /stʊd/ but what comes out is /stu:d/- which usually corresponds to the written word “stewed.” The smart ESL teacher will realize that her student is having a problem because the Spanish language only has 5 monophthongs:

/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/

The /ʊ/ – a sound which we use in words like “good”, “should”, and “hook”- is just not part of a Spanish speaker’s repertoire. Likewise, an English-only speaker learning Spanish will find difficulty in pronouncing the Spanish “o”, which we usually read as a diphthong, a combination of two monophthongs. In the United States “o” is generally /oʊ/ while in England it is /əʊ/. We might consider ourselves fortunate if we’re from Minnesota, where “o” is said in the same way as it is in Spanish; the state that is /mɪnɨˈsoʊtə/ for most of us is /mɪnɨˈsotə/ for the natives.

The Italian language is phonetically very similar to Spanish; however it has two extra vowels- /ε/ and /ɔ/- which we refer to as “short E” and “short O”. These vowels give the Italian-speaker a significant aid in learning English as they are used in many words, such as bed (/bεd/) and cot (/cɔt/). The Italian-speaker from Naples has an additional advantage, as her dialect contains the vowel /ə/ as well. This vowel, also known as the “schwa”, is the most common vowel sound of all in the English language. It is generally used in unstressed syllables, such as in the second syllable of “sofa” /`soʊfə/ or in the definite article “the” whenever it appears before a consonant.

English speakers find that the tables are turned when they are learning a vowel-rich language such as German, which has 17 pure vowel sounds, including the distinctive /ø/ sound, which appears in such common expressions as dankeschön (thank you very much).

Being aware that the language you are studying has not only different grammar and vocabulary, but a different set of sounds as well can help accelerate the learning process. Foreign language teachers and students are only doing themselves a favor by getting to know the symbols of the IPA.

Some Words Just Don’t Translate

If you are a native English speaker who speaks or who has tried to speak in another language, you may have found that certain English words don’t have precise equivalents and require long explanations in translation. Awe turns into “overwhelming feeling of admiration, but also a reverential fear”, foliage becomes something like “phenomenon of leaves changing color in the fall, most notably among maple trees,” and bromance probably isn’t even worth the effort it would take to explain it.

Native speakers of foreign languages often have the same problem when speaking English.  In English we have water weight and pregnancy weight, fat-weight and muscle-weight, but a speaker of German may be disappointed to find that we don’t have “grief bacon”, the literal translation of Kummerspeck, which nominates the excess weight gained from emotional overeating.

Have you ever called someone but let the phone ring just once and then hung up? In some countries this type of call is not a prank but a way of communicating “I’m just thinking of you” or “OK, I’m on board with what you said in that last text message”, or “Call me back!”, all without spending a single dime. In the Czech and Slovak languages this kind of hit-and-run call is a Prozvonit and in Italian it is a Squillo.

Do you know any people who engage in Tingo? That is- people who come into possession of items which they desire by borrowing them from the house of a friend? These people would feel at home among the speakers of the Pascuense language on Easter Island. Furthermore, if you have any friends who are experts in the art of the Jayus- the joke told so poorly that you just can’t help but laugh- send them to Indonesia where their jokes have a name!

Some foreign words hit the mark so well that it is worth absorbing them into the English language as they are. Many Yiddish words have made this trip: Schtick, schmuck, and chutzpah are just a few examples. The German word Schadenfreude has become a common way to refer to taking pleasure in the suffering of others. French and Italian words such as à la mode and al dente abound in culinary language. The Japanese sent their kamikazes to Pearl Harbor during World War II and left the word in our language.

The existence of untranslatable words is just one more reason to learn foreign languages. We can find all of Dostoyevsky’s masterpieces in excellent English translations and with Google translate we can read Russian newspaper articles without ever having to look at the Cyrillic alphabet; however certain nuances of Mother Russia will always be lost in translation. As Vladimir Nabokov writes with regard to the word toska:  “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”

The parts of the Greek Orthodox Mass said or sung in Greek are steeped in an ancient sacredness which no translation into any language could do justice, and Islamic prayers are surely much more powerful in Arabic than in translation. Seeing Roberto Benigni act in Italian or Penelope Cruz in Spanish, reading authors such as Goethe, Cervantes, or Hugo in their original language: these are all reasons to learn foreign languages. Arguably, the greatest reward of knowledge of a foreign language is not the ability to express ourselves, but the ability to understand new things which in our own language seemed not to exist. That is to say, excess weight gained from emotional overeating surely doesn’t exist only in Germany, but having a name for it makes it much easier to talk about!

