I have been unmotivated for a very long time to post in this blog. It doesn't seem to have caught people's interest, and I am disinclined to talk into a void or ring into a cacophony that is not interested in the chords I seek to strike.
Nevertheless, I stumbled into a conversation today in which I was eager to participate, and thus for my own convenience, if not for anyone else's satisfaction, I decided to repost my contribution to that conversation here.
*On the subject of language fluency*
What an interesting conversation! For me, studying foreign languages has increased my sensitivity to the difficulty of *all* communication. It has also increased my feeling of grateful wonder when successful communication happens.
As others have pointed out, "fluency" is a relative concept. One can speak with varying success with members of a people group, or a discipline, or a workplace, or even the participants in a personal relationship. Yet no matter how much one believes one knows and understands, I feel there is a huge amount that remains unknowable (even in the parts we assume that we know).
What is fluency really about, then? Do we seek to understand or get along with people only in order to complete other tasks? Do we want to connect with people, and if so, what if misunderstanding and permanent gaps in knowledge are necessary parts of that connection?
For many years I have felt daunted by the mystery of communication. How does it happen at all and what purposes does it serve? Many people are familiar with the color question: we both call a thing blue, but is what I see the same as what you see? For something so basic it doesn't seem to matter what you or I see: we don't get in a fight over it. (Or do we? Now I'm remembering that dress meme.)
Whenever we successfully communicate, do we only *seem* to understand one another (a different way to say it is that we seem to flow together) because the differences in how we understand something do not interfere with our goals, and therefore stay invisible? In so-called success, do we wrongly conclude that we understand and thus miss out on further understanding? Perhaps just as importantly, do we miss out on the chance to never understand parts of another person and thus be reminded of our limitations and that they are as complex as we are?
Countless times, I have thought that another person and I understood one another only to learn, through feelings or events, that I was wrong. The same goes for professional situations. How much is my relative fluency worth, then, in languages I should supposedly know by heart? Would any level of detailed knowledge of the vocabulary of a given situation prevent such failures? I doubt it.
I used to say to people, "would you rather know me or love me?" Part of what I meant by this is that knowing harshly reduces a person to a set of problems that can be solved, whereas loving accepts their irreducibility and participates in life with them anyway.
I have chased "knowing" many times in life, hoping it would give me more power and rescue me from various failures. Bad idea! Fluency sounds to me like a synonym for control, even in the seemingly simple matter of learning a language. I think it starts from a good place -- the desire to connect with people (and, to be honest, to tickle my brain) -- but if I do not remember that I can never entirely know anything or anyone, I risk pursuing false goals straight through the people I supposedly would love to engage with, but who in light of that false goal seem to be blocking my success.
Sometimes I wish that we could approach every single communication event as a cross-cultural one. I wish we could adopt an attitude of hospitality, compassion, and humble eagerness to learn (including mistakes). I wish we could adopt this attitude even with the people we assume are most familiar with. With an approach like this I feel like we could catch glimpses of how unfathomably complex and lovable we are.