---

Learn a Language and Exercise Your Brain

To keep our muscles strong as we age, doctors recommend that we practice sport or do exercises with weights at the gym. To keep our heart and lungs in working order we get breathing by running or swimming. Staying in muscular and cardiovascular shape as we get older is important in order to prevent ailments of our joints, hearts, and lungs; so it should come as no surprise that staying in mental shape is important for preventing deteriorating mental diseases. To keep our brain working, doctors recommend the use of more than one language.

Linguistic researchers work on the assumption that speaking two languages creates a type of internal competition between the two languages; managing this situation enhances our brain’s executive control functions - a system of command that directs our attention process in tasks such as planning and problem solving, as well as other types of mentally-demanding activities. Have you ever stopped to ask someone for directions while driving and then had to repeat to yourself like a mantra “Left at the third stoplight. Right after McDonald’s, then first left” until you arrived at your destination in order to make sure that the directions didn’t slip away from your mind? You are consciously employing your executive function to keep your attention focused and ignore distractions.

Speaking more than one language keeps this kind of executive control in constant activity, and so it seems that bilingualism may mitigate cognitive decline in old age and even postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been shown that while aging has little effect on vocabulary levels, general world knowledge, and language use, older adults show difficulty in ignoring irrelevant stimuli and attending selectively to important aspects of the environment during perceptual processing. This is where bilingualism steps in- it strengthens and develops precisely those control functions which are apt to weaken as we age.

Furthermore, it appears that the more languages spoken, the better. A study by the Public Research Center for Health (CRP-Santé) in Luxembourg has indicated that speaking more languages has a positive benefit on memory in aging. The study, involving 230 men and women with an average age of 73 who had spoken or currently spoke two to seven languages, showed that “speaking more than two languages has a protective effect on memory in seniors who practice foreign languages over their lifetime or at the time of the study,” according to the author of the study, Magali Perquin, PhD.

We achieve the greatest benefits to our overall health when we enact fundamental changes in our lifestyle. Pumping weights is a great way to keep our muscles working, but when we sit up straight in our chairs every day, walk with broad shoulders and a straight back, and properly flex our legs every time we have to bend down, we engage our muscles correctly over a longer periods of time and thus multiply the benefits of our gym workout exponentially. Learning to speak another language or rather- learning to think in another language- creates a process within us which is in operation even when we aren’t aware of it. To a certain extent bilinguals even have to switch between their languages when they dream! There is no better way to prepare our brains for the challenges of aging than by teaching it to work in another language.

If you’re interested in learning a foreign language, please learn about The Boston Language Institute’s foreign language programs.

Language Barriers in Business

In the collective imagination of globalized business, buyers, suppliers and manufacturers communicate across borders at the speed of ethernet and are just as much at ease working with a company across the globe as with one down the block; however, business executives who deal with international transactions every day see things in a different way. According to a report  sponsored by EF Education First and carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, almost half (49%) of 572 senior executives from private and public sector organizations worldwide believe that communication misunderstandings and messages lost in translation have inhibited major international business deals and resulted in significant losses for their company.

The efforts to increase the flow of international business have focused on political and legal situations, but now that many of these barriers have been knocked down, the exchange has taken on a more of a human nature. Almost two-thirds (64%) of the executives interviewed believe that cultural and linguistic barriers have inhibited access to foreign markets and almost all agree that profits (89%), revenue (89%) and market share (86%) would increase significantly if cross-border communication were to improve at their company. At the same time, 49% of the executives do not believe that their companies are doing enough in the way of training the linguistic and communication skills of their employees, and 40% say that the recruitment of people with the skills necessary to work in a cross-cultural environment is not prioritized as it should be.

The current focus is on English- 68% of the executives think that their employees will need to learn the English language in order to see growth outside of their home market. Multilingual approaches are often ignored as they are “inefficient and can prevent important interactions from taking place and get in the way of achieving key goals,” according to Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley. The English-only approach is being adopted all across the globe, from Northern European countries which for many years have embraced English in a variety of contexts to other countries such as Japan and Italy which have traditionally resisted the Anglo-invasion. In 2010, the CEO of Japanese company Rakuten announced that all 7,100 employees of the multi-national retailer would have to become proficient in English within two years or risk demotion while the Polytechnic University of Milan decreed this year that by 2014 all post-graduate courses will be offered only in English (two-thirds of these courses are currently in Italian).

These moves have not come without opposition, both practical and theoretical. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani has encountered resistance to his plan among the workforce and has had to seek ways to help his employees buy in to the switch and achieve the language skills they will need. Says Emilio Matricciani, professor in the Department of Electronics at the Polytechnic- “The risk is that we will impoverish teaching; language is not an article of clothing that we put on. Thought depends on language and nuances will be lost.” Neeley, while recommending the English-only approach, recognizes the difficulties and potential downsides inherent to it. She points out that in a monolingual environment the self-confidence of non-native speakers may be eroded and performance may suffer as they may feel less inclined to participate in group work.  She notes that “once participation ebbs, processes fall apart. Companies miss out on new ideas that might have been generated in meetings. People don’t report costly errors or offer observations about mistakes or questionable decisions.”

While philosophical objections to the exclusive use of English in business all across the world may be raised, one thing is clear-the ability of an employee to communicate is paramount to his or her worth to a business in any field, from retail to electronics to research. Companies like Rakuten have found that providing language training to their employees and considering time spent on learning as work time is necessary to the success of their mission. Linguistic skills are increasingly more important in a world with more permeable borders and corporate language training should be a fundamental part of the activities of any business working around the globe.

Forget Perfecting Your Accent and Achieve Second Language Fluency

How many of us remember being tortured in high school Spanish class by our inability to say “Costa Rica” with that long, trilling Spanish R? Or maybe we felt like complete failures in French class because we couldn’t seem to pronounce anything with a convincing French accent? Achieving native pronunciation in a language is the focus of many language courses and the inability to modify our mouths to perfectly pronounce every vowel and consonant in a foreign language is often equated to an inability to speak the language. The good news for those who feel like their mouths were just not made to make extremely foreign sounds is that research has shown that an excessive focus on the pronunciation of individual language elements actually leads to reduced fluency with respect to teaching approaches which keep in mind a more global picture of the language’s sounds.

Canadian linguistics professors Tracey Derwing (University of Alberta) and Murray Munro (Simon Fraser University) have carried out significant research on how accent interferes with intelligibility in second language learning.  In a 1998 study, they divided students learning English as a second language into three groups with different teaching approaches: instruction with no focus on pronunciation, instruction with a focus on the pronunciation of individual language segments, and general speaking instruction including prosodic factors (“Prosody” is how linguists define the use of pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm in speech to convey meaning). The students receiving some kind of pronunciation instruction (the second and third groups) showed improvement in comprehensibility and “accentedness,” but only the group receiving the more general instruction (the third group) showed significant improvement in “fluency.” The elusive “fluency” which language learners seek might be something other than an immaculate pronunciation!

Upon further reflection, it should come as no surprise that comprehensibility and fluency in a language should be independent of the ability to correctly pronounce every single vowel and consonant sound. Children missing their front teeth are unable to make the “th” sound in English and yet we understand them perfectly. Many Americans pronounce “pin” and “pen” in exactly the same way, say “milk” as if it were “melk” and call “Bill” “bell” but are comprehensible nonetheless. A great number of Italians are physically unable to make the trilling “r” (similar to the Spanish “r”) and a smaller number cannot make the “gl” sound (like the “lli” in “million”) which is so common in the language, and yet these people are fully-fledged fluent speakers of their native language, often becoming politicians, actors, and other types of personalities who speak publicly for a living.

Furthermore, the American entertainment scene offers us a rich panorama of public personalities with foreign accents who are not inhibited in their work by the peculiarity of their speech. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Banderas, and Heidi Klum are all wildly successful communicators despite their accented speech.  Out of sight of the public eye, instruction at America’s best universities, especially in science and engineering departments, is often carried out by professors speaking with strong Russian, Chinese, and Arabic accents, among others.

All of this should cause us to reflect on our goals when we are learning a foreign language. Do we want to learn to speak precisely like a native speaker or do we want to learn to communicate with the greatest fluency possible? Pronunciation is important, but it is restrictive to focus only on the pronunciation of certain vowel and consonant sounds ignoring broader scale patterns such as intonation, volume, and meter. At the end of the day, it is possible to learn to speak communicative, fluent Spanish without ever properly trilling an “R.”

The Essay: Don’t Let the Best Be the Enemy of the Good

In the story of João and Ana the characters demonstrate two very different approaches to learning a foreign language.  João is driven by a quest for perfection but is hesitant to use his French in its nascent, flawed state; Ana, on the other hand, seems to care only about communicating and uses French as she knows how, as mangled as it may be. During the course of their time in Paris, Ana experiences a great deal of growth while João remains paralyzed by his insecurities. Ironically, the character who accepted her imperfections (knowingly or not) ultimately arrived at a much greater command of the language. The story illustrates a curious paradox- an obsession with perfection can be the enemy of real progress!

Anyone who has lived abroad while learning a foreign language can probably identify with either João or Ana, or both. It is nearly impossible not to make mistakes in grammar, syntax or pronunciation while learning a new language and while it is obviously important to correct our mistakes, no betterment can be achieved without speaking and practice. To master a foreign language we must strive for excellence while at the same time accepting our own imperfections and trying to speak. We may think that we are making fools of ourselves, but the real fool is the language learner who is too timid to try.

Postponing an action until the “perfect” moment arrives is something that we all have done at one moment of another. Most of us have also had the experience of finding that the longer we wait the more difficult things become. “It’s been 3 months since I’ve called Grandma, I absolutely have to call her but I’ll wait until tomorrow, it’s too late now… It’s too early in the morning, maybe she’s still sleeping, I’ll call her after work… I only have half-an-hour now, maybe I should call on the weekend, when I have more time… She likes to watch TV on Saturday evenings, I wouldn’t want to interrupt…” Before long 3 months have become 4 and the situation just gets worse and worse. Probably the perfect moment that we are waiting for will never come and if we are smart we realize that an imperfect action is better than no action at all.

A songwriter will usually have at least some small part of the melody or the lyrics which he is not completely satisfied with but which he must accept for the greater good of the song as a whole. An engineer designs a bridge as best as she can but knows that there is always some situation- as extreme as it may be- in which it will fail to function. A painter is forced at some point to step back from his work and say “it’s not perfect but I like it” or he risks spending the rest of his life covering the same canvas with ever thickening layers of paint. The song, the bridge, and the painting would never be sang, crossed, and admired by the greater public if their artists were not willing at some point to let some small imperfections go.

What actions are we putting off for eternity while we wait for the right moment? What projects are we hiding in the workshop, unsatisfied with their imperfection? Waiting for perfection, how much good work are we forsaking? The adventure of learning and growth starts with the first step, and no amount of immobile preparation can make the first step so long as to make up for all of the progress that we could have made while we were waiting.

The Story: Don’t Let the Best Be the Enemy of the Good

João sat on the side of the dormitory party, quietly observing the others, students from France and all over the world who, like him, had come to Paris to study. João had arrived here only a few weeks before from his home in Rio de Janeiro and had already fallen in love with the City of Lights.  Tonight, however, as in almost every other situation here, the normally talkative boy found himself resigned to silence. Even after years of French classes, João didn’t feel confident enough to speak with the natives. He needed time to formulate his sentences correctly, often couldn’t remember the precise vocabulary word he wanted, and above all, was embarrassed by his pronunciation.

João spent most of the party listening to the others speak. One girl in particular caught his attention, not for the usual reasons that girls catch a boy’s attention, but because she spoke boisterously throughout the entire evening. Like, João, she had just arrived from abroad — from Madrid, he gathered. Any casual observer would have instantly identified her as Spanish by her marked accent and  mangled syntax.

João wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or amused by the girl.  Some of the French people at the party couldn’t hide their amusement, mimicking her with loud guffaws. He was happy to have restricted his conversation to the few things that he knew how to say well; he surely wouldn’t have wanted to be the butt of French jokes for the way he spoke! He would just have to wait for his French to greatly improve before he could converse with people here in the same way that he could converse with people back home.

But as the months went by, João grew quieter and quieter. He had mastered a nearly perfect French pronunciation of some key phrases that he used every day- he felt very confident ordering his morning café au lait and croissant- but he rarely found the courage to say more than what was absolutely necessary and spent most of his day in silence.

One day, while he was riding his bike home from long hours in the library, a car flew out of a side street with no warning and struck João to the ground. Though dazed by the blow, he jumped quickly  to his feet. Staring at the driver through the windshield, he found himself speechless. After a few seconds of silence, the man tore off, leaving João briefly dumbfounded in the middle of the street until the squeal of screaming tires announced the abrupt stop of the car. A young girl was standing in front of the car, laying into the driver in a torrent of angry and fluent French.  Within minutes, the driver was at João’s side, begging for forgiveness. When it was all over, João had obtained not only a heartfelt apology, but a ride to the hospital and insurance information to pay for medical costs and bike repairs.

João received something else from the bike accident: an important lesson. The girl, his savior, was Ana, the fellow student from Madrid whose French he had so disdained at the beginning of the year. He was sure that none of the people along the street who had heard her give the irresponsible driver a piece of her mind had laughed at her. In fact, the driver looked as if he had seen a ghost after her sermon. Ana, for however sloppy her grammar and pronunciation had been, had obviously made great strides in her French during her time in Paris through constant trial and error while João had let his fear of making mistakes inhibit his progress. On his way back from the hospital, João thought of a quote from Winston Churchill that he had read in a book earlier that day: “The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelled ‘paralysis’.”